Naming the Unmentionable: The Scourge of White Christian Supremacy
by Bruce Gourley
In March of this year Republican candidate Donald Trump, channeling the fears of many white Christian Americans, repeatedly insisted that “Islam hates us.”
Similar thoughts probably crossed the minds of a group of “20 and odd” persons stepping off a boat at Jamestown, Virginia in late August of the year 1619.
Kidnapped from their homes far away, imprisoned in a Portugese ship upon the high seas and then kidnapped yet again, this time by English sailors manning a more powerful vessel, the unwilling immigrants that day gazed upon a strange land. If they could have known where they were – they did not – and formed thoughts in the language of the place strange to them, the scenes before their eyes and the painful sensations of their shackled bodies may well have led them to think, “Christians hate us.”
History changed that late summer day in 1619 when those African Muslims stepped onto the soil of the New World. For a few bushels of food the governor and a leading merchant of the Christian colony of Jamestown purchased the twenty-something Muslims, quickly putting them to work in nearby tobacco fields. Toiling away against their will, the immigrants` stolen labor enriched the colony`s white Christian elites, men who congratulated themselves for both the profits they reaped and their faithfulness to the colony`s charter of “propagating the Christian Religion” to people living “in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God.” The kingdom of the white Christian God now extended over Africans as well as Native Americans.
Thus begins the story of white Christian supremacy and African Muslim slavery in colonial America. Although some of the earliest Muslim slaves were allowed to earn their freedom after a certain number of years of forced labor, the colony`s elites soon realized the financial advantages of perpetual servitude. Before the end of the century, lifetime enslavement of African Muslims was standard practice throughout the New World.
Alongside the doctrine of black slavery, Christian elites preached white solidarity. By virtue of the paleness of their skin, whites were the chosen ones, reaping the benefits of race-based freedom. Enslavers controlled the bodies of the enslaved, bodies routinely beaten in order to generate ever more profit, raped for sexual pleasure, and marched in leg irons hundreds of miles distant to clear and work new lands for the further enrichment of the master`s wealth. Few were the fortunate free Africans who escaped enslavers` terrorism. Living in this netherworld were the growing number of offspring from interracial unions, both enslaved and free.
Some one hundred years following the firm establishment of white Christian supremacy and African Muslim slavery, the Declaration of Independence and American Revolution proved unable to alter the course of racial history. Paying lip service to the equality of all men, the nation`s founders nonetheless caved in to the demands of Southern elites. Black slavery continued, protected by an amendment to the Constitution (the Second) designed to allow enslavers to raise militias to quash slave rebellions. Even so, from the 1780s forward northern whites increasingly repudiated the enslavement of blacks, a position they reached from Christian convictions. Although outlawed in the North in the early eighteenth century, most white citizens remained white supremacists and slavery yet enriched northern elites as southern, slave-produced cotton fueled northern industry. White Christian elites of the South, meanwhile, theologized black slavery, preached white solidarity and co-opted poor whites, reaping enormous financial profits as inequality soared. All the while they denied they were racists, pointing instead to their faithfulness to the Bible and to God`s will for the Christianizing enslavement of black persons.
It took an estimated 700,000 American deaths in a four-year civil war to bring an end to America`s slave economy and establish freedom for all persons. White Christian supremacy, however,continued undaunted. No apologies from former southern enslavers were offered to formerly enslaved blacks, no efforts made to recompense the South`s laboring class for the several trillion dollars of work stolen from them, no offers extended to help freedmen obtain education and land.
Instead, many southern whites displayed contempt for and hatred of their former slaves and determined to thwart northern efforts to force racial equality upon the South. In 1866 a white Christian organization, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), emerged to insure the continued subjugation of black persons that had begun in 1619. Initiates were required to swear loyalty to Christianity and Christian morality. Devoted to white supremacy, the terrorist organization conducted a massive campaign of violence and murder throughout the South, killing at will African Americans who dared exert freedom and whites who advocated racial equality.
Although the KKK under pressure from northern forces went underground in the 1870s, the North proved unable to overcome the militant white supremacy represented by the Klan. Northern efforts to force whites to accept black freedom ended in failure. Soon, Jim Crow laws institutionalized regional apartheid through fear and terrorism. Christian white supremacists revised southern antebellum history, fabricating memories of an antebellum Old South where happy, content black slaves willfully toiled in cotton fields for lenient white masters who extolled the best of Christian morality and virtues.
