[Oe List ...] 9/30/2021, Progressing Spirit, “White Too Long” - A Conversation with Robert P Jones, Part 1; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Sep 30 07:35:30 PDT 2021
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“White Too Long”
A Conversation with Robert P Jones, Part 1
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| Interview by Rev. David Felten
September 30, 2021
The following is Part 1 of a series drawn from an interview with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity on September 9th, 2021. It has been edited for length and focus.
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David Felten: Your latest book, White Too Long, lays out the complicity of American Christianity with white supremacy, particularly within the church of your upbringing, the Southern Baptist Convention. Do you really mean the white supremacy I’m thinking of?
Robert Jones: I think when most white people hear the words “white supremacy,” they conjure up grainy, black and white images of people in robes burning crosses in the 1920s. And what that does is distance us from anything we might call “white supremacy.” What we really need to be talking about is what Professor Eddie Glaude calls “white supremacy without all the bluster” — or without the costumes. So, what I mean by white supremacy is acknowledging that we have been born into a society with a deliberately unlevel playing field, and that has been built with the assumption that white lives are more valuable than others.
David Felten: It’s so baked into the status quo, people don’t see it.
Robert Jones: But it’s right in front of us. The country was set up very intentionally and overtly to justify giving better jobs, better schools, and better places to live to those who claim to be white. And if you’re any kind of honest student of American history — or if you just know your own family's history (if you're white) — you can see it clearly. There's not a city in the country where you can't see the legacy of racially motivated zoning, where there were “whites-only” areas of the city. The whole history of public schooling in the country was set up to benefit those who could claim to be white at the expense of others.
David Felten: And as long as we’re thinking about white supremacy as hoods and burning crosses, we get a pass. We can say, “That's not me!”
Robert Jones: Right. That’s nothing to do with me. But these other things are much closer to home, including police violence disproportionately affecting African-American men, mass incarceration, and other things that are still going on that we tend to not put in the category of white supremacy.
David Felten: The light you shine on the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention is pretty shocking. The largest evangelical denomination in the country founded on justifying and defending slavery?
Robert Jones: Yeah, at its height, it had 16 million members, making it the largest not just evangelical denomination, but the largest denomination of any kind in the country. I begin the book—it’s the first sentence of White Too Long, with this basic fact: “The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that chattel slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believe this arrangement was not just possible, but also divinely mandated.”[i]
David Felten: And that never came up being raised in the SBC?
Robert Jones: I was never taught what the “Southern” in Southern Baptist Convention meant. I just assumed it was an innocent geographical marker — not that it meant an allegiance to a Southern way of life that included owning other human beings. That's the meaning of the “Southern” in Southern Baptist that's still there today.
David Felten: It's as if the Methodist Episcopal Church South had never died.
Robert Jones: It’s worth noting that both the Methodists and Baptists split in the same year and it was these white Christian denominations splitting over the issue of slavery, with the Southern factions justifying slavery biblically, that was the dress rehearsal for the political splits that finally led to the Civil War.
David Felten: It was a righteous cause because it's in the Bible.
Robert Jones: Absolutely. Plus, I had an MDiv from a Baptist seminary and a PhD from Emory University (a good Methodist seminary) and through all that education, was, I frustratingly, never taught anything about this thing called the “doctrine of discovery,” the underpinning of white supremacy.
David Felten: And that goes WAY back!
Robert Jones: Yeah, it was a 15th century set of doctrines promulgated by the Pope that justified and blessed the expeditions of Columbus and all the others. It basically said that if you were from a European nation with a Christian king and you encountered other lands not occupied by Christian people, you had the blessing of the church and the power of the state to dominate those lands and those people.
David Felten: So, the founders of the SBC and the Methodist Episcopal Church South were able to pick up on that as further justification for their white supremacy.
Robert Jones: Yeah, there's a straight through-line. The same doctrine that justified the forced removal and genocide of Native Americans justified slavery. And what's underneath it all is the belief that European Christians were God's chosen people and their lives were more valuable than others’ lives.
