The rise of “Trumpism” in the U.S. has heightened public discourse on the relationship between race, politics, and white Christianity, with much of the focus on evangelicals. The papers in this panel broaden the frame by placing scholarship on white evangelicalism and Christian nationalism in conversation with white Christian progressivism. Papers explore how whiteness shapes Christianity on the right and the left in terms of political practices, behaviors, and perspectives, and how this impacts our common life in the U.S. Authors discuss white Christians' involvement in racial justice movements, social sources of divides within evangelicalism, racism in U.S. sermons, and Christian gun ownership.
This paper examines the theory, methodologies, and findings of a larger study exploring the impacts of whiteness - and specifically, White Christianity - on racial justice movements within the state of Texas. Employing Critical Whiteness Studies as a methodological tool, community organizers working in the areas of incarceration and immigration reform/abolition were interviewed for two primary purposes: to better understand how White Christians engage in and are impacted by organizing for racial justice (do these movements have the potential to “un-suture” White Christians/Christianity from whiteness?); and to better understand how the presence of White Christians impacts the work of such organizations and movements (what are the benefits, as well as the costs, of allowing White Christians into power-building spaces/movements for BIPOC communities?). This paper reflects on the findings of this study while also calling into question the impact of the primary researcher’s identity on its relational dynamics and outcomes.
What generates divides within evangelicalism over individualist and structural frameworks for understanding racial inequity? Some research has pointed to gender and education as key factors in shaping racial attitudes (Edgell and Tranby 2007). We investigate these claims with recent national survey data, while considering other sources of contemporary evangelical divides, including Christian Nationalism, generation, and urbanicity. We argue that divisions within evangelicalism reflect generational and class shifts within evangelicalism, especially due to the effect of the Trump movement on evangelicalism. Evangelicals who are supportive of Christian nationalism are at odds with those skeptical of the uniting of God and Caesar. National survey results from 2022 provide support for generational, class, and political divides within evangelicalism on issues of racial inequity.
This paper draws from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Christian handgun owners and Christian anti-gun violence activists in the Triangle region of North Carolina to develop an immanent critique of Christian handgun ownership as encountered in the field. Drawing from the work of Luke Bretherton and Willie Jennings, it explores how an ethnographically grounded analysis can make an ethico-political intervention into the place of guns in US American life, one that employs practices of listening and joining across vectors of difference as a way of responding to the continued harm of guns on our common life in the United States.
While religion and race have separately been established as meaningful drivers of elite and public behavior, I argue that we cannot truly understand their impact on American politics without being considered together. In this project, I ask whether the ways in which religious experiences shape U.S. race relations by investigating how racism is discussed during religious services. I examine the contexts of discussions about racism in 10,900 sermons from 1,047 U.S. congregations through the use of computational text analysis methods. I show that there is variation in how clergy discuss racism during religious services, an established avenue through which religious experiences shape political behavior. I connect these quantitative results to previous literature that shows white evangelicals are hesitant to connect issues related to race/ism to politics.