2018 AAR presidential address: In the ruins of white evangelicalism: Interpreting a compromised christian tradition through the witness of african American literature

Abstract

This paper begins by describing the author's exit from white US evangelicalism, and his revulsion at the overwhelming support of white US evangelicals for Donald Trump. The author describes this as an unveiling of the moral collapse of a once-moralistic white evangelicalism, then situates that collapse within the long historical trajectory of white supremacist Christianity in the United States. This corrupted white Christianity is exposited here through scenes from major works in the African American literary canon. The categories of moral debasement (greed, pride, slander, arbitrary use of power, unchecked anger and violence, and alienation), religious powerlessness, and perceptual blindness are deployed to summarize how racist white Christians and Christianity are described in these fictional (but historically realistic) literary works. Citing three recent dissertations by young (ex-) evangelicals, the author claims that white evangelicalism has always been corrupted by white supremacism but now appears to have been swallowed up by the politics of white reactionary grievance. The only way forward is complete repudiation of this history and the development of a post-white evangelical Christianity, and scholarship, undertaken humbly and in the context of diverse interracial friendship and community.