(2024-09-01) Will White Christians Finally Elect Jesus Way Over Their Whiteness

John Pavlovitz: Will White Christians Finally Elect Jesus' Way Over Their Whiteness? The 45th President (Donald Trump) has been many things since arriving on our political landscape in 2015: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language.
But he's also been a floodlight.

Intellectually, I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation and the Evangelical Church, but I'd convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren't as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been.

As a pastor in largely white churches in the south over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church was changing

Then, the 2016 election happened, and the 2020 election—and with that came the grieving over what the horrors that supposed followers of Jesus had help give life to.

I surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to were as afflicted with white supremacy as they turned out to be.

Now, I had seen the cracks in their facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech beginning to surface, their ever more incendiary social media posts from fringe news sources.

But even then, they kept their prejudice close to the vest, never really fully tipping their hands, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it "politically correct.")

Then he arrived: someone who gave them what they needed for so long: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After nearly a decade of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and the dam of their suppressed bigotry burst and they let the toxic hatred flow freely.

White pastors now lob these prejudices through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffeeshops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.

this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season here: the realization that I have lived and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.

This is Democracy’s final stand here in this country and I believe it’s the last chance for American Christians to embody the compassionate, inclusive teachings of Jesus or forever be defined by a Christian Nationalism that would have despised him. (White Nationalist)