Robert P. Jones on the white fundamentalist movement as a reaction to civil rights

Robert P. Jones is the author of two important books about race, The End Of White Christian America and White Too Long. He and George talk about segregation in the south, and how the civil rights movement was the unspoken influence of fundamental Christian ideologies. 

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George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. It's a great treat to be able to welcome to the Good God program today Robert P. Jones. Robbie, glad to have you with us.

Robert Jones:
Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

George Mason:
Robbie is the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. Hold it up a bit there. This book is receiving quite a bit of attention. It comes on the heels of your most important book, also, from 2017, The End of White Christian America, a very highly-regarded and award winning work that really track the changing demographics of America. It showed how that is changing the religious landscape as well.

George Mason:
Now, we come to this book. This was really precipitated, I think, in you around the Charlottesville time, wasn't it? You'd be talking about that?

Robert Jones:
Yeah, absolutely. That's right. I started working this book in earnest in 2018. We've just passed this week the three-year anniversary of the Charlottesville, the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville. I think it was a combination of earlier things Trayvon Martin, Dylann Roof murdering of African-American worshipers in Charleston.

Robert Jones:
I think the precipitating event that really pushed me into writing in earnest, really, was the Charlottesville marches where people were chanting these neo-Nazi slogans, "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us," and just so formerly out there. Then, of course, killed one of the counter-protesters as well. Then, our president not being able to act flatly condemned white supremacist and talking about there being fine people on both sides.

George Mason:
Well, I should say that you have approached this, both from a scholarly and statistical sort of approach, which fits, of course, the fact that I neglected to say you are the CEO and Founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. A lot of the work you do is, really, with polls and with trying to track public opinion on religious attitudes and the like.

George Mason:
Also, you come to this out of a lot of personal experience. Growing up in Mississippi, Mississippi College. Like me, little after me, you attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, got your Master of Divinity degree there. Then, a PhD in Religion at Emory. You're a child of the South, also. A lot of this was, as you read in White Too Long, a very personal story for you about sort of a discovery of what was going on in your religious upbringing. Can you talk more about that?

Robert Jones:
Sure. Well, I was that kid who was at church five days a week, growing up. I was there Sunday morning, Sunday night, Monday night visitation, Tuesday night Bible study, Wednesday night spaghetti dinner. This will sound very familiar to any of your Baptist listeners. That was my experience growing up all the way through high school.

Robert Jones:
What was remarkable to me, reflecting back, really, on that childhood was that I never really heard anything through that entire time of hearing two sermons a week, at least, a couple of Bible studies a week, Sunday school education, really anything about civil rights or about white resistance to civil rights, or, this may be the most remarkable thing being a Southern Baptists, about the Genesis story of our own denomination, that the reason we're called the Southern Baptist Convention was that we split from the Northern Baptist over the issue of slavery and, specifically, that the southern churches put forward a candidate for the mission field that was a slave owner and really forced the issue.

Robert Jones:
When the Northern churches rejected it, basically, took our toys and went home and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, which, as you know, it's not like some fringe Southern movement. It goes on to be the largest Protestant denomination in the country by the middle of the 20th century.

George Mason:
Well, it's interesting to think about the origin of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Then, just a decade and a half later, you end up with the Civil War, the secession of the South. The interesting way, or the parallel, in the way they talk about what it actually meant, because when you hear the way we were taught about the origins of the Southern Baptist Convention, it was really about the breaking of faith with the Philadelphia Missionary Society that had said previously that they would not make slavery an issue in setting up missionaries. There was sort of a breach of this polity.

George Mason:
It sounds so much like this states' rights argument about what the Civil War is really about is not slavery, but it is, actually, about the self-determination this white people to interpret their culture and their life for themselves, and those sorts of things. Yet, in the book, you do a service to us all in making very clear that Alexander Stephens and Basil Manly and all of these sort of figures at the very beginning of the Confederacy, including Southern Baptists were very much committed to this idea of white supremacy and the subjugation of black Americans.

Robert Jones:
That's right. One key figure that escaped me, really, until I started doing research in the book was the person you mentioned Basil Manley Sr. Again, all through seminary, PhD in Religion, never heard of this guy. It turns out that he was instrumental in, not only orchestrating the Southern Baptist split in 1845, but he was there in, to borrow the Hamiltonian phrase, in the room where it happened.

