For example, in Du Mez’s and Barr’s books, Christian “patriarchy” does not narrowly refer to some specific conceptualization of gender roles that assumes men should rule over women. To begin with, careful readers will realize how broadly some of the key terms in these discussions are being defined (or redefined). To many evangelicals, especially among the younger generation, this argument strikes a chord. Hundreds of years of participation in white supremacy, patriarchy, and nationalism have warped “white evangelical theology” such that it needs to be fundamentally reimagined. Step 3: the author concludes that Christian lament and even explicit, public repudiation of past injustices are not enough. At a time when church attendance was far more widespread than today, the government was engaging in the forced displacement of Native Americans, and white professing Christians were engaging in acts of racial terrorism (i.e. Entire denominations split over the issue of slavery. Again, many of these accusations are true. Step 2: the author argues that Christians either actively endorsed or were complicit in these widespread acts of injustice. In contemporary times, sexual abuse scandals, patriotic celebrations in the middle of worship services, and cringe-worthy displays of so-called “biblical masculinity” should also give us pause. In most cases, the historical events described by the authors are indeed horrific and call attention to our nation’s lamentable failure to live up to biblical standards of justice. This problem involves power dynamics of one kind or another: white supremacy, patriarchy, nationalism, etc. Step 1: the author identifies a problem, either in history or in contemporary politics. The books listed above share a similar rhetorical structure. Even if we agree with their conclusions, we should recognize that they are sowing the seeds of a deconstruction that goes far deeper than race, gender, and politics. However, for the purposes of this article, I’ll expand on one other commonality: they all share a dangerous approach to theology via the disciplines of sociology and history. These books share numerous common features: all of them were written by professing Christian scholars with advanced degrees from prestigious universities, all of them address hot-button issues in contemporary culture, and all of them reach conclusions that resonate with left-of-center perspectives.
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This list could be expanded to include Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, Willie James Jennings’s After Whiteness, Sechrest et al’s Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? and Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism.
Robert Jones’s White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity was discussed in The New York Times and the author himself is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States earned a treatment in Time magazine. Beth Allison Barr, the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, was likewise the subject of an NPR interview and a New Yorker article. Kristen Kobes Du Mez was interviewed on NPR about her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and was featured in a story for The Washington Post. In the past few years, numerous Christian scholars have produced books garnering national attention. Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Eikon.