Confronting Theological Totalitarianism: Race and Religion in Alt-Right America by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez

Race has always been an “issue” in these United States. From Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July address (1852), where he exposed the nation’s hypocrisy concerning slavery, to the heightened focus on race after the election of the nation’s first black President, Barack Obama (2008), to the white male backlash that swept Donald Trump into the White House (2016), our democracy has never recovered from the nation’s original sin: slavery. As Douglass so accurately diagnosed, “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”[1] The most damning consequence of Douglass’s scathing remarks is the implied link between white supremacy and the Christian religion, a cultural cancer that persists to this day and has gained mainstream acceptance with the rise of the Alt-Right movement.[2]

As a Christian theologian I continually struggle to defend the inclusive, compassionate vision of Christianity I encounter in the Gospels against the divisive and malevolent Christianity that once condoned Jim Crow, willfully ignored lynching, and today tolerates the beating and killing of black bodies by law enforcement. If, as Abraham Joshua Heschel contends, the “chief characteristic of prophetic thought is the primacy of God’s involvement in history,”[3] then the Christian religion has a responsibility to excise the cancer of racism and white supremacy by clearly and concretely opposing the politics of racial division that seek to preserve white privilege. In the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, our current President claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” while defending the mob that chanted “Jews will not replace us” and carried signs with the Nazi slogan “Blood and soil” alongside Trump/Pence campaign posters, arguing that the members of the Alt-Right “were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”[4]  All Christians—not just those leaning left-of-center—ought to have condemned the President’s vacillation in this instance and called for a public disavowal of the Alt-Right movement. The fact no such outcry took place (except among progressive clergy) speaks volumes about how closely white supremacy has been interwoven into the narrative of American Christianity.

Perhaps no cultural phenomenon encapsulates the resistance to an inclusive Gospel more than the tendency among white Christians (especially white Evangelical Christians) to respond to the outcry of the Black Lives Matters movement with the dismissive slogan “All Lives Matter.”[5] The current historical moment—a moment of deep spiritual crisis demanding a prophetic response—is yet another instance when American Christians have allowed white bigots to hijack the language and symbols of the Christian religion to promote their hateful ideology. Then, rather than confronting racism and naming it anti-Christ, these same Christians employ the language of love, forgiveness, and tolerance to undermine the radical urgency of Black Lives Matter. When held up to the mirror of the Hebrew prophets, Christ in the Gospels, or the modern inheritors of this prophetic biblical tradition (like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and St. Óscar Romero), mainstream Christianity is exposed as culturally and politically impotent.

Jesus opposed violence and decried the taking of human life: “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Mt 5:39, NRSV); “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44, NRSV). The apostle Paul rejected racial distinctions: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, NRSV). Nevertheless, when confronted with the extra-judicial killing of black and brown people in the U.S. by law enforcement personnel, many Christians—especially Evangelical Christians—resist “politicizing” their faith. Ironically, many of these same groups have been principal players in the nation’s Right to Life movement since the late 1960s, working through political means to not only overthrow Roe v. Wade, but also criminalize abortion. Why is political participation correct in one instance but not the other?

A typical response from Evangelical Christians, even African American Evangelical Christians, is that Black Lives Matter is a movement dedicated not just to combating “state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism,”[6] but one that has openly embraced liberal partisan politics. In the words of Michelle Higgins, director of the advocacy group Faith for Justice, based in St. Louis, herself an African American member of a predominantly white evangelical denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), when evangelicals hear the phrase black lives matter, “Most evangelicals are going to say, ‘That phrase is true.’” At the same time, however, Ms. Higgins acknowledges most evangelicals are uncomfortable with language that is critical of law enforcement, and reject language supportive of transgender and gay rights: “There it gets fuzzy for conservatives…If I have to say black trans lives matter, I believe I am affirming something my religion calls me to denounce.”[7]

Yet, the apostle Paul affirms in his letter to the Galatians that in Christ we are all “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, NRSV). Our inherent dignity as human beings, regardless of race, skin color, or sexual preference, rests on the foundational belief that we are created in the image of God: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27, NRSV). Sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin exhorts Christians to love their enemies, as Christ commanded, reminding them “not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.”[8] Any Christian theology that does not affirm and protect the inherent dignity of each and every human being falls short of this biblical teaching. Concretely, the doctrine of the imago Dei leads the community of faith to action, decrying and opposing the dehumanization of human beings—wherever it occurs—in solidarity with Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Arabs, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, gay men in Chechnya, or undocumented immigrants in the United States. Christian groups that privilege whiteness by minimizing the suffering of their black and brown neighbors, or who allow religious and political leaders to demonize dark-skinned immigrants with impunity, worship a false god: the god of white nationalism. They then compound their sin by forcing this hateful ideology onto Christianity itself, through an act of theological totalitarianism. This crisis calls for a moment of status confessionis; a declaratory statement like the Barmen Declaration (1934) or the Belhar Confession (1982), purging American Christianity of the stain of white nationalism.

The Rev. Dr. Rubén Rosario Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His first book, Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (2008), won the 2011 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for Theology. He has contributed to two recent collections, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology (2015) and Immigrant Neighbors among Us: Immigration across Theological Traditions (2015), and is editor of the T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, and it is forthcoming in October 2019. His most recent monographs include Christian Martyrdom and Political Violence: A Comparative Theology with Judaism and Islam (Cambridge University Press, July 2017), and Dogmatics After Babel: Beyond the Theologies of Word and Culture (Westminster John Knox Press, March 2018).

[1] Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 388-89.

[2] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) website defines the Alternative Right, known in the media as the Alt-Right, as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.” For example, after the National Review, a traditional bastion of U.S. conservatism, vehemently opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, members of the Alt-Right used social media to attack the publication and promote Trump’s presidential bid (last accessed November 25, 2017). https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right

[3] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction, Vol. I (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 218.

[4] Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Giving White Nationalists An Unequivocal Boost,” in The New York Times (August 16, 2017), A1.

[5] Mark Oppenheimer, “Some Evangelicals Struggle With Black Lives Matter Movement,” in The New York Times (January 22, 2016), A13.

[6] See https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/, and https://blacklivesmatter.com/ about/herstory/, for an introduction to and defense of the movement, including a succinct statement of its core guiding principles (last accessed on May 24, 2019).

[7] Oppenheimer, “Some Evangelicals Struggle With Black Lives Matter Movement,” A13.

[8] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1960), 3.7.6.