George Mason:
In the room, yeah.

Robert Jones:
When Alabama, the first state to secede, he was Chancellor of University of Alabama. He was, also, a respected pastor and one of the key people urging Alabama to secede from the Union on the political side of things, and then, goes on to be the Founding President of the Board at Southern Seminary, the first seminary established by the Southern Baptist Convention, and was known all across the South as one of the staunchest theological defenders of slavery in pronouncing it God's divine will for human society. In fact, it was God's ideal model for human society for this hierarchical model of whites over blacks and men over women.

Robert Jones:
This idea that whites were put on this earth by God to sort of play this role, and that, in fact, if anything, African-Americans being enslaved to whites was to their benefit, because they were being raised up in the Christian faith in a way that they wouldn't be otherwise. These kinds of arguments were prevalent.

Robert Jones:
Then, he, also, is, again, maybe not in the room when it happened, but on the portico where it happened. He was the Chaplain to the Confederacy who was the guy holding the Bible and saying the prayer as Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in Montgomery as the first president of the Confederacy. These things were all wrapped up together, not just sort of at the level of in general, but the actual players were the same people.

George Mason:
Southern Baptists would probably not know automatically, but their publishing company, Broadman Press, the name, "Broadman," itself is the combination of broadest and manly, Broadman Press. Deeply rooted in Baptist life is this philosophy, this theology of white supremacy.

George Mason:
You live through, as I did, in this Baptist era what came to be known as, either, the fundamentalist take over of the Southern Baptist Convention or the conservative resurgence, depending upon your point of view. Nancy Ammerman, the sociologist of religion, made the claim that, in many ways, she sees that movement, which started around 1979, and continues, really, to this day, is really a kind of resurgence of the South.

George Mason:
It's really its own sort of lost cause approach that there was a feeling that the culture of the Old South in the Southern Baptist Convention was giving way to New England liberal intellectuals and elites, and these sorts of things.

George Mason:
People were getting highly-educated and they were controlling the direction of the Convention. This was a sort of return to the Old South. Have you heard of Nancy's theory about that? Have you wrestled with --

Robert Jones:
Yeah, I can't say enough praise about Nancy Ammerman. Yes. All of your listeners, you should look her up if you're not already familiar with her work. Just amazing historian and courageous historian, actually. Taking some knocks in her own career for being willing to speak the truth on some of these matters.

Robert Jones:
I think it's really important to, kind of along the same lines you're talking about, to read these movements, not just through a theological lens but kind of bringing the politics and theology in the church history altogether. What else is happening in 1979? It is the organizing of the Christian right political movement is happening in our politics at the same time. What's behind that is the civil rights movement.

George Mason:
Yes, it is.

Robert Jones:
I think there's a kind of mythology inside the Christian right movement that it was all about abortion. It was all about resisting abortion and resisting gay rights. But really, the precipitating issue that really pulled people like Falwell into the public realm was, actually, a reaction to civil rights. The issue for Falwell was Bob Jones University being threatened to lose federal funding because they had a policy against interracial dating on campus that ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act.

Robert Jones:
When they became under threat, that's really what activated Falwell. It wasn't abortion. It wasn't gay rights. It was that issue that brought him in. If you'll listen to his rhetoric, to stay with him for a moment, he preached sermons in the '60s and he, often, would say, "The place of the preacher is in the pulpit. Pastors have no business out in the streets organizing."

Robert Jones:
The real target for those kinds of remarks was to discredit the work of Martin Luther King and other African-American activists, pastors who were out organizing for civil rights. That became "political" and somehow illegitimate for something for a pastor to do.

Robert Jones:
Once white institutions start getting threatened, he's totally fine to put that away and then to talk about the real need for white Christians to organize. It's around protecting white institutions. Ultimately behind that, it is, again, a kind of theology and ideology of white supremacy.

