When Supremacist Systems Come to Church
Learning to see with a wider scope
For the final post of this series on decolonizing religion and religious deconstruction, we’re going to take a hard look at the ways and spaces supremacist systems show up. These examples will do with religion but also race, which is a hard topic for some people, but really important especially for white people (who often haven’t had to do a lot of wrestling on race issues) to think about.
When I was little, I started to get curious about why it was the Europeans who went out exploring, conquering, and colonizing so many places in the world. Why were these white people always seeming to be the ones in charge? Why did they have the best weaponry and why did they win so many of the battles they fought? As I got older, it felt more and more unfair, but I didn’t have any good answers for why there was so much European colonization across the continent. I had been taught that those who work hard and are talented will do well. So, the reluctant (because I have always, always been interested in fairness and kindness) conclusion I drew was that Europeans must be superior in those kinds of ways1.
[Also, you can replace Christian with European in that last paragraph and get that same sense of religious superiority. Was it also reluctant for me? Yes, but I was told we had The Answers and God’s Truth, so sorry, but everyone else was wrong.]
And of course, if Ron DeSantis et al have their way, kids across the United States will continue to draw these types of conclusions, because they don’t have any opposing information to challenge what American kids are taught about meritocracy and our idealized history.
In college and beyond I was finally exposed to more information and began to draw new conclusions. That Europeans aren’t innately superior but have leveraged technology to their advantage and are apparently really, really driven by economic gains combined with a sense of ideological superiority. They saw resources and wealth to be accumulated from lands that other people occupied, so they decided to occupy the lands instead and exploit the resources (or, set up exploitative trade practices; the colonization of Africa is a great example).
The thing that fundamentalism never wants you to do is ask the questions beneath the surface-level answers they give you. Don’t deeply question why Christianity is the only right religion and why the Bible is the only source of God’s truth. Just trust our circular reasoning that it’s true. Don’t question why Christianity spreads the way it does and why so many of our churches here are filled with people who look and think just like us. Just trust that YOU are a true believer.
But I like to ask questions, and if you’re still here reading, you do too. So here we ended up, asking questions with no good answers, wondering how many house of mirror illusions we have to walk through to find a new kind of truth…if we can ever get there.
Policing practices, whiteness, and Tyre Nichols
Two months ago, Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten by a special-unit police force in Memphis, dying three days later from his injuries. The police officers who beat and killed him were Black. But in many ways, his death was at the hands of a system designed to uphold white supremacy. I found what Lisa Sharon Harper had to say about his death to be moving:
He was lynched
By five Black overseers of the state
And I feel for them. They, too, were likely victims of the state. They likely joined the patrol as a strategy to survive it. They swore to protect the proper order of things—
>>> Protect property.
>>> Protect businesses.
>>> Protect the white people who own and run them.
The rest are expendable.
Black people are expendable.
But they forgot—they, too, are expendable.
Mr. Nichols’ death has brought to the attention of many people this idea of “whiteness” as a concept that goes beyond the color of an individual’s skin. Whiteness, instead, can be thought of as a power structure the elevates the priorities of white people as a group. That upholds and perpetuates white supremacy, with its interests in colonization, imperialism, militarism, and corporatism.2
To get a more complete understanding of this concept of “whiteness,” I turned to the faith-based racial reconciliation group Be the Bridge.
The divisive ideology of whiteness convinced people of European descent that they were more pure, beautiful, honest, trustworthy, intelligent, and hard-working than other ethnic groups… The western church, after helping to birth [whiteness], came alongside this ideology and gave it theological and spiritual buttressing, so its adherents could not just believe they were the best, but God made it that way. Doing so led to the slaughter of millions, the desecration of land, the plundering of resources, and the creation of systems and structures to uphold this fallacy.
Many people (white or not) have a hard time with the term whiteness because they feel it sows further division and doesn’t reflect enough of the power dynamics that are actually being referred to. I don’t take issue with the term, though I also know if I were engaging in conversation with a white person out here in rural Ohio who thinks racism is a thing of the past, it’s definitely not the word I would use. Which is fine! I use “whiteness” here because I can understand it as referring to supremacist systems supporting the causes of “people who believe themselves to be white,” as Ta-Nahisi Coates says. I don’t take “whiteness” personally.
