The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

In White Too Long, author Robert P. Jones demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, he argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because it is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities.

As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians of all denominations have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“White Too Long is a powerful and much needed book. It is a direct challenge to white Christians to finally put aside the idolatry of whiteness in order to release the country and themselves into a different possibility.  With clarity of moral vision, historical nuance, and the sensitivity of an artist’s pen, Jones has written a critical book for these troubled times.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University; author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lesson for Our Own

“In White Too Long, Robert Jones offers both searching personal testimony and a rigorous look at the facts to call white Christians to account for the scandalous ways white supremacists have regularly distorted and manipulated a faith dedicated to love and justice to rationalize racism. Jones is a rare and indispensable voice in our public conversation about religion because he combines painstaking data analysis with a sure moral sense. May this book encourage soul-searching, repentance, and conversion.”—E. J. Dionne Jr., Columnist for The Washington Post; author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

“Robert P. Jones’s searing White Too Long brilliantly argues that his fellow white Christians must dissent from their received faith and embrace a theology of racial justice. White Too Long is a prophetic call of redemption for folk who have too often idolized whiteness and worshipped America instead of the God of Martin, Fannie Lou and Jesse.”—Michael Eric Dyson, University Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University; author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

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James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

According to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., we live at a time in which those who attempt to achieve a new, better America have been challenged by the election of Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. His administration has embraced and advanced the the insidious belief that white people matter more than others, giving rise to horrific events like those that took place at Charlottesville.

Glaude also contends, however, that we have been here before, and James Baldwin was around to see it. Following the abrupt end of the Civil Rights Movement and the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. He wrote about the “after times,” and emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“In the midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival, Eddie Glaude has plunged to the profound depths and sublime heights of Baldwin’s prophetic challenge to our present-day crisis.”—Cornel West

“Begin Again is an unparalleled masterpiece of social criticism. Glaude thinks alongside America’s finest essayist, matching the master’s firepower, brilliance, courage, and sensitivity at every turn. He pushes, prods and disrobes history, forcing us to face uncomfortable truths and insisting upon our better inheritances. Glaude’s stunningly crafted prose—incisive, vulnerable, and beautiful—is as breathtaking as his brilliance. This book is precisely the witness we need for our treacherous times.”—Imani Perry, author of Breathe and Looking for Lorraine

“In this searing, provocative, and ultimately hopeful book, Eddie Glaude, Jr., takes us on a fascinating journey through the mind and heart of James Baldwin. But a parallel odyssey through Glaude’s own formidable mind and generous heart unfolds as well—an odyssey that tells us much about the way we live now and how we might come to live if we could, to borrow a phrase of Lincoln’s, think anew and act anew. One need not agree with everything in these pages to learn much from them, and for Americans seeking to understand our past, our present, and the possible futures before us, Begin Again challenges, illuminates, and points us toward, if not a more perfect union, at least a more just one.”—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America and Destiny and Power

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country

In American Prophets, author Jack Jenkins discusses the Religious Left, an amorphous group of interfaith activists that has operated since America’s founding — praying, protesting, and marching for common goals that have moved society forward. This idea is in direct opposition to the typical view of religion in American politics, which centers the Religious Right, an organization thought to be driven by a coalition of fundamentalist powerbrokers who are the “moral majority,” and who set the standard for conservative Christian values and working to preserve the status quo.

Drawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the re-emergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the Religious Right. He profiles Washington political insiders, as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today, including:

• Rev. William Barber II, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays and co-chair of the nationwide Poor People’s campaign
• Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March
• Rev. Traci Blackmon, a pastor near Ferguson, Missouri who works to lift up black liberation efforts across the country

Throughout our history, the Religious Left has embodied and championed the progressive values at the heart of American democracy, including abolition, labor reform, and civil rights. Jenkins uses this book to discuss the past and current iterations of the Religious Left, while changing the way we think about the intersection of politics and religion today.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Jenkins is my go-to source when I want a snapshot of what’s happening in the American religious landscape… demonstrating how a vibrant and undeterred Religious Left has filled the moral vacuum with an unapologetically progressive agenda promoting peace, pluralism, and human dignity for all.”— Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“Delves deeply into the origins, activities, and leadership of the Religious Left . . . highlighting the widespread—though not always widely recognized—role that progressive faith communities have long held in political and social causes. . . . A well-researched and timely work of journalism.”— Kirkus Reviews

“A contemporary ‘Lives of the Saints’—a series of profiles of admirable leftist activists whose politics are motivated by their faith. . . . The problem isn’t that there has not yet been a potent religious left; it’s that the ‘religious’ part is too often left out.”—The New Yorker

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City

In Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, author Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from the 1950s through the 1970s in the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in New York City. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, she vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans shaped the complex and shifting meanings of “Puerto Rican-ness” and “blackness” through political activism.

While previous work has tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as “people of color” or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities, Lee reveals the permeability of boundaries between African American and Puerto Rican communities. African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power movement–until white backlash and internal class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking “Hispanicity” as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from “blackness.”

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Lee shows that working-class communities have the power and potential to come together and challenge the terms of their political affiliations and social circumstances…. She decisively rewrites the history of the decade and reminds us that the so-called black-white binary has been a means of social control rather than ethnographic description.”—Journal of African American History

“The book painstakingly illustrates the broad scope of Black-Puerto Rican activism in New York City, showing that it encompassed many spheres of social and political mobilization, including those not associated with radical movements. A significant contribution to Puerto Rican, African American, New York, and U.S. postwar history, this book will be an important contribution to the ongoing debate on ‘Black/Brown relations’ in the United States.”—Frank Andre Guridy, author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

“Lee’s thorough and careful research into the history of grassroots politics in the 1960s and 1970s represents an important addition to the literature on the civil rights movement and its coda in New York City. The story she tells of the uneasy collaborations between Puerto Rican and African American activists and leaders in this period adds much-needed depth to the history of New York in general and to the history of civil rights activism in particular.”—Lorrin Thomas, Rutgers University-Camden

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.