“America Never Was America to Me”: Telling a Story Fitted for Those Who Have Outgrown American Myths or the Raceless Gospel for Ex- Colored People Who Have Lost Faith in White- Body Supremacy

by Starlette Thomas

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

 – Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

 

I stopped pledging allegiance to the American flag when I was sixteen years old. The time coincided with my call to ministry, give or take a year. Early on, I figured the two didn’t go hand in hand. Hand to the plow as expected in Luke’s gospel, it required a singular focus if my work was to be of any use and if ever I was to set my sights on the “kin-dom” of God. Right hand to God, I met with the principal, who agreed with my decision. It was my First Amendment right. Jesus is the “King of kings and the Lord of lords,” right (Revelation 19:16)? It also felt right.

One Sunday morning, we sang, “On Christ, the solid rock I stand / All other ground is sinking sand.” So, what was I expected to think of American soil given its shifty relationship with African Americans? Do you know this country’s history of trapping African Americans? From chattel slavery to sharecropping and convict leasing, the “Reverse Underground Railroad” rerouted them back to bondage through economic and legal coercion. Today, this mass incarceration continues vis-à-vis “the new Jim Crow,” as Michelle Alexander explains it.[i]

Besides, my pastor told us we were “pilgrims passing through.” The choir sang, “Walking up the king’s highway” because we were heaven bound as this world was passing away, a temporal reality. Instead, we pledged allegiance to Jesus and his “kin-dom,” affirming the supremacy of Christ, his commandments and his sacrifice. “In baptism, our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens,” Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon concluded in a book of the same name.[ii] This earth was not our home. Instead, we were oriented to see ourselves as strangers who knew nothing of worldly powers or idols. So, forgive me, but Caesar who?

Consequently, I had to choose between two stories— the biblical narrative or the collection of stories Americans tell themselves of the “frontier spirit,” the “self-made man” and a people reduced to a mixture spooned from a “melting pot.” Regarding the latter, all are chapters taken from the story of American exceptionalism—except America never felt exceptional to me. It is likely because this country has never done anything unexpected for me. And I don’t expect it to.

America still owes my ancestors forty acres and a mule. It’s the same country that didn’t formally apologize for slavery until the 110^th United States Congress session in 2008. The Senate, now on the same page, issued more of the same sentiment a year later. Both were sure to make it plain that this did not mean African Americans were entitled to compensation. Neither apology authorized claims for reparations. So, I say, “Save it.”

Stories shape people, perspectives and our subsequent lived realities. They are a source of embodiment and for good or ill, a means of transformation. “White Christian nationalism’s ‘deep story’ goes something like this: America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on Christian principles,” Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry wrote in The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. The authors continued, “Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native- born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders.”[iii]

But the story is a myth as the founders were a mix: atheist, deist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Roman Catholic. The founding documents also weren’t divinely inspired or written with the finger of God but influenced by classical liberalism and civic republicanism. White Christian nationalism is “a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates for the fusion of Christianity with American civic life,” Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry make plain in Take America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.[iv]  Further, the land was stolen from the peoples indigenous to what became the United States as was the labor from Africans and later African Americans. Still, many Americans live by and die for these conclusions.

They are an organizing principle and a dividing line as stories told in the media about African Americans, those racialized as black, reinforce these largely prejudiced and stereotypical storylines. It also feeds the idols of white Christian nationalism identified by Whitehead as power, fear and violence.[v] Illustrated by mugshots and narrated by persons at a “safe” distance. Likewise, the story told on Sunday mornings is of segregation, a derivative of chattel slavery’s history of control, forced assimilation and the hyper-surveillance of persons racialized as white,[vi] who recreated themselves as masters, mistresses and overseers. It is heard in the songs we teach children about the love of Jesus: “Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world/ Red and yellow, black and white / They’re all precious in his sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Color-coded, that’s not how Jesus loves the little children. Instead, it is how American Christians racialized their Christian confession and it is an embodied witness. “In order to protect their whiteness, adults taught children to keep themselves physically separate from blackness at all costs, for sharing any intimate space resulted in an intolerable familiarity between the races,” Kristina DuRocher explained in Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South.[vii] Still segregated at 11 a.m. sharp on Sunday mornings, this includes sacred spaces.