Victorious over blacks and history, elite white Christian supremacists rebirthed the KKK in 1915 as a second-generation terrorist organization tasked with keeping blacks in servitude and poverty, opposing immigrants (especially Roman Catholics and Jews), and thwarting a newly-ascending labor movement. In the decades following the Klan perpetrated thousands of terrorist acts in the name of Christianity, preaching white racial solidarity and further stoking a hatred of black persons among common whites. Many white Christians of the 1930s and 1940s expressed approval of Adolph Hitler and his white supremacist German Christian nationalist movement, the Nazi Party.
Although the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s finally achieved legal victory over white supremacist laws in America, the racist and hate-filled spirit of the Klan remained embedded in the minds of many white southerners. This is evidenced in forcefully segregated churches, anti-black private and home school movements, as well as racist policies embodied in financial and social institutions. In the 1970s the modern Religious Right emerged not in reaction to Roe v. Wade, but rather from white supremacist outrage over efforts by the Internal Revenue Service to punish fundamentalist Bob Jones University for the school`s racially discriminatory policies. Ronald Reagan, sensing political opportunity, dog-whistled to racists with rants about mythical “welfare queens” who lived lives of luxury off of government welfare. White Christian evangelicals flocked to the familiar tune, twice electing Reagan president and all the while denying they were racists. Reagan promised law and order. Black incarceration soared under presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Yet for racists, the unfathomable happened in 2008 with the election of an African American as president of the United States. White supremacists were livid that someone of an inferior race had become the nation`s leader. From hatred the Tea Party emerged. Proclaimed as a movement against Wall Street elites but in realty bathed in the ideology of white supremacy, Tea Party rallies routinely featured openly racist, hate-filled, anti-Obama signs. The number of hate groups in America, KKK and otherwise, soared. Embracing the anger, many conservative white lawmakers in Washington, D.C. vowed to resist Obama`s governance at all costs.
As Tea Party fervor sent increasingly angry and strident white Christian supremacists to Congress, racist lawmakers and presidential contenders hearkened back to Jim Crow laws in devising schemes to keep African Americans from the voting booth. Today, their anger routinely spills over into rants against homosexuals, Mexican immigrants, Syrian refugees and Muslims.
To be certain, threads of modern reality are woven into today`s white supremacist narrative. America is on the cusp of becoming a white minority nation. Inequality – driven, according to many economists, by powerful and elite corporatists manipulating government and law to enrich themselves at the expense of their poverty-paid laborers, the rapid ascendancy of automated technology, and the outsourcing of many American jobs to countries characterized by low wages – is shrinking the middle class and placing the once-vibrant “American Dream” further and further out of the reach of ordinary white persons (a dream most African Americans have yet to achieve). The cost of higher education, by far the best road out of poverty, is beyond the reach of those who need it most. America, in too many ways, is a nation in crisis.
Hovering over this existential national crisis, however, are four centuries of unremitting and widespread racial and ethnic hatred empowered by white Christian supremacist ideology. We as a nation have yet to truly embrace the fact that all humans share 99% of the same DNA. Hewing to the artifical construct of race oppresses minorities and perverts majorities. Fearing rather than celebrating differences in ethnicity, religion and gender yet prevents the fulfillment of the nation`s founding vision of human equality.
Shamefully, within white evangelical Christendom, human equality modeled by Jesus and voiced by the the Apostle Paul (Romans 2:11, Galatians 3:28) remains anathema for many.
And so today`s KKK and white supremacist allies remain all too vocal and influential in this year`s election year discourse, channeling hatred and vitriol against persons of color and ethnicity. It comes as no historical surprise that an aged white supporter at a Donald Trump rally this spring, in the midst of the removal of a black protestor by Trump`s security forces, punched the African American and afterward declared that “we might have to kill” the man if he returned.
I hope to be alive when America finally escapes her historical burden of racial and ethnic hatred, but I have my doubts. We must do our best to overcome our nation`s original sin, but salvation from the evils of white supremacy will likely fall to more diverse and tolerant younger and future generations who gaze upon our diseased land with new eyes and refuse to be enslaved to the spirit of hate.