George Mason:
Well, if you'll listen to Franky Schaeffer's account of those days and the formation of the Moral Majority, this is the son of Francis Schaeffer who, again, in Hamiltonian language, was in the room. He says that race, really, was behind that, as you say, and that abortion became the issue as a result of, basically, focus groups that Paul Weyrich and others were doing to try to figure out what are the hot button issues we can use to mobilize people.

George Mason:
It's really interesting that, now, abortion has become an ultimate litmus test for that movement when race is the undercurrent of the entire thing. It always has been.

Robert Jones:
Well, it's certainly notable after the Roe v. Wade decision, the Southern Baptist Convention actually praised the decision in its first meeting after that. Again, you're right, it gets kind of grafted on the movement after the fact. It's not something there. At that point, George H. W. Bush praised the decision. The Southern Baptist Convention praised the decision.

Robert Jones:
Largely, it's because white Protestants saw it as a Catholic issue along with contraception and didn't really even take it to be something that's internal to, at least, their highest political concerns. Again, they had been really activated around race. Just one more point on this is, if you have any doubts about the success of what can be called the Southern strategy after the Civil Rights Acts...

Robert Jones:
Essentially, you can look at the composition of the political parties today. What essentially happened was the Democratic Party becomes associated as the party of civil rights. Then, you have, in pretty short order and spurred along by a very intentional political strategy among GOP activists, to foster basic white racial grievances as a way of kind of collecting votes and moving people from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Robert Jones:
By the time we get to Reagan, we really have this, really, between the late '60s and 1979, 1980, you have an almost complete flip in the South where white Southerners and white Christian Southerners, really, have moved from being solid Democrats to being solid Republicans. Again, the precipitating issue is the civil rights issue that really causes that shift. This gap just continues to get wider.

Robert Jones:
Today, like I said, in my day job, I'm crunching numbers all the time. I was just talking to a reporter about this the other day that, today, the Republican Party is about 70% white and Christian and the Democratic Party it's just about a third white and Christian. The Republican Party's base is twice as white and Christian and increasingly becoming homogeneous, in a way.

Robert Jones:
It's direct result of this legacy, the kind of Southern strategy handed on by millions of millions of dollars every four years we have a presidential election. Then, with this kind of inertia and initial thrust out of reactions to the civil rights movement.

George Mason:
Well, the title of the book is not really about saying that the demographics of American culture are changing and it's not going to be white much longer. It actually comes from a remarkable quotation of the writer, James Baldwin. I actually quoted your book in this quotation in my sermon for this coming Sunday. Baldwin says in this New York Times piece in 1968, "I will flatly say that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me and has so impressed me for a very long time as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long."

George Mason:
If you're talking to people in places where you grew up, Robbie, and where I serve here in Dallas today, many of them are conservative Republican Christians, maybe, not mean-spirited and don't think of themselves as people who would support the notion of white supremacy. Yet, what we have is this sort of embedded ideology of whiteness that is difficult to communicate. It is almost like the Buddhist parable of the young fish who swims up to the older fish and says, "I've heard about this thing called the ocean. Where is it?" The old fish said, "Well, you're swimming in it."

George Mason:
There is a sense that people have a hard time seeing what is right around them. It's the air we breathe. It's the water we drink. It's the way we live. A lack of self consciousness about this notion of whiteness being really a social construct, not something natural or endemic. You tell the story of how whiteness became a construct and how the church became, in a sense, a conductor of that, tease out those origins and that story a little more as you do in the book for us.

Robert Jones:
Well, I think the first thing to say is I think you're absolutely right. I titled the first chapter of the book, Seeing, S-E-E-I-N-G, for this very reason that I think it is the biggest barrier for me, for us, I think, anyone who's grown up thinking of themselves as white to even see it. Now, I think one of the more powerful things for me as an adult looking back is, I went to public school in Jackson, Mississippi, and this, to me, is a demonstration of its power. I went to a public school that renamed itself, The Rebels.

Robert Jones:
Now, when did it rename itself? About mid-20th century as Jim Crow laws were being challenged by the early civil rights movement. It was a way of this public school putting a marker down to say, "No, no, this lost cause values of white supremacy, we are taking a stand." It was late 1940s when that happened. I was in high school '86 to '90. We were still The Rebels. We were integrated school. It was about half black and half white.