David Felten: White Too Long introduces us to some of those pretty influential “chosen” people who’ve otherwise been lost to history.
Robert Jones: One of the folks that I didn't know about before I started doing research for the book is a guy named Basil Manly Sr. He was not only the architect of the secessionist movement in Alabama, he was the architect of the Southern Baptist Convention and went on to found Southern Seminary, which today remains as the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. As the official “Chaplain of the Confederacy,” he was one of the leading proponents of preaching about God's blessing on the Confederacy, the Southern way of life, white supremacy, and how slavery was justified as part of God's will.
David Felten: He was also present at Jefferson Davis’ inauguration and did the invocation.
Robert Jones: Yeah. It tells you how tight he was. He was actually the only person in the carriage with Jefferson Davis and the vice president of the Confederacy when they were brought up to the Capitol. He held the Bible during the oath of office and gave the “consecrating prayer,” casting a vision of the Confederacy as the ideal expression of God's will for human society on earth.
David Felten: And after the Civil War, the SBC and other denominations, including Methodist, continued to justify and promote white supremacy. What did that look like?
Robert Jones: Well, there were all kinds of contortions. The Methodists come back together in the early part of the 20th century to mend their North and South rift. But what they did to preserve the power of white bishops within the denomination was to put all of the African-American churches in one non-geographical district. Instead of mixing the African-American churches into the districts where they geographically belonged, they put them in this one anomalous thing called the “Central District,” so that all the African-Americans were represented by one bishop (as a way of watering down power) and keeping all the other districts segregated.
David Felten: So, they used political tactics to guarantee segregation and the supremacy of whites.
Robert Jones: Plenty of churches had restrictive covenants that in their official minutes declared themselves as whites-only congregations. In fact, doing research for the book, I think one of the more heartbreaking things I realized about my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, is that the last thing the great civil rights worker, Medgar Evers, did before he was assassinated in 1963, was an organizing effort trying to integrate the white churches in downtown Jackson.
David Felten: And one of those churches was the Methodist church where the mayor was a member.
Robert Jones: That's right. The Methodist church had the mayor and the Baptist church had the governor. The governor, Ross Barnett, was one of the most segregationist governors in the 20th century. He was simultaneously running an overtly segregationist campaign while serving as the superintendent of the men’s Sunday School program and was wildly loved by the church. When he was elected, they had a special sanctification ceremony and gave him a big pulpit Bible. The person who gunned down Medgar Evers, Byron De La Beckwith, was a white, Episcopalian member in good standing at a church in Greenwood, Mississippi. He’d been writing letters to the editor in the Mississippi delta papers saying, “If any African-Americans try to attend my church, I'll be waiting on the steps with a gun.”
David Felten: So it’s not just Baptists and Methodists.
Robert Jones: No. It's worth noting that both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis weren't Baptists. They were Episcopalians.
David Felten: And Lee and Davis still have pews at the Richmond church where John Shelby Spong served as rector many years ago.
Robert Jones: Yeah. It's deep. I think that's the thing we're having to wrestle with, is how deep this is in the DNA of white Christianity in the country.
David Felten: When I heard you speak at a UCC church in California, you were intentional about saying, “Hey, you Progressives are not clear of this. You can't just wash your hands and say, ‘Well, we're Progressives and we’re the good guys.’”
Robert Jones: Yeah, I would say that if you were reading the written documents that were issued by the National Council of Churches, or by the Methodist social principles or denominational advocacy offices, you’d think that Methodists were everywhere in the civil rights era. And some were. Pastors lost their jobs because they stood up for civil rights. But I think these big denominational level statements are never fully taken up at the local congregational level. I think that's the work that has to be done.
"Coming Up:" For the statistics exposing the challenge before us and some practical suggestions about how to dismantle the white supremacy inherent in white Christian America, see Part 2 of David Felten’s interview with White Too Long author, Robert P. Jones.
~ Rev. David M. Felten and Robert P. Jones
Read online here
About the Authors
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings.