A racialized gospel, God is recreated as a colored human being and somehow an impossible theophany for the progenitors of the faith—to see the face of God and live to draw a picture— is possible (cf. Exodus 33:20). “By wrapping itself with the alleged form of Jesus, whiteness gave itself a holy face,” Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey wrote in The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. The authors continued, “But he was a shape-shifting totem of white supremacy. The differing and evolving physical renderings of white Jesus figures not only bore witness to the flexibility of racial constructions but also helped create the perception that whiteness was sacred and everlasting.”[viii] Pseudo- divinity framed in canvas prints, 5x7s and 8x10s, the image of God shrunk to the size of our imaginations. Hung up on church walls for our observation, begging the question posed by William R. Jones, “Is God a white racist?”[ix] Here’s a small suggestion: Take them all down.

Race created a social hierarchy, a pigmentocracy and justified what Frantz Fanon described as the “epidermalization—of this inferiority.”[x] In turn, whiteness became pedestalized and after a time, recreated as divine, sanctified even. Though Christians identified as “new creatures in Christ,” our baptismal identity as explained in Galatians 3:27-28, became insignificant, watered-down even (see also 2 Corinthians 5:17). Stephen J. Patterson described it as “the forgotten creed” in his book of the same name, writing, “Baptism exposes the follies by which most of us live, defined by the other, who we are not.” He continued, “It declares the unreality of race, class and gender: there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female. We may not all be the same, but we are all one, each one a child of God.”[xi] What can I say then to the North American church that mostly practices an imperial religion— except woe unto you, hypocrites!

Some might ask, “Why are you making this about race?” But I’m not forcing a conversation; this is far from a reach as race and white Christian nationalism are inextricably linked. Because “(white) Christian nationalism betrays the life and teachings of Jesus in two important areas: racial inequality and xenophobia,” Andrew L. Whitehead wrote in American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. He wrote later, “White Christian nationalism is closely intertwined with systemic racism. Rather than minimizing this connection, white American Christians can acknowledge our complicity in upholding the systems that maintain racial inequality.”[xii] But the North American church has known this from its colonial beginning, a well-informed choice made evident by its embodied praxis of segregation. William James Jennings names the detriment of this decision in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, writing, “The Christian imaginary that is emerging out of colonialist power naturalized segregationist mentalities and thereby denied one of its most basic and powerful imaginative possibilities, the deepest and most comprehensive joining of peoples.”[xiii] Accordingly, the members of the North American church cannot effectively practice the ministry of reconciliation because they cannot envision the beloved community—if only in the mind’s eye.[xiv]

How then shall we preach? No more pulpit swaps and community days, please. No topical treatments of social ills that are more than skin deep. Instead, we’ve got to get our story straight regarding “the false white gospel” as Jim Wallis describes white Christian nationalism as it will inform our character development, our Christlikeness.[xv] “If we are to understand how Chistian convictions help us to form our lives truthfully the narrative of our lives must be recognized,” Stanley Hauerwas pointed out in A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. He continued, “To stress the significance of narrative at the very least helps remind us that the documents crucial to the life of the Christian community take the form of narrative.”[xvi] A “storied people,” the North American church has never existed apart from segregation, unwilling to turn the page even if it advances the coming “kin-dom.”[xvii]

The late James H. Evans, Jr. also offers a responsive task in We Have Been Believers: An African- American Systematic Theology:

The black theologian must relate the ‘canonical’ story, in its prophetic mode, with the ‘folk’ story of a people who hope against hope. To do this, the theologian cannot be so immersed in the assurance, optimism and myopia of the canonical story (the proclamation of the churches) that he or she is unable to see the challenge of the folk story. Conversely, the theologian cannot become so enchanted by the pathos of the folk story or so disillusioned by the tragic dimensions of African- American experience that the hope expressed in the canonical story is not seen. In sum, the black theologian must tell a story that relates the hope of the biblical message with the realism of the black experience. … [F]rom creation to consummation, black theologians must fashion a story that brings together the twin commitment of African-American Christians to faith and freedom.[xviii]

Summarily then, tell the truth, shame the devil and hit the support hounds of fear, hypocrisy and hatred “that track the trails of the disinherited” as expressed by Howard Thurman in Jesus and the Disinherited.[xix] Don’t tell a long, winding tale of how they all managed to get away.