Robert Jones:
It wasn't subtle. When the football team scored a touchdown, the band played Dixie, and a cheerleader ran up and down the sidelines with a Rebel flag, our insignia. Our mascot was Colonel Red kind of Confederate soldier kind of aristocratic Federal Confederate soldier. It's so overt. Yet, here I was, going to church all those times a week, going to this public school with my integrated African-American friends all around me playing sports. I hardly thought about it. It just was invisible to me. It was not interrogated at all. I think that's really the power of kind of being in it.

Robert Jones:
One of the things I've thought about is, to me, what has helped me, I think, just to be personal about it, is when I've experienced a great dissonance between me and an African-American friend, or when I looked at the data and I see this distance between white Christian attitudes and African-American Christian attitudes, it should mean to us that something's off, something's awry.

Robert Jones:
The two things, I think, to overcome are a kind of knee-jerk defensiveness and an insistence on holding on to a kind of purity and innocence in our own narratives. We got good Christian resources for not holding on to those things. It doesn't get a lot of play. I think, even if we were to recover a more sociological way of thinking about original sin, for example. The church that we inherit, that theology that we inherit, is always broken, to some extent, because it's been handed to us with human hands. Those human hands never quite get it all right.

Robert Jones:
Even if we just take that little window of humility, I think, it should put us in a position to not defend to the death every jot and tittle of theology that we've been handed. Particularly, when we realize that, for example, recently as the 1960s, we had Ross Barnett, the kind of segregations Governor of Mississippi, who was also the very widely respected teacher of the men's Sunday school at the very powerful First Baptist Church in Jackson. It had him saying in public, "God was the original segregationist," just flat out. That's not that long ago. That's my parents' generation.

Robert Jones:
In the real essence, if he was that broken that recently, we've got some work to do, I think. We shouldn't be surprised, I think, that we have some real work to do.

George Mason:
I'm not sure if you're familiar with this story, but during the mid-1980s, there was a peace committee in the Southern Baptist Convention trying to get the moderates and conservatives to a meeting of the minds and stop the fighting and figure out how to live together and all of that. The two leading lights representing the two groups were Cecil Sherman on the moderate side and Adrian Rogers, the pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

George Mason:
At a break in the conversations, Cecil went up to Adrian and said, "Adrian, I hear you and your wife are always on the circuit talking about male and female relationships and marriage and how women should be graciously submissive to their husbands. You cite these passages in the New Testament. But those very passages, also, in the very same place, say that slaves should be obedient to their masters.

George Mason:
If you want to take literally for today the part about marriage in men and women, what do you do about that part about slavery and their ...?" Adrian, he says, paused and looked at him and said, "Well, I think slavery is a much maligned institution. We would not have the welfare problems we have today in this country if we still had slavery."

George Mason:
Now, this is wrong to late 1980s, Robbie. If you look at the church that he built there in Memphis, I defy anybody to drive up to that church and not see a plantation set on a hill.

Robert Jones:
I've been there.

George Mason:
You know what I'm talking about?

Robert Jones:
Yeah.

George Mason:
There's this kind of culture. On the one hand, what we have in southern religion is a kind of denial that we're not those same people who used to be part of the segregationist crowd, who used to make excuses for, if not participate in the Klan, who used to be part of the Citizens' Council of all of these Southern towns and cities, we're not those people anymore.

George Mason:
However, in the book, you make some points about how our understanding of the gospel of Christianity itself has still the remnants of this kind of theology of white supremacy. Would you tell us some of those ways in which you see that continuing to take effect in our churches' lives?

Robert Jones:
Well, that litany that you just laid out, even as I'm listening to it, I've been writing about it even, it's overwhelming to hear. I think it actually makes the point, kind of back to where we're saying, what we have received from our forbearers was a theology that was formed exactly in that context.

Robert Jones:
If you take seriously that context, it means that that theology had to essentially conform to those presuppositions. It had to conform to the fact that segregation was not just okay, but probably, God's preferred method for how society should be, that slavery was okay, that whites were intended to be kind of in charge.