Robert P. Jones is the CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute[ii] (PRRI), and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, winner of a 2021 American Book Award. He writes a weekly #WhiteTooLong newsletter dedicated to the work of truth-telling, repair, and healing from the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity: robertpjones.substack.com
*** Get your FREE copy of White Too Long!***
Three signed copies of Robert P Jones’ White Too Long will be given away to three lucky readers of ProgressingSpirit.com. Just add a comment with the hashtag #whitetoolong to the comments below or on the Progressive Christianity Facebook page and you’ll be entered in the drawing to win!
[i] Jones, Robert P. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2020, page 1.[ii] https://www.prri.org/ |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Susan
Do your beliefs include that you must accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior in order to go to heaven; and, in the end, those who do not accept Christ, no matter how much good they have done on earth, will go to hell?
A: By Skylar Wilson
Dear Susan,
Thank you for your question. I experience the Universe as a single non-dual event that we now know has expanded over 13.8 billion years up to this point. I interpret Jesus Christ, planet Earth, and all of the elements, animals, plants, fungi etc. as being an embodiment of this cosmic process. I resonate with the idea that the Cosmic Christ, the Tao, Buddha Nature etc. is the vital thread of Spirit that moves through all things and that the historical Jesus, among others, experienced this and reflected it within his community. Within this living cosmology, there is no heaven or hell that exists as a place outside of Creation. The life giving impulse of Creation and the beauty of planet Earth itself is everlasting life and Heaven. This level of connection cannot be taken away but we can easily lose touch with it when we identify with the pain and trauma that is also inevitable in life.
To reiterate, Hell is identifying with our wounds and suffering to the point where we forget that we are completely loved and connected to life. Heaven is a metaphor for how good life is when we live and act from the knowing that we’re completely connected and can feel each part of this world reaching out to us and holding us in unique, strange, and alive ways. Heaven and Hell can be very real places in a psychological sense but are not places outside of our lives here and now. I believe that we create heaven and hell through our choices. When we choose to act from connection and love, with empathy and compassion while opening to the pain of suffering within ourselves and in the world then we are participating in creating Heaven.
~ Skylar Wilson
Read and share online here
About the Author
Skylar Wilson, MA is the founder of Wild Awakenings, a conscious community of change-makers dedicated to the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. He has led wilderness rites of passage journeys as well as ecological restoration teams for 18 years, specializing in creating sacred wilderness immersion experiences and interfaith ceremonies. Skylar is the cofounder and co-director of the Order of the Sacred Earth, a network of mystic warriors and activists dedicated to being the best lovers and defenders of the Earth that we can be. Skylar is the coauthor of the book by the same title as well as the co-host, with Jennifer Berit, of the podcast: "Our Sacred Earth" on Unity online radio. Skylar works closely with schools and organizations including the Stepping Stones Project in Berkeley, CA over the last 8 years while guiding organization-wide retreats, mentoring youth, group leaders, parents and elders. He also produces transformational events for thousands of people around the country including the Cosmic Mass, an intercultural healing ritual that builds community through dancing and the arts.
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A couple of weeks ago, we lost our dear friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, one of the patron saints of Progressive Christianity. His life and work were such an inspiration to so many of us and his guidance was instrumental in helping to shape our organization. He will be deeply missed, but his theological writings live on with ProgressiveChristianity.org through his former newsletter, now known as Progressing Spirit.
One of the things that I value most about ProgressiveChristianity.org is that we both preserve the work of theological giants like Bishop Spong, as well as, continue his legacy by empowering up-and-coming thinkers to share their invaluable insights. We create a space that advances the conversation and promotes an intellectually honest theological approach that empowers people rather than imprisoning them in outdated theological models.
If you would like to help us continue the Progressive Christian Movement, please consider making a recurring gift or a one-time donation in memory of Bishop Spong. Your generosity makes all the difference.
