--- title: White Christian Americans Must Be Honest About Their Sins description: Robert P. Jones writes that white Christian Americans must recognize that their personal sins they pale in comparison to the systemic ways they have built a society that reflects a conviction that their lives matter more. canonical: https://time.com/6102117/white-christian-americans-sins/ author: Robert P. Jones article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-09-29T11:00:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:15:13.614Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview og:description: "The first step toward recovery is to separate being white from being Christian." og:url: https://time.com/6102117/white-christian-americans-sins/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebde6fb0beea6b71/698a1d4be76ad244ab63943c/white-christianity-world-view.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: white-christianity-world-view og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview twitter:description: "The first step toward recovery is to separate being white from being Christian." twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebde6fb0beea6b71/698a1d4be76ad244ab63943c/white-christianity-world-view.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=e56971b9-7b68-4b7a-b6d0-52c78caad688&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/I4zgXOYu.m3u8) (8:02)  _Published 2020-09-22. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._ by [Robert P. Jones](https://time.com/author/robert-p-jones/) ## Robert P. Jones Sep 29, 2021 11:00 AM UTC by [Robert P. Jones](https://time.com/author/robert-p-jones/) ## Robert P. Jones Sep 29, 2021 11:00 AM UTC As I came of age in Woodville Heights Baptist Church, on the white working-class side of Jackson, Miss., I internalized a cycle of sin, confession and repentance as a daily part of my life. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this was a double inheritance. Beneath this seemingly icy surface of guilt and culpability flowed a deeper current of innocence and entitlement. Individually, I was a sinner, but collectively, I was part of a special tribe. Whatever our humble social stations might be, we white Christians were God’s chosen instruments of spreading salvation and civilization to the world. The power and sheer cultural dominance of [white Christianity in America](https://time.com/5929478/christianity-white-supremacy/) historically bound these contradictory sensibilities together. But today we are witnessing the unmaking of this white Christian worldview, and it has unleashed remarkably destructive forces into American life. Understanding this dissolution is the key to deciphering one of the most vexing puzzles in our politics: how a purportedly sober Christian worldview has become a volatile cocktail of [fealty to Donald Trump,](https://time.com/5932014/donald-trump-christian-supporters/) wild-eyed rants about vaccines, faith in [QAnon conspiracies](https://time.com/6076590/qanon-conspiracy-why-people-believe/) and hysteria over [critical race theory.](https://time.com/6075193/critical-race-theory-debate/) **_Read More:_**[_White American Christianity Needs to Be Honest About Its History of White Supremacy_](https://time.com/5929478/christianity-white-supremacy/) [Recent surveys by PRRI](https://www.prri.org/research/dramatic-partisan-differences-on-blame-for-january-6-riots/), an organization I lead, reveal disturbing realities among white evangelical Protestants today: 61% believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. And the idea of patriotism has taken a troubling turn: 68% believe Trump is a “true patriot,” and one in three believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” [More than seven in ten deny](https://www.prri.org/research/amid-multiple-crises-trump-and-biden-supporters-see-different-realities-and-futures-for-the-nation/) that the [history of slavery](https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/) and discrimination in the U.S. has any bearing on economic inequalities between white and Black Americans today. [White evangelicals are the religious group](https://www.prri.org/research/religious-vaccines-covid-vaccination/) most likely to [refuse COVID-19 vaccines](https://time.com/6071909/covid-19-vaccine-culture-war/) and object to mask mandates. [One in four](https://www.prri.org/research/qanon-conspiracy-american-politics-report/) are [QAnon conspiracy believers](https://time.com/5955248/qanon-local-elections/). Understanding how we got here requires entering the white evangelical cultural world, one in which I grew up. As was common, my initiation rites started early. I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and savior and was baptized at age 6\. As I approached adolescence, I was encouraged to cultivate an identity as a disciple of Christ. I was taught to develop my own daily “quiet time,” about 30 minutes dedicated to scripture reading, journaling and prayer. There were also communal rituals. During informal Sunday evening services, members often “gave their testimony.” Sometimes it was spontaneous, a member rising to break the prayerful silence. But the practice was also built into the liturgy (although we would never have used that suspect word, which belonged more to the Episcopalians on the other side of town). These scheduled talks were marked “Testimony” in the bifold church bulletin, with the name of the recruited witness indicated on the right margin. Critically, what stitched these private and public practices together was an emphasis on personal sin. Common themes were failures in roles and priorities. The grown-ups promised to be more honest in their business dealings and to be more godly parents and spouses—husbands better leaders and wives more pliant to that leadership. When youth were invited to testify, we were often given guidance about how to be honest but appropriate—typically an expression of regret coupled with a promise to reform from running with the wrong crowd. **_Read More:_**[_The Growing Anti-Democratic Threat of Christian Nationalism in the U.S._](https://time.com/6052051/anti-democratic-threat-christian-nationalism/) But like a torch held too near the eyes in a dark room, these acts of intense discipleship illuminated little beyond our insular community. Nothing outside our intimate lives, not even (or particularly) major racial upheavals in our community, were perceptible objects of Christian concern. When Black kids finally showed up in my third-grade classroom in the 1975-76 school year—a full two decades after [_Brown v. Board of Education_](https://time.com/103002/brown-v-board-of-education-60th-anniversary/)—my white Sunday school teachers and pastor remained silent about this transformation of our daily social lives. When Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech emphasizing “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers had been murdered during Freedom Summer, Mississippi’s white Christians responded by consummating