Robert Jones:
We have not really had, by and large, at the popular level, any great recantation of that theology or any great need to reform that theology. Many of the hymns we're singing are straight out of that era. The liturgy has not really been reworked. If you think about just how wrong we got it, on this issue of race, you would think there would have been a great reckoning with that theology.

Robert Jones:
It just hasn't really happened. The fights over theology haven't been about that. They haven't been about, "We got it so wrong on this. What does it mean for the fundamental thing?" In the book, I even take on and look at something as central to evangelical theology as a personal relationship with Jesus. If there's anything you and I heard growing up on a weekly basis, it was that religion is about salvation and salvation is about this personal relationship with Jesus, and that every person had to make this decision for themselves.

Robert Jones:
The challenge with that is that it was the kind of thing that you could simultaneously have a very good relationship with Jesus and be a segregationist and be a slave owner, and that understanding of that personal relationship with Jesus had no bearing on those questions. That ought to deeply trouble us, I think.

Robert Jones:
I guess what I'm calling for is, if you interrogate what happens there, is that it does mean that there's this kind of hyper individualistic way that religion gets constrained into this very personal interior kind of box. Then, the things happening outside the church, the inequalities, the injustices, really, have no toehold to kind of gain any traction, because, if it's just me and Jesus and I feel pretty good about my pious, my quiet time, my prayer life, my Bible reading, all of that, none of that shakes the foundations of my presuppositions. It just hermetically seals off religion from the deep questions of justice and equality in society.

Robert Jones:
If you take a step back, it's shockingly at odds with all other parts of the Scriptures. I think about this line. In writing the book, I thought a lot about this line from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail. I've reread that, I don't know, 20 times, probably. I would say, if there's anything, the two things I think white Christians ought to go back and read are The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail, and just kind of taking those in.

Robert Jones:
This line is haunting line from King, where he's excoriating, not the kind of overt racist that are throwing bricks and spitting on people and burning crosses, but he's got his levels of criticism there at the respectable mainline mainstream churches that are sitting silently. He has this line, and he says, "Sitting silently behind their anesthetizing stained glass windows." I think that that has been the painful conclusion I've come to, really, is that, by and large, the way that white Christian theology has developed, again, I should say this is not just an evangelical problem. It is a much broader problem.

George Mason:
It is, right.

Robert Jones:
It is a mainline Protestant problem and a white Catholic problem. The way that whiteness and Christianity have been melded together have functioned to limit white Christians' ability to see structural injustice because they had such a focus on this kind of individualistic way of thinking about religion.

Robert Jones:
What you realize in history is that it developed that way by design, because there was this pre-commitment. Prior in the Christian commitment, there was a pre-commitment to a kind of white supremacist view of society and how we understood God to be ordering society. Everything else follows from that pre-commitment. If that's the case, which I think it is, we can see it today, we've got a lot of thinking to do and a lot of re-narration and a lot of theological spadework to do.

George Mason:
Well, I think that's true. I think we would love to be able to say that our theology is we get that pure from the Bible and history. Then, we impose it upon the rest of our lives so that we are conforming ourselves to the way of our faith. In reality, here, we had a theology of white supremacy that was there to defend an economic and social order that, then, had to be undergirded with this theological structure, or "the scaffolding" is the language you use, and the church being the conductor of this enterprise.

George Mason:
I even say that one of the things we haven't really gotten into very much is addressing the whole notion of premillennial dispensationalism, which comes out of Scofield and Dallas Theological Seminary and some of these schools that really has a notion of the end times that says that the Lord's not going to be able to return until there is a sufficient enough decline in culture.

George Mason:
In other words, rather than the church working toward the improvement of society, to do so might actually delay the end times and not be the will of God, to begin with, which is why you have a supporter of Donald Trump in the pulpit at First Baptist Church of Dallas today, who holds this very theology. It, really, is animating our politics as well as our cultural life also.

Robert Jones:
It's also worth asking, who is a theology like that appealing to? I mean attracted to. Who is that theology attracted to? It's only attractive to people whose lives are pretty good, whose lives are on the top of the heap and kind of at the head of the social pyramid, because if you're enslaved or you're really, really struggling, if every day is a struggle, like a life and death struggle in dire poverty, this is not a theology that's going to be so appealing to you.

