Will White Christians Finally Elect Jesus' Way Over Their Whiteness?

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

The 45th President 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.

He's fully exposed millions of people who'd kept themselves carefully concealed. I can really see them now in ways I never could previously. It's all out been in the open.

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. It may have been a combination of privilege and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice.

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 supremacy as they turned out to be. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners, so worship America, and so abhor difference. They were apparently really good at pretending, and in my naivety and self-delusion, I suppose I was more than willing to believe them.

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; their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.

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: along with their festering hatred of LGBTQ human beings, their long-simmering misogyny, their hostility toward immigrants, their fierce white supremacy. Donald Trump normalized all of it.

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.

And my white friends and family members and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming.

And 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.

But perhaps all is on lost.

As we head toward another American Presidential election, I want to believe there truly is a heart-shift taking place in many white Christians: that they are finally tiring of defending such moral filth, of standing behind something so cruel and bereft of empathy, of aligning themselves with an incarnation of the antithesis of what it looks like to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

The Harris/Walz campaign is offering a clear alternative for people of faith, morality, and conscience: one rooted in the belief that we are all tethered together and that we are inherently of equal worth. It is a movement that sees and affirms every human being, that seeks to build a nation where every person can have agency and dignity.

They are offering believers the chance to elect, not hollow, ceremonial religion that perpetuates white patriarchy—but a spirituality that is as expansive and open as we claim God is.

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.

I am praying for courageous followers of Jesus in these days: for men and women of faith to cast aside their imagined allegiances to a political party or a denomination, and most of all to their pigmentation—and to choose what their hearts know is the better path for all people we claim are made in the image of God.

I pray that when they step into the polls in November, they will shut out the voice of politicians and pastors and family members, and that they will affirm their personal faith—and cast out something that has no redemptive value.

Love is on the ballot.

May white Christians be brave enough to choose it.