As a native of Richmond, Virginia, I am no stranger to southern Protestantism and the (increasingly waning) cultural dominance of conservative Christianity in the South. Practically since birth, I was raised attending the same Baptist Church that my father and his brothers were raised in decades earlier. But, as with many young Christians, my doubts grew bigger as I grew older. Being exposed to new people, places, and experiences made it increasingly difficult to reconcile my faith with my expanded worldview. Around the age of ten or eleven, I began to question the version of God that was taught to me––a God who supposedly loved everyone, and, as my pastor told me, loved me even more than my parents do. Yet, at the same time, I was taught that God is judgmental and punishing, and that his love is conditional. Those who do not accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior will feel the wrath of God and be banished to Hell to suffer for eternity.
I considered myself an atheist by the time I was a preteen and declined to get baptized, something that those in my church typically chose to do between the ages of seven to twelve. I thought nothing of it and was at peace with my own belief system, but that choice became a problem with some of those I loved most. One day, as a young college student home for break, I was approached by an older relative who grabbed me tightly and said, “Jesus is knocking at your door. Let him in!” Although I had never publicly declared or denounced any faith, I realized that it was necessary for me to pretend to believe in God around these family members; not to protect myself from their judgment, but to protect them from thinking they will be separated from me for eternity.
Although my Baptist church, along with many southern Protestant churches, preached an exclusivist doctrine warning of Hell and imploring obedience, Christianity and its various denominations do not all teach the same theology. Ultimately, all denominations of Christianity can be divided into two main categories: conservative and progressive.[1]Although they strongly correlate, progressive Christianity does not necessitate progressive political beliefs, just as conservative Christianity does not require conservative political beliefs. Instead, progressive Christianity rejects the belief that one must be a Christian to qualify for eternal salvation.[2] Conservative Christianity, on the other hand, is theologically exclusive: they “believe the Bible is true in all it affirms,” and that, having been “entrusted with the truth of God,” the action of “knowing and accepting the truth” is how one goes to Heaven.[3]
Conservative Christianity has historically served to uphold white supremacy in America. The continued existence of white supremacy “operates in collaboration with other oppressions [to] reinforce and reproduce each other.”[4] In fact, American education often teaches a white-washed version of history that directly links our nation’s founding with religious freedom, telling only a fraction of the truth while ignoring many of the realities.[5]
The classic tale at the heart of the American exceptionalism myth starts like this: having escaped brutal persecution by the tyrannical Crown and oppressive Church of England, the Pilgrims and Puritans bravely sailed to the New World and founded their own safe-havens predicated on religious liberty for all.[6] What this heroic story fails to mention, however, is that white supremacy and Christian theology went hand-in-hand; early Puritan settlers believed that God had ordained a natural human hierarchy, with Puritans as the “chosen” people superior to all African, indigenous, and even Anglican people.[7] They studied early Christian theologians, which included St. Paul and his introduction in the first century of “a three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations–heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom).”[8] Until the institution of slavery was finally eradicated in the United States, many, if not most, Christians used their religion to justify slavery as God’s law.[9]
The Christian justification for slavery is no longer accepted in mainstream theology, but the remnants of these teachings have not entirely faded into obscurity.[10] Conservative Christianity retains many characteristics of white supremacist culture by “teach[ing] us that Christians (and a certain kind of white Christian at that) are divinely capable of shaping and defining reality for the rest of us.”[11] To these white, conservative Christians, it is their ideology alone that decides “who is valuable and human and who is not.”[12]
The success of conservative Christianity’s centuries-long indoctrination campaign has created a body of citizens primed toward authoritarian tendencies, which has had and continues to have profound civil rights implications. Much like the three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations that Christianity has taught for the majority of its existence, so too could a three-tiered hierarchy be established of Americans and their relationship with conservative Christianity: the complicit, the complacent, and the resistant. More specifically, conservative Christianity influences its followers to act in authoritarian manners (the complicit) or to support those authoritarian manners (the complacent).