Robert Jones:
If you're at the top of the pyramid, as most white Christians were, it's a pretty comfortable and convenient thing to say. It's like, "Well, look, we don't really have that big of responsibility." You can kind of think in other worldly terms and exactly write that it's an absolution, really, of human responsibility. It's a kind of theological absolution of human responsibility kind of theology.

George Mason:
Well, with your research in the institute, you lead us to confront a discouraging statistic. That is that there is a positive correlation, or maybe we could say, negative correlation in the sense, but there is a correlation between church attendance and racial prejudice. One would hope that it would be inversely related, but instead, it's positively related.

George Mason:
That is to say, the more people are attending church and engaged in church life, the more likely it is that they will have and defend racial prejudices. It's an extraordinary finding and a discouraging one for church leaders, I would say, who are wanting to believe that the church can be part of the solution instead of the problem.

Robert Jones:
That's right. I looked at attitudes and then at behavior, like attendance. Part of it, we have been talking a lot about the history, but I did want to see the subtitle of the book is about the legacy of this history. How is it with us today? Then, I sort of put on my social science hat and look at the current public opinion data.

Robert Jones:
One of the ways to kind of get clear on this picture is I compared the views of white Christians to whites who are not Christian. Even within the white population, you can see this enormous gap whenever you're asking anything around structural racism. I made sure that I tried to build a pretty broad measure for this, because obviously, asking about attitudes around race is fairly sensitive. One of the ways to make sure you're more confident of the results is to ask a broad range of questions, and then, analyze them together.

Robert Jones:
Basically, I had 15 questions in what I call the racism index in the book that is largely around structural racism. It's questions around Confederate symbols. It's questions about current events like the police killing of African-American men and treatment of African-Americans in the court system. It's broad measures about whether or not past discrimination had its effects into today in terms of differential wealth and economic outcomes between African-Americans and whites. Then, some general questions on racism.

Robert Jones:
Anyway, when I built all that out, there was just this remarkable gap. On the questions all together and even the individual questions, we would regularly see 30 percentage point differences between white Christians and whites who are unaffiliated and not in direction you'd think. It's actually whites who are not Christian or religiously unaffiliated whose views are much closer to African-Americans, rather than white Christians.

Robert Jones:
Just to make it really concrete on the question around we've all been wrestling with after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, the killing of African-Americans, the question says, do you think the killing of African-American men by police are isolated incidents, or are they part of a pattern of how police treat African-Americans? On that question, we have whites who are Christian. Again, not just evangelicals but white mainline Protestants, more Episcopalians, Presbyterians. Also, white Catholics are about twice as likely as whites who are religiously unaffiliated to say they're isolated incidents. They have a real difficulty connecting the dots between these incidents.

Robert Jones:
On Confederate monuments and flags, very similar thing, about a 30-point spread between white Christians of all kinds and whites who were unaffiliated who are much closer to the views of African-Americans. Much white Christians are much more likely to say Confederate symbols, for example, are just symbols of Southern pride rather than symbols of racism.

Robert Jones:
I put a bunch of questions like that, 15 questions together. Even there, you see this kind of composite view. I scored that index on kind of 0 to 10. White evangelicals score the highest on this racism index. They score 8 out of 10 on this composite measure.

Robert Jones:
Here's the kicker. White mainline Protestants who are more prevalent in the Northeast and the Midwest, and white Catholics who are more prevalent the Northeast, score 7 out of 10 on this index. Whites who are unaffiliated score 4 out of 10. African-Americans score 2. That kind of tells you where this spread is. I really take that seriously as a way of kind of showing how this legacy plays and shapes and, I think, creates blind spots, really, for white Christians and really blinds them and hinders their ability to see structural racism.

George Mason:
Well, as we conclude our time together, and thank you for being with me in this, it's a beautiful book, I want to end with some hope your last chapter, actually, gives us some pointers toward acts of hope, I would say, where the church is helping to lead the way in these difficult conversations about how we find our way out of this into a new place.

George Mason:
I'm happy to say that you chose Macon as one of the ways to look at that because the First Baptist Church of Christ and the First Baptist Church of Macon share a sort of a green area of commons between their two churches. One is a white church, historically, and the other was built by the white church, the black church.

