By Jonathan M. Metzl, New York: Basic Books, March 5, 2019, 331 pages.
Reviewed by Stephen Fox
In a TED Talk aired on NPR on April 2nd of this year, Howard Stevenson told a story about a presentation on lynching he had made to a class at Southern Baptist Seminary. As he showed the class a photograph which had been taken during a lynching of a black man, he pointed out two white child witnesses. At seeing that photograph, one of the white ministers in training broke down, uncontrollably sobbing and saying that as a child he had also witnessed a lynching.
Stevenson stopped the class to allow the seminarian to regain his composure and then allowed him to continue to explain to the class that he was currently serving as a pastor of a church in a transitional neighborhood and that people of color regularly worshiped in his congregation. He described how he had not been able to reconcile his childhood memory of the lynching with the ministerial tasks facing him.
Stevenson asked the seminarian to consider engaging in a conversation with his own congregation about how to heal his own soul while doing justice work among the people of color he had been called to pastor.
Such sentiment is at the guts of Vanderbilt Professor, Jonathan Metzl and his book, Dying of Whiteness, that appeared on bookshelves in March of this year. Focusing on Tennessee, Missouri and Kansas, Metzl explores the Trump Base and the peculiar reality of the advocacy of white working class males who also vote against their own best interests and that of their children. How could they come to support an ideology saturated with race and minority resentment? His research is depicted in charts and data summaries which make a compelling case that white males in Trump’s MAGA are damaging their own quality of life and shortening their own life expectancies while resisting sensible reform on the issues of guns, healthcare reform, environmental protections and funding of schools.
Though he never writes the word “Baptist” in his book, Dying of Whiteness meshes well with the Baptist story of the last 40 years. For instance, Metzl explores the legacy of Kris Kobach in his chapters on Kansas, suggesting he is like the former Governor Sam Brownback on steroids. Kobach is credited (blamed?) for enactment of state laws to make abortion virtually impossible to obtain and a strangling cut of tax revenue to fund state programs of health and education, further enriching the already rich at the expense of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
In her grand history of America published in the fall of 2018, Jill Lepore described in the chapter titled “Battle Lines” the legacy of Eagle Forum's Phyliss Schlafly. Lepore discussed the network of followers of Schlafly, including a significant number who were also involved in the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, some of whom had also been involved in the John Birch Society and White Citizens Council. Those followers advocated a kind of backlash conservatism emerging out of the discredited McCarthy-era Communism hysteria, and resistance to Brown v Board and the integration of public education.
This is significant for Baptist history as the Eagle Forum's Alabama President, Eunie Smith, was intimately involved in in the creation of the draconian immigration bill in Alabama in 2009, spearheaded by Kris Kobach. Smith's husband, Albert Lee, was Paul Pressler's confidante as a member of the board of the Baptist Joint Committee leading the unsuccessful efforts to fire the executive director, James Dunn. The underlying effort was to counter what Pressler and other fundamentalists saw as a liberal stance by the BJC to champion racial integration and the separation of church and state, bedrock principles in Baptist history for much of the 20th century.
As an aside on Lepore, one knows he/she is reading new territory when, in a secular history of America, in the chapter on the Scopes Trial and Fundamentalism one finds this quote by Southern Baptist firebrand, J. Frank Norris himself: "I was born on the dark moon night, in the dog fennel season, when a black cat jumped on a black coffin".
It was the head of the Alabama chapter of the Eagle Forum, Eunie Smith, who introduced Kansas native, Kris Kobach, to Scott Beason, Alabama state legislator and member of First Baptist Church in Gardendale, Alabama. Kobach and Beason collaborated to draft and promote the draconian Alabama immigration bill that brought yet another chapter of civil rights and justice shame to Alabama in 2009. (See “Willimon Repents” included in ethicsdaily.com.)
Metzl described how the same pattern was repeated when Koback joined the staff of the newly-elected Governor Brownback in Kansas. Brownback was elected with the Koch Brothers’ heavy funding supporting the political strategies of Brownback and anti-immigration lawyer, Kobach. Readers will remember the tax cutting that Governor Brownback pushed in Kansas, which he promised would create prosperity for all. Rather, the severe tax cuts resulted in a broken public education system, unfixed roads and bridges, and near bankruptcy in the state.
Metzl repeatedly comes back to the themes of austerity and backlash politics that result in "upstream wealth and downstream despair." His concluding thoughts are worthy of quoting in full:
In our Midwest there were certain tensions about fitting in–as Jews we were in many ways, white outsiders. But our family also thrived in Missouri and Kansas because of strong regional traditions of neighborliness, kindness and goodwill. These are the traditions that seem ever more in peril in this Trump moment of divisiveness. A moment when one side of a debate amasses arms, guts social programs that benefit the least among us and falls into a narrative in which the viability of certain groups exists only in relation to the despair of others…..[It was not always this way] and to be great again we must not fall prey to prefabricated and manipulated polarizations. Let us hope for all our sakes and for the future of our nation, that the white America of which I am a part can find a politics worthy of living for, rather than one whose enormity is marked by increasingly autoimmune forms of conflict, disempowerment and despair.
— Stephen Fox, a blogger living in Collinsville, Alabama, can be found at Fox Blog, foxofbama.blogspot.com