Blessings,
Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines, Co-Executive Director
ProgressiveChristianity.org
Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org going strong -
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection
Part I: Setting the Stage
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 25, 2011
Through this column during the weeks before Good Friday, I did a series on the story of the cross and its meaning, seeking to call you, my readers, into a more interpretive way of reading the passion narrative. I focused on the developing nature of that narrative and sought to show that when the first narrative account of the crucifixion was actually written in Mark around the year 72 CE, it was filled not with references to eye-witness reporting, but with quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures, especially from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. It was, I concluded, never intended to be literal history or something based on first-hand data. The original purpose was thus not to tell us what actually happened, but to interpret the meaning of what happened. Once we stopped seeing these words as literal history, the door was opened to plunge into a radically new understanding. So we noticed that the account of Judas Iscariot was an 8th decade addition to the Jesus story, one about which Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64, knew nothing. We examined the placement of the crucifixion story into the celebration of the Passover and suggested that this was a contrived interpretative technique, rather than a literal memory. We saw that the character we call Barabbas, whose name literally means “Son (bar) of God (Abba),” now paired with Jesus, also the son of God, was suggestive of the two animals in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, one of which was slaughtered while the other was set free and thus we saw how Yom Kippur had been used to interpret the death of Jesus liturgically.
These insights, while surprising no one in the academies of Christian scholarship, are always surprising and sometimes even troubling to those who have generally assumed that in the story of Jesus’ death as written in the gospels, they were actually reading history. They were not, nor was that ever the intention. The gospels are written 40-70 years, or between two and three generations, after the time of the crucifixion and they reflect a long interpretive process in which the memories people had of Jesus were wrapped inside Jewish messianic expectations that then became the way the Jesus story was understood and interpreted. As Paul noted in I Corinthians 15, Jesus died “in accordance with the scriptures.”
Now in this post-Easter time of the Christian year, I would like to subject the resurrection stories of the New Testament to the same sort of critical biblical analysis, recalling that St. Paul also said that Jesus was raised “in accordance with the scriptures.” Perhaps in the process of this series, we will learn that in freeing theological truth from the biblical text, something does not have to be literal to be understood as true and that the experience of the resurrection has little to do with a body being resuscitated from death back into life. Indeed, the resurrection of Jesus means something far different and far more significant than that. So I plan five, maybe even six columns that will run periodically over the next ten weeks or so. I am aware that this column is used in Adult Education classes in a number of churches across this nation and around the world. I hope this series will prove to be fruitful to those readers in particular.
Once again, we begin this biblical probe by examining the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written, which means we study the New Testament in this order: First, we read Paul (51-64), then Mark (70-72), Matthew (82-85), Luke (88-93) and John (95-100). Only in this way can we watch the story grow and gain insight into its original meaning.
Paul, primarily in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 54-56, is very spare in giving us any Easter details. Quite literally the only thing Paul says is that Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” Note there is no reference in Paul to a tomb, to a stone being rolled away, to the women coming at dawn on the first day of the week, to a messenger who makes the resurrection announcement and finally no hint of the appearance of Jesus physically at the tomb to anyone. All of these details will be added only in the later gospels. Paul does, however, give us a list of those who, he says, had the raised Christ “manifested” to them, or the list of those to whom the resurrected Jesus “appeared.” The word that we translate “appeared” or was “made manifest” is very loose. Does it mean a physical sighting or a transforming experience? Does it mean a seeing with human eyes or the birth of a new awareness? Is its primary meaning physical sight, second sight or insight? Is it different from the account of Moses “seeing” God in the burning bush? Paul gives us no details. The list of witnesses, however, might provide some clues. So might other texts in the Pauline corpus that cannot possibly be read as physical bodily resuscitation stories.
In Paul’s list, there are six separate manifestations. First Paul says, he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to “the Twelve” and then to the 500 brethren at once. That seems to be the first list. Then a parallel list is recorded in which he appears to James then to “the apostles” and finally to Paul himself. Both sets of witnesses beg more questions than they answer. Cephas is no surprise, he is always listed first among the twelve, and perhaps that position is a direct result of being the first one to “see” the raised Christ. I will examine that possibility later. “The Twelve” is a surprise, but only because Judas is clearly still among them. Paul seems not to know the tradition that one of the twelve was a “traitor.”