Those resistant to conservative Christianity have been successful in recent years, particularly with the increase in legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in the 2010s, “reflect[ing] rapid progress in public opinion…more sudden and more dramatic than we’ve seen on other issues.”[13] However, these successes have helped to foment and enrage a deep undercurrent of indignation and false sense of injustice among certain sects of conservative Christians, who have since gained significant ground in their own civil rights struggles.[14] With the cultural upheaval of the 2020s, conservative Christianity was able to utilize its perceived moral authority and successfully strip away civil rights from women and LGBTQ+ people while increasing legal protections for Christians seeking to discriminate against them.[15]
For the resistant, we must reject the influence of conservative Christianity’s strictly defined moral code and exclusivist sense of reality in our political and legal systems. In fact, if these contemporary justifications for LGBTQ+ hatred were applied by the Court to the issues that dominated public opinion in the civil rights era, many landmark cases would have included religious exemptions for racial discrimination. Further, if conservative Christians truly were the most supremely inclined to the “truth” of the Bible, then would they not continue to support Christian justifications for human slavery that are so often seen in the Bible? Indeed, there are many more justifications of human slavery found in the Bible than any declaration in opposition to it.[16] Yet, changing societal attitudes have caused even the most steadfast conservative Christian to renounce old teachings like that of slavery as ordained by God, but while still assuring themself that the teachings they choose to follow and choose to reject are based only on God’s true, doctrinal authority: something that they alone are blessed to know.
[1] George Yancey & Ashlee Quosigk, One Faith No Longer ix (2021).
[2] Id. at 146-152.
[3] Id. at 100.
[4] Tema Okun, White Supremacy Culture – Still Here (May 2021), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XR_7M_9qa64zZ00_JyFVTAjmjVU-uSz8/view?usp=sharing.
[5] See Kenneth C. Davis, America’s True History of Religious Tolerance, Smithsonian Mag. (Oct. 2010), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/.
[6] See id.
[7] Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning 17 (2016).
[8] Id.
[9] See generally Parson’s Brownlow and Prynne on the Slavery Question, Lynchburg Daily Va.at 2 (Sep. 11, 1858) (acknowledging the long-standing nature of pro-slavery biblical justifications and showing the continuation of such arguments in 1858).
[10] See See Juan Siliezar, Slavery Alongside Christianity, Harv. Gazette (Jan. 7, 2019), https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/a-harvard-exhibit-on-slavery-and-christianity/ (“In the modern era, Christianity and slavery are seen as oxymoronic. But for much of Christian history, many saw no conflict between keeping the faith and keeping or trading slaves. From the first century until the Civil War, the Bible itself was often used to justify slavery”); see also Kent Fry, Slavery and the Difficulty of Interpreting the Bible, Reformed J. (July 3, 2023), https://reformedjournal.com/slavery-and-the-difficulty-of-interpreting-the-bible/ (“As I researched [pro and anti-slavery] arguments, the biblical interpretations had a surprisingly contemporary ring. There are important and identifiable parallels between the biblical support for slavery in the nineteenth century and today’s biblical stances on polarizing cultural issues”).
[11] Okun, supra note 4.
[12] Id.
[13] Joel Mittleman, Homophobic Bullying as Gender Policing: Population-Based Evidence, 37 Gender & Soc’y
5, 5 (2023).
[14] See generally Fry, supra note 11 (“The use of the Bible in the moral debate about slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century led to a biblical and theological crisis of authority. We are in a similar biblical and theological crisis as [Christians] sort and sift over matters of human sexuality”).
[15] See 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 143 S. Ct. 2298, 2341 (2023) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (“The Court…for the first time in its history,” has issued a “license to discriminate” based on religious freedom to “a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of [which] is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status”); see also Jenny McGrath, Purity Culture and the Overturn of Roe: Understanding Christian Nationalistic Ideology and its Impact, Canopy F. (July 15, 2022), https://canopyforum.org/2022/07/15/purity-culture-and-the-overturn-of-roe-understanding-christian-nationalistic-ideology-and-its-impact/ (“Anti-abortion laws [and the overturning of Roe v. Wade] cannot be separated from the long…history of Christian nationalism. Authoritarian structures thrive on creating systems of dominance over bodies, particularly in the realm of sexuality and reproductive health”).
[16] See Fry, supra note 11 (“The biblical and theological objection to the owning of another human being required considerable reflection that went beyond merely citing scripture. Because of the texts that supported slavery, anti-slavery theologians, pastors, and churches had a more arduous journey to arrive at the conclusion that slavery was an inherently immoral institution against the will of God”).