(or Why I Associate My Spiritual Heritage with Race)
The majority of my posts have, in one form or another, addressed the problems with patriarchy in the white evangelical church. The most unexpected pushback I regularly receive on social media and in real life is not my criticism of patriarchy, but my use of the term white evangelical to describe my spiritual heritage. I realize I’ve never clarified why I choose to use the term on my blog and would like to directly address my use, even though it’s a term very few white evangelicals actually use to describe themselves. My post White Evangelical Married Sex is Not a Beautiful Union: The Pride & Profitability of Patriarchy most frequently raises good questions from my readers about my employment of the term white evangelical:
Joshua Ryan Butler doesn’t identify as white I don’t believe, nor does Debra Fileta.
I’m no fan of either of these books but how does race come into play here when the authors are not white?
One minor stirring I feel the need to push back on would be your need to bring skin color into every article and your About Me page? It really takes away from your content. You can say “conservative evangelical” without calling it white. There are thousands of ways to classify a person (upbringing, culture, profession, education, race, income), so when you say “white”, it really doesn’t narrow anything down. Just a gentle challenge for you as you continue to put out thoughtful content.
To be clear, I am not criticizing my readers for asking questions and offering feedback. I am honored when anyone takes the time to read my writing, even more so when they take the time to engage in good faith, and I’ve had very thoughtful conversations about race with several of my readers. A huge part of the problem is most white people usually do have questions and opinions about race, but don’t feel comfortable asking questions and talking about race for fear of being labeled a “racist”. I truly believe white people need to create safe spaces for white people to talk about race. So let’s talk about race, baby.
The first black indentured servants were sold on North American soil in 1619. The Pilgrims didn’t land on Plymouth Rock until 1620. The foundations for chattel slavery and racism had already been laid before the Pilgrims even arrived. Our Founding Fathers enshrined the racial divides in our country when they ratified a Constitution that declared an enslaved person was only “three-fifths” of a person. If Martin Luther King, Jr’s life had not been snuffed out by racism, he’d be 95 years old this month. Some of our living grandparents and great grandparents were his contemporaries. King once noted that “eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of American life.” In some ways, not much has changed since the 1960s. Our country was built on racism, and the effects are still widespread today. If white people want the racial divide in our country to heal, we need to learn how to look in the mirror and understand our role in the divide.
When I left my church four years ago and people asked me why I left, I didn’t have the words to explain. I wasn’t even comfortable calling myself an “egalitarian” yet, let alone articulating the decades of misogyny I had witnessed in my church tradition. Part of the problem was that my experiences hadn’t occurred in one denomination; I had spent time across many—Church of Christ, Independent Baptist, Christian (yes, it’s a denomination), Pentecostal, Vineyard, Non-Denominational, Inter-Denominational, Southern Baptist; megachurch, small church, church plant, hip church, elderly church, hymns, guitars, organs, urban, suburban, etc, etc, etc—and yet they somehow all felt eerily similar. After I left my local church and became isolated by a pandemic, I spent two years reading, listening, and trying to understand my experience before I found the words to start blogging. I first came across the term “white evangelical” on social media. I had done enough work in racial reconciliation ministries over the years to intuitively know “white evangelicals” were my people even if I hadn’t heard the phrase used until my late thirties. Turns out, it’s a term that academics and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) have been using to identify my people for a long time. A quick google search leads me to believe the term has been around since at least the 1960s, but I am not sure where it originated.
The term White Evangelical is used to identify a broad religious sect of people who emphasize a theology of individual salvation (“Born Again”), who are predominantly white, and who are unified by a shared culture of celebrity teachers (Beth Moore, Max Lucado), books (Purpose Driven Life, Prayer of Jabez), conferences (Promise Keepers, Woman of Faith), parachurch organizations (Focus on Family, Campus Crusade), singers (Amy Grant, Lauren Daigle), music (“Shout to the Lord,” “I Can Only Imagine”), and political party affiliation (Republican). The term white evangelical refers to the culture as a whole, not to the racial identity of individuals within that culture. For example, authors Joshua Butler and Debra Fileta, even if they do not identify as white, write primarily for a white evangelical audience. Christians from traditions outside of white evangelicalism have never heard of many of the names/organizations I previously listed.
After the pandemic regulations lifted, my family spent almost a year attending various black churches. I’m white, my husband and children are not. (My husband’s asian). Even though my family is not black, the churches we attended were culturally black. Black churches sing different songs, read different books, emphasize different theology, attend different conferences, graduate from different seminaries, clap on different beats (white churches clap on 1&3, black churches clap on 2&4), and play Spades with the Joker cards (outside of church, of course). We also spent some time in a Chinese church, and none of my family, including my Chinese-American husband, recognized the songs or understood the sermons (but we did enjoy the food). During our year-long journey, no white person ever took offense when I said, “We visited a Black (or Chinese) church this weekend,” even though there was always at least one other non-black person besides our family in attendance, yet when I refer to the fact that I was raised in “white” evangelicalism, white people are always the first to take offense at my use of the term even though most of my family’s religious experience has been not in Black or Chinese church, but in White Church.
Of course, the closer you get to the edges of any of the terms used to categorize the American church—catholic, orthodox, mainline, evangelical, black, white, or POC (including Chinese, Latino, Korean churches, etc.) the more ambiguous they become. Some denominations, organizations, and people do not fit nicely into one category (Tony Evans, for example), but the term “white evangelical” generally describes a large cultural movement within Christianity even if there is some overlap and blurry edges between all of the various ways of organizing religious sects.
In another post, I wrote about the perplexity of labels—the need for words to quickly communicate complex ideas (Love), and the way the hard edges of words often feel like a cudgel against the complexity of human experience. The never-ending longing to find the right words for nuance is to be human.
