AS THE BLACK LIVES Matter movement has shone a light on police brutality against black people across the country, the public conversation in the United States has been unable to ignore the legacy of racism that shapes many of our nation’s most vital institutions. In his important new book, The End of White Christian America, Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), makes the bold claim that White Christian America (WCA)—the fertile ground that gave root to and energized the legacy of American racism—is dead. Granted, this does not mean the death of racism. But for those of us striving for racial reconciliation, the changing societal narrative that Jones offers here is a hopeful one.
Jones begins the book with a tongue-in-cheek obituary for WCA: “Although examiners have not been able to pinpoint the exact time of death, the best evidence suggests that WCA finally succumbed in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century.” He ends the book with a eulogy for WCA that is much more serious in tone and draws upon the stages of grief named by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her eminent book On Death and Dying.
Jones defines the WCA as a distinctly Protestant entity, with two primary branches, white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants. Jones notes that although these two subgroups are often at odds, together they comprise the “single dynasty” of WCA. “For most of the nation’s life, White Christian America was big enough, cohesive enough, and influential enough,” Jones writes, “to pull off the illusion that it was the cultural pivot around which the country turned.”
One of the book’s greatest strengths is Jones’ case for the decline and death of WCA, bolstered by an array of key data from PRRI research. The hub of the book’s argument centers on three key factors for the demise of WCA. The first factor is the political failure of the “White Christian Strategy,” a thread that includes the Southern Strategy, marked by the mass shift of Southern voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party between the 1960s and the 1980s. It also extends to include the Moral Majority of the 1980s, other groups (including the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council) that carried the banner of family values into the 1990s, and, more recently, the rise of the tea party. The second factor named by Jones is the fairly rapid cultural shift to majority acceptance of gay marriage, which has had a much more devastating effect on the evangelical branch of WCA than its mainline counterpart. The third and final factor is the demographic trend that means that by 2050 the U.S. will no longer have a majority white population.
The End of White Christian America leverages PRRI’s vast body of research to articulate a narrative of recent cultural shifts that together destroyed one of the most significant historical touchstones of American public life. After reading, rereading, and digesting this book, I’m still not completely convinced there is a singular White Christian America. And even if there is, the overwhelming brunt of the societal changes Jones describes seems to fall on the evangelical branch of WCA, not the mainline branch.
Despite my quibbles, I recognize the significance of Jones’ work and of its timely release in the thick of this presidential election season. The fall of WCA, thankfully, does not imply the demise of Christianity in our land. But insights from the story will be useful to church leaders at the local and denominational levels as they seek to imagine a future for God’s people in a more diverse, pluralistic United States.
C. Christopher Smith is senior editor of The Englewood Review of Books, co-author of Slow Church, and author of How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church.
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