George Mason:
They are finding their way together. One of our former pastoral residents at Wilshire Baptist, Scott Dickinson, is the pastor of the predominantly white church. That's a hopeful story that we're seeing, and you were impressed by that. What are some of the things that impressed you about how they are making a new path they are making with this?

Robert Jones:
It's exactly right. Macon, I should say, is both of my parents' hometown. I still have relatives there. In fact, my cousin has a law office right across the street from First Baptist Church in Christ out there so you can see it from their lawn. The church that my parents grew up in, actually, was started by First Baptist Church in Christ East Macon.

Robert Jones:
What I found, I think, hopeful in this work is that you had, essentially, two churches that share a very fraught history. The African-American church was, essentially, the descendants of slaves and enslaved people who were owned by the members of the white church. They've been sitting around the corner for each other for 150 years, mostly ignoring each other's presence.

Robert Jones:
I think it's just been no animosity, but just kind of completely different worlds. A little more than five years ago, Scott Dickinson and James Goolsby, who was the pastor of First Baptist Church on New Street, both kind of looked at each other and it's like, "What are we doing? Let's talk about this." With some support from a group that you've been involved with, the New Baptist Covenant and other churches actually decided to form a covenant between the two churches. That was a covenant to really be in conversation.

Robert Jones:
They had, slowly, I think, built, through potlucks and Easter egg rolls and conversations on the green, a kind of fellowship between these two churches that is ongoing. What I love about this story is it's not an easy story. It's not a kind of quick now-everything's-fixed.

George Mason:
Nurtured by, "Yeah, let's just join pulpits."

Robert Jones:
It's a hard journey. There was some really moving episodes, just one real quickly, that they recently took a joint trip to Montgomery to see the work that the Equal Justice Initiative there has done for the National Memorial for Peace and Healing, which is the memorial to the victims of lynching in the country. That's a pretty tough trip to take with an integrated group of folks, but they did that and actually came back and had a reflection service around it.

Robert Jones:
I think it has really changed. Particularly, it has brought, I think, to the predominately white church some really difficult conversations about that history and what it means. I think they're walking that path and they're walking it together. I know there are other churches around the country who share similar kinds of history that are taking up this channel. I think it's that kind of work on the ground that's really going to make the difference in the long run.

George Mason:
I think it is, too. I think the thing that impresses me about what they've done in Macon is that they have not shied away from actually confronting their history. Scott and the white church has gone back into its records and realize that the building of the church for the black First Baptist Church was done out of the sale of slaves from their own church, which is to say, in order to build that church they broke up families, they treated human beings as property, and then, built the church that separated the races for all this last century and a half.

George Mason:
Now, they're really confronting, also, the question of reparations. How do they not just come together in fellowship? How do they correct that history in some meaningful way?

Robert Jones:
I'll say one last thing along those lines because I think it's important. I think one of the things I learned from studying the work that Scott and James are doing down there, and the congregations are doing there, one thing I get clear on was that white churches, I think, have to be really careful about reaching for this wanting to just turn around for reconciliation while skipping the question of justice or restitution.

Robert Jones:
One of the things I think I learned from watching them is how important that is for white Christians who ultimately wants to reach reconciliation. I think you've got to be really clear that the path to reconciliation has to go through the kind of valley of justice and repair. The repair in the damage question is a really important one and one that I think we can't skip.

George Mason:
Well, Robert P. Jones, we thank you for writing this book, White Too Long, and for all the work you continue to do to hold up the mirror to us as a culture and as a people, and the way you challenge even the church in America. Thank you for your faith and for your good work, at the same time. We are grateful.

Robert Jones:
Thanks, George. Thanks for your voice as well. Appreciate it.

George Mason:
God bless. Thanks for being on Good God.

Robert Jones:
Thank you.

George Mason:
See you. Bye-bye. Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful that we get to be able to offer these conversations to you free of charge, especially, now during this time of COVID-19 that is disturbing the peace for all of us. We know that there are a lot of people and organizations that need your funding. We're grateful to have the funding necessary to be able to present this to you without asking you to support us at this time.

George Mason:
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Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason. It is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.