Andrew Whitehead describes what it was like to grow up as a white Christian in a small northern Indiana town in the 1980s and 1990s:
"We determined our national morality in terms of abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. This is a well-worn tune for those who have followed religion and politics for any stretch of time."
"So if your experience was anything like mine, you probably never heard a message from the pulpit of a majority-white megachurch about racial inequality. Equality for Black Americans wasn’t a moral issue for white Christians like me. That was a political distraction. Not a moral imperative.
Which is curious to me now, given the 'pro-life' mantle we all claimed."
I read this report, and think right away of Linda Gordon's important historical study, The Second Coming of the KKK, which finds that Indiana — and its white Christian ministers — were a particularly prominent hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s.
White supremacy is, as Robert P. Jones tells us over and over, deeply rooted in white US Christianity.
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