A tokenized Black preacher at a counter-protest
A few years ago, during the pandemic summer of 2020, I briefly stopped by a church-sponsored prayer meeting in an outdoor park in town (which *just so happened* to fall later in the day of the first Black Lives Matter march in our small town). I already had a strong suspicion of what it would be about, but I wanted to confirm. (When you grow up evangelical, you develop excellent bullshit radar for this kind of thing).
There was loud worship music being played by a local worship band. Tons of (white) church-y people were gathered, singing praises. A white pastor stood up, said some words. Then they brought up a Black pastor, and my heart sank.
Not because he’s not allowed to be there: he could be, just like the rest of them, even if I disagreed with what they were doing. But because my gut told me he was just being used as a token. Earlier that day, we had a relatively large Black Lives Matter march that most of the Christians (aside from a fairly good-sized contingent from both the churches I take part in!) stayed far away from. The Christians in the park wanted to show that this Black guy agreed with them, and that therefore, they were in the right. Not some kind of mean nasty racists.
The Black preacher said some words about not being afraid of worldly things (like viruses?) and not trusting the government. He talked about unity in Christ and not being divided by racism. (not like those divisive marchers, right?).
If I were bold like
, I could have shown up with a protest poster about how God doesn’t want to hear songs of praise but instead see justice roll down like water. But I’m not, so I hurried home with my baby in the stroller, feeling sickened. Not just because of the words this guy was uttering, but because I knew all too well what systems were underlaying his words, because I was steeped in it for all too long and you can’t unsee it once you see it.
Seeing systems; seeing the big picture
When I was writing my book, what became more and more clear to me was that the “thing” I was writing about – or truly, writing in protest of – was an entire system. It was a system rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy and it was more powerful than any one person or idea. What I repeatedly saw was that underneath each individual “policy,” so to speak (purity culture and sexual mores, limiting exposure to critical thinking and outside ideas, deeply embedded shame in the psyche, and so on) pointed to the quest for power and control over others.
My friend and loyal reader of this newsletter, Chuck Petch, shared with me a term for something that still has me thinking: “deconstructing society.” I feel quite familiar with deconstructing religion, but am relatively new to deconstructing society (by which I mean the forces that shape and control the ways in which we live our lives). Decolonizing our faith, and then zooming the lens back to look at what else we might be decolonizing, is just a part of this process.
If you appreciated this post, would you “heart” it, drop a comment, or share it with a friend3? Your support helps keep this newsletter alive! I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s reflections. How have you changed your perceptions to see another version of what’s going on? Are there questions you’ve asked that made others uncomfortable or that no one has had a good answer to? Do you feel you’re deconstructing the systems you once relied on? And how do you navigate the individual and collective trauma that goes with that?
Hopefully it is abundantly clear that I now know better! But I am genuinely concerned about the neutering of children’s education about anything that might “cause guilt,” per the curriculums DeSantis et al want to ban. What are we doing, raising a bunch of snowflakes? (the IRONY kills me!)
I have found journalist (and trained Presbyterian minister!)
to be an incredibly helpful resource in consistently calling out power structures and doing his best to speak truth to whatever power needs to hear it. He's the kind of journalist that doesn't stick to any party line, because integrity won't allow it.I’m going to need to make up for the readers I might be losing for spending so long talking about uncomfortable topics like racism, ya know?? 😅
I love every bit of this. And trust me, losing readers because you talk about racism IS 100% WORTH IT. ❤️❤️❤️
Thanks for this. I've been asking similar questions about my upbringing in Britain as the son of an Anglican minister. I remember as a child singing hymns like Onward Christian Soldiers and I Vow To Thee, My Country - this was in our daily religious assembly AT SCHOOL! I didn't think anything of it at the time. I now live in the US where there is (supposedly) separation of church and state, though there is obviously much cause for concern on this side of the pond too!