This is why counter narratives of resistance, subversion and reclamation are so important. It’s also the reason why two-sided stories are questionable as they support false binaries, dyads and oppositional ways of being. Consequently, positions like “take all the world and give me Jesus” can be used to spiritually bypass the victims of Jesus’s followers. Instead, Christians need to take a long, hard look at their church’s history and complicity with the North American empire. This is not a step-by-step approach but a lifelong practice of discipleship, the faithful denial of white-body supremacy and its progeny, including white Christian nationalism.

Take the American flag out of the sanctuary. How’s that for starters? Stop putting your hand over your heart and singing, “God bless America.” It’s political propaganda, a patriotic prayer that promotes exclusive nationalism and blurs the lines between religious and national allegiance. Separate the church from state celebrations. See the church as “the body of Christ”—not a 501 (c)(3) organization. Churches don’t pay taxes for a reason (Ephesians 4:15-16). Follow Jesus’s instructions to “render under Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25) and the president’s hands should come up empty.

Because you can’t tell two stories without talking out of both sides of your mouth, without being two-faced and double-minded even. So, here’s the story I needed to hear, aptly titled, “The Raceless Gospel for Ex-Colored People Who Have Lost Faith in White-Body Supremacy.” My magnum opus, the Raceless Gospel assumes race is a sociopolitical construct without biblical or biological basis and is inspired by the re-creation narrative of baptism in Galatians 3:27-28.[xx] This text is also the biblical response to the marginalization of people groups, the patriarchal domination of women and the economic exploitation of persons who were enslaved. It is a counter to the ancient cliché: “I thank God every day that I was born a native, not a foreigner; free and not a slave; a man and not a woman.” This baptismal creed was the early church’s response to divisiveness and today, would include white Christian nationalism.

Not a colorblind lens or a post-racial vision, Jesus followers are invited to remember their baptism and consider how this watermark informs their self-understanding barring the power-grabbing identity of whiteness as well as the subsequent practice of discipleship and Jesus’s ministry apart from what Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza describes as “relationships of ruling.”[xxi] The work and witness of the Raceless Gospel is the result of deconstructing Christianity from race, decolonizing identity, decentering whiteness, and questioning racialized narratives about human being and belonging. The result is semantic and somatic sovereignty, which frees me to say race and white Christian nationalism are both tools of neocolonialism. Baptism as a reflection pool would trouble and perhaps, transform American society, delivered from the capitalist inspired categories of somebodies and nobodies.

Still, Langston Hughes is right: “America never was America to me” so I had to go and prepare a place for me, free from white-body supremacy in preparation for a “kin-dom” coming. This is the Raceless Gospel.

Rev. Starlette Thomas, D.Min., is the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, named for her work and witness and the associate editor at Good Faith Media. She is also the author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.

[i] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

[ii] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 12.

[iii] Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford Press, 2022), 4.

[iv] Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, Take America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 10.

[v] Ibid. 17

[vi] See Henry J. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long- Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004).

[vii] Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 26.

[viii] Edward J. Blum & Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 8.

[ix] William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

[x] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 11.

[xi] Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, & Sexism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29.

[xii] Andrew Whitehead, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023), 12, 17-18.

[xiii] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 208.

[xiv] Howard Thurman named our kinship and soulish belonging, writing: “I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.” Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground (Richmond: Friends United Press, 1986), xiii.

[xv] Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2025).

[xvi] Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 90-91.

[xvii] “We need more than ever to recover our kingdom (/kin-dom) vocation.” N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2024), 10.

[xviii] James H. Evans, Jr., We Have Been Believers: An African- American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 7.

[xix] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 19.

[xx] See also Colossians 3:9-11 and First Corinthians 15:39

[xxi] Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Paul and the Politics of Interpretation,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, and Interpretation, Richard A. Horsley, ed. (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), 45.

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