Part of being human, of being made in the “image of God,” encompasses the ability to communicate, but the human longing for eternity, the tension of living in what “is” and what “should be” can never fully be expressed in words, for how can one perfectly articulate infinity?
Language: Labels & Longing, paraphrased
We can recognize that labels like white evangelicalism or egalitarian are necessary and useful to quickly communicate complex ideas, while also mourning all the nuance that is lost by use of a term.
As I’ve mention earlier, I’m white, but my family is not. Our wasian children (another label I’m thankful to have learned on social media to give voice to some of my children’s experiences) have experienced random white children coming up to them speaking Spanish on more than one occasion. (Remember, my husband is Chinese-American.) When they were younger, my children were baffled by these experiences, but it was the beginning of them learning the hard truths about the ways that race works in our country, often invisible to white people. Their middle school years have been especially rough. Middle school is miserable for everyone, but BIPOC children experience racism in ways often invisible to white children, in the same way women experience misogyny in ways invisible to men. Just as a woman doesn’t have the privilege of being unaware of her sex when she’s walking alone in a dark alley, my children don’t have the luxury of being invisible to race when they’re in the middle of mean middle-schoolers. Most white people are very resistant to the “white” label even though they wouldn’t hesitate to use the term “Asian” or “Black” (or “African-American” or other preferred label) when talking about a non-white person or organization. My personal experience is that the person who insists they’re color-blind is always the first person to utilize a racial modifier when talking about any non-white person. It’s dishonest for white people to deflect from using racial terms for themselves when our country has still not fully healed from the racial divisions of our national foundation. (Race is a man-made construct, but it is not helpful to deny its reality.) BIPOC churches have been referring to majority white churches as “White Church” for decades, because for them, race has always been an obvious factor for the religious divides in our country.
In the last half century, white protestant churches have primarily divided over differences in theology around sex and gender. The strong conservative/liberal binary is a white church phenomenon. The terms complementarian and egalitarian were created in white theological spaces. (BIPOC churches have varying levels of mutuality and patriarchy within their traditions, but it is often more nuanced and not the stark dividing force that it is within white church spaces.) However, historically, the conservative/liberal divide in white churches usually widened over slavery, and the most obvious fissures across the American church are race-based. It’s why Sundays are still so segregated. It’s complex, but the way race and sex are handled in the American church are related. I don’t think you can address the misogyny running through the white evangelical church without also addressing the racism. They are intertwined.
The writings of one of the original modern White Evangelicals offers a glimpse of the marriage of misogyny and racism within its ranks. Tim LaHaye, author of the first bestselling Christian sex book The Act of Marriage shares an anecdotal story of a woman named Aunt Matilda being raped on her wedding night. Sheila Gregoire, who dedicated her book The Great Sex Rescue to Aunt Matilda writes:
Please notice that Tim LaHaye called the rapist, who held his wife down while she was kicking and screaming, and did this throughout their marriage, “equally unhappy” as his rape victim. This anecdote is from the fourth edition of their book. And nobody at Zondervan (the publisher, who still, to this day, has this wording in its book and has not taken it out) thought, “hmmmm….maybe it’s not a good idea to call a rapist equally unhappy as his rape victim!” No, they thought that was okay. Which is why I dedicated The Great Sex Rescue to Aunt Matilda, and all others like her. The evangelical world has failed women by making marital rape normal. And I’m incensed and so angry.
2 KINDS OF MARITAL RAPE THAT EVANGELICALISM (INADVERTENTLY) ENABLES
Prior to his sex book, Tim LaHaye had wrote a scathing letter to Wheaton College when they dared to hold a service to honor the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. after his assassination. LaHaye called King a “theological liberal heretic” and, as one scholar observes, LaHaye “threatens to use his influence to dissuade people from enrollment.” A full breakdown of the problematic content of LaHaye’s letter can be found here.
Later in life, the same Tim LaHaye became the bestselling author of the Left Behind series. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not have a “later in life”. Where misogyny is present, you will often find racism lurking too.
I think it’s important to clarify that I don’t think “white evangelical” is a negative term – it’s a neutral term used to describe a large, very powerful, predominantly white church movement in the United States. While most of my blogging has focused on my negative experiences of patriarchy in the movement, there were also many positives growing up in white evangelical spaces. I’ve touched on some of the positives in a previous post, and maybe I’ll spend more time reflecting on the positives in the future. I do know that after spending the last few years in white mainline, various BIPOC, and even Catholic Christian traditions, I don’t feel like I fully belong in any of them, and I’m not sure I’ll ever fit in any the way I once fit in white evangelical spaces. I might have removed my white girl self out of white evangelicalism, but I’m not sure anyone can ever take all the white evangelical out of this white girl. White Evangelical is a useful term to describe the large cultural movement in which I was raised—some of it was very good—but misogyny and racism run all the way to its roots, and I’m not sure it’s salvageable. That’s why I left.
Two Books I Highly Recommend to Understand the History of Racism and Misogyny in White Evangelicalism:
On Racism: The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby (Full disclosure – I have not read this particular book, but I have read some of Tisby’s other books and have been following his substack for several years, and I feel confident recommending this resource. It’s on my current reading list and was recommended to me by a black pastor whom I respect as the one book he wished all white Christians would read.)
On Misogyny: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin DuMez (which I have read – it was a very eye-opening read on the way political power and patriarchy have always been key players in the white evangelical movement.)
Related Posts:
The Apostle Paul Led Me Out of Patriarchy – the teachings of Paul led me out of complementary theology
Patriarchy: Porn & Purity Culture – a reflection on my own complex history with purity culture
Holy Tension – There are many valid tensions within Christianity that do exist and tend to divide us.
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White people do have white spaces to talk about racism. It’s called our homes…
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