{"id":569,"date":"2016-10-01T19:12:51","date_gmt":"2016-10-01T19:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.brethren.org\/messenger\/?p=569"},"modified":"2018-09-21T19:19:51","modified_gmt":"2018-09-21T19:19:51","slug":"eulogy-for-white-christian-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/media-review\/eulogy-for-white-christian-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Eulogy for white Christian America"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re not imagining things: America isn\u2019t like it used to be.<\/strong>\u00a0Coming to grips with this massive societal shift is the focus of\u00a0The End of White Christian America<\/em>, by Robert P. Jones.<\/p>\n

By \u201cWhite Christian America,\u201d Jones is referring to the cultural dominance of white Protestants in this nation\u2019s history. As he noted in an Aug. 31 PBS NewsHour interview: \u201cIf you were in charge of something big and important in the middle of the 20th century, chances are you were white, you were Protestant, and you were male.\u201d<\/p>\n

While \u201cChristian\u201d might seem like the wrong word if he\u2019s referring primarily to Protestants, Jones points out that for much of the 20th century Christian and Protestant were virtually the same.<\/p>\n

As he traces the history of mainline and evangelical Protestantism, he\u2019s intentional about calling them the two \u201csurvivors\u201d of White Christian America: He begins the book with an obituary for White Christian America and ends it with a eulogy. Using extensive polling data (he\u2019s CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute), Jones demonstrates how the dominance has ended and how nostalgia and grief for the past are affecting America today.<\/p>\n

In one chart, Jones compares responses to this question: \u201cSince the 1950s, do you think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?\u201d The responses sort people dramatically by religion and race. Americans as a whole check in close to the middle, with 46 percent saying American culture has changed for the better. People of color (groups such as blacks, Hispanics, Hispanic Catholics, and black Protestants) all say it has gotten better, and white groups say that it has gotten worse. The most positive response, at 63 percent, is from the religiously unaffiliated. The most negative response, at 27 percent, is white evangelical Protestants.<\/p>\n

Jones spends an entire chapter on each of two topics that divide Americans\u2014same-sex marriage and race. In the first, he tracks the rapid change in opinion on same-sex marriage in general across the country and specifically within religious groups. \u201cBy 2014,\u201d he observes, \u201cbattle lines on the issue of same-sex marriage were no longer between religious and nonreligious Americans. Rather, debate was raging\u00a0among<\/em>\u00a0religious groups\u201d (126-127).<\/p>\n

In his chapter on race, Jones shows the gulf between the way blacks and whites view police violence against African Americans. Blacks generally see these events as part of a pattern of racial injustice; whites tend to see them as isolated events. This \u201cracial perception gap\u201d has been around for decades, says Jones. \u201cThe racial perception gap highlights one of the most powerful\u2014but also least discussed\u2014 divisions between Americans on the topic of race: the rift between the descendants of White Christian America and the rest of the country\u201d (155).<\/p>\n

What does all this mean for Brethren? We may have begun as a people outside the power structures of the day, but today we are among the heirs of White Christian America. Institutionally we have identified with mainline Protestantism, though in many other ways we have also been influenced by evangelicalism. Jones offers much for us to study and ponder.<\/p>\n

In his closing eulogy, Jones uses the K\u00fcbler-Ross stages of grief as a model for what white Christians are facing. He systematically describes how both mainline and evangelical white Christians have been making their way through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and (for some) acceptance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I hope I\u2019m doing at the end,\u201d says Jones in his NewsHour interview, \u201cis thinking about presiding over this very complicated loss and death in American culture, with some people who are grieving, but some people who are very much ready to move on and ready to say good riddance to this era.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think the real challenge for us is to figure out how we tell a story about who America is and where we\u2019re going as a country that is faithful to its past, but makes room for the new demographics and the new place that the country is going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re not imagining things. America isn\u2019t like it used to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[31,38],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media-review","tag-media-review","tag-wendy-mcfadden"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}