Judas is first introduced in Mark (70-72) and when Matthew (82-85) gives the first written narrative of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples, the Judas story has been factored in, so in that gospel Jesus appears only to the eleven! No corroborating data anywhere identifies the “500 brethren” to whom Paul says he appeared “at once” so they continue to be shrouded in mystery.
Then in his parallel list he starts with James. Who is he? There are three James’ in the New Testament: James, the son of Zebedee, James, the son of Alphaeus, and James, the brother of Jesus. Which James does Paul mean? The only James that Paul ever mentions elsewhere in his writing is James the brother of Jesus so he becomes our best guess. Then Paul says he appeared to “the apostles.” Who are they? They are clearly not “the Twelve,” who have already been listed. So they have to be a different group, but who? By the time the gospels are written, “the Twelve” are called “the apostles,” but not so with Paul.
Finally, please note that Paul claims that he himself was one who also “saw” the raised Christ. Could this possibly mean that the resurrection was conceived of by Paul as a resuscitation of a deceased person? Hardly! Paul’s conversion, according to the best reconstruction that we can put together was no earlier than one year and no later than six years after the crucifixion. The gospel writers collectively assert that no resurrection appearances in any physical sense took place that long after the crucifixion. Mark tells us of no appearance of Jesus at all, not even to the women in the garden, but he does hint that the disciples will see him in Galilee, which is a 7-10 days’ journey from Jerusalem.
Matthew contradicts Mark and says the women did see Jesus in the garden at dawn on Easter day and then he relates a story of Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee that appears to come much later and in which Jesus comes out of the sky as one who has been both transformed and glorified. He is clearly not a resuscitated body who has returned to life in this world. Luke says appearances of the raised Christ continued for as long as forty days after Easter and then terminated with the ascension. John says the ascension took place on Easter evening after the tomb was found to be empty by Mary Magdalene that morning, and that the Jesus who appeared to the disciples was an already transformed and ascended Jesus, who was not bound by time and space. Indeed he could walk through walls. So what kind of seeing was Paul talking about when he included himself in his list of witnesses? How are we to understand this suddenly, rather complicated Easter story?
Easter is obviously not quite as simple as literalists suggest, when they demand that belief in the resurrection must mean belief in the physically raised, resuscitated body of Jesus from the dead. It is clear to me that this is not what the Easter experience was about at all. What is not so clear is what it was about. So that is what I shall seek to explore in this series of columns.
I will take the entire New Testament and search it for clues, remembering that all of the books that constitute the Christian Scriptures were written only in the light of the Easter experience. Not one verse of the New Testament was written prior to Easter and not one verse was written except inside the meaning of Easter. Every word of the New Testament was created 30 to 70 years after the fact of Easter.
I will present my data in response to four very elemental questions that I will ask of my biblical sources. They are: Who? Where? When? and “How? Whatever the Resurrection was, who stood at the center of this life-changing experience? Who was the first to understand? Who opened the eyes of others so that they could understand? Is there evidence throughout the New Testament that points in a single direction?
Where was the crucial person to whom the reality of Easter dawned in the mind of this critical observer? The gospels are divided between Galilee and Jerusalem. Are there other narratives in the New Testament that make it clear that it was one and not the other?
When did this “appearance” occur? Easter may be timeless, but the Easter experience occurs in a human mind at a particular moment of time? Is “three days” a measure of physical time or is it a symbol?
Finally, in what context did Easter dawn? How did this context frame the experience? Can we enter that interpretive context today and see Easter’s meaning with new eyes? That is the outline of where I hope to go over the next few weeks. I hope you will want to journey with me for this is the only website I know, which seeks to open the minds of people to a non-literal, but profoundly real way to hear the Christian story.
~ John Shelby Spong
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