their marriage to the Republican Party, one that remains strong today. When Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, there were no discussions in my Southern Baptist seminary about the silence and complicity of white Christian churches during those murderous days or since—even though De La Beckwith had been a member in good standing at a white Christian church and Evers’s last act had been organizing an unsuccessful campaign to integrate Jackson’s influential First Baptist Church. Looking back on it now, it’s clear that this intense preoccupation with personal sin, by design, kept our field of vision shallow and allowed us to sit, Sunday after Sunday, “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it so devastatingly in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” **_Read More:_**[_I, Too, Was Once a Soldier of the Apocalypse: Why White Evangelicals Must Choose Between Reform and American Extremism_](https://time.com/5942445/reform-evangelical-christianity/) But now the bulwark of white Christian America is crumbling. We are no longer, demographically speaking, [a white Christian nation](https://time.com/4928811/white-christian-minority-united-states-survey/). White evangelical Protestants—the once self-proclaimed “moral majority”—[have fallen from nearly a quarter of Americans just over a decade ago to 14.5% of the public today](https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/). And Southern Baptists, who grew to be the largest Protestant denomination of all by the mid-20th century, have [lost more than 2 million members](https://religionnews.com/2021/05/21/southern-baptist-decline-continues-denomination-has-lost-more-than-2-million-members-since-2006/) across the same period. As the shadow cast by white Christian churches and institutions is shortening, we’re witnessing in real time the anomie this contraction is producing among many of its adherents. Many are responding by abandoning the ranks. The increasingly desperate remainder are screaming defiantly from the ramparts, determined, to the last man, to defend the breached walls. [James Baldwin](https://time.com/5859214/james-baldwin-racism/) wrote, with anger and pity, about the Black experience of seeing white people as “the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” He understood whites, and white Christians in particular, to be trapped in a kind of self-induced psychosis, stemming from the strain of sustaining a conception of themselves as repentant sinners while living lives of indifference and violence toward their fellow Black and brown citizens. In these twilight years of white Christian America, for those still within the veil, the strain of holding these contradictions can lead to a dissociative state, where self-reflection becomes treasonous and self-delusion a necessity. The fruits of this spirit are abundant. Empathy signals weakness, and disdain strength. Prophets are shunned, and authoritarians embraced. Truth is exchanged for a lie. **_Read More:_**[_Theologian Russell Moore Has a Message for Christians Who Still Worship Donald Trump_](https://time.com/5932014/donald-trump-christian-supporters/) We can puzzle over these phenomena separately, but they are best understood together as symptoms of collective ill health. The willingness of so many white Christians to embrace little lies everywhere stems from the necessity of protecting the big lie that is everything. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote movingly about the double-consciousness that Black children have thrust upon them in America as their sense of self is distorted and refracted back at them through white eyes. He vividly described the struggle for the Black American “to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” The problem today for white Americans, particularly we white Christians, is the opposite. Having grown up with the comforting illusion that sinfulness and innocence, humility and dominion can coexist in a single consciousness, it is increasingly evident that this amalgamation is a sign of deep moral, spiritual and political malaise. Rather than holding these warring selves together, we must banish one. The first step toward recovery is to separate being white from being Christian. Practically, we must reject what have, for too long, been three articles of our faith: that the Bible is a blueprint for a white Christian America; that Jesus, the son of God, is a white savior; and that the church is a sanctuary of white innocence. Most fundamentally, we must confess that whatever the personal sins of white people, in the past and present, they pale in comparison to the systemic ways we have built and blessed a society that reflects a conviction that, to us and to God, our lives matter more. The only path to health, for both our faith and our democracy, is for white Christians to embrace a terrifying but saving truth: what we have taken to be the bedrock of our faith and a biblical worldview—that we alone are God’s chosen people to bring salvation and civilization to the world—is not an eternal truth grounded in the Bible but rather a self-serving lie rooted in white supremacy. ## Transcript Stark video. How about that. James Hudson. Gone. Over for a long. Time. Oh, man. Much, much too long. I think the last time I saw you might have been at graduation. I think so. Yeah. That's what it was. Yes, man, That was with 64 before. In most classrooms. Row after. Row of empty chairs and up. In school, we're taught that the civil rights movement was all about segregation in the South. But the biggest protest of that era was actually a boycott of New York City's segregated school system. On February 3rd, 1964, nearly half a million students didn't show up to class and similar boycotts continued for months after. It was a massive movement, even bigger than the turnout for the March on Washington in 1963. This is John Dover and James Muhammad, formerly James Hudson. They appeared in this picture in the black newspaper the Amsterdam News, as students taking part in the boycott. Nearly 60 years ago. We were pretty involved young people, and I don't know whether we were selected or what. I know that. I know that that picture was staged, though. I know they told us all to like it. I could tell just by looking at it, you know? But. But I'm glad we were there, though. Yeah. Education was the key for our success. Our parents tried very hard to give us the best that they could at the time we joined the boycott because we recognized that there are always obstacles to it towards advancement for us as black people. So why don't more people know about this history? That's a great question. I mean, how can you have 460,000 people stay out of school and that hardly anyone sort of talks about it in textbooks afterwards? And part of the explanation is that the mainstream or white media at the time didn't feel the same sense of urgency that they treated civil rights in the South. I think it kind of fell out of the story. The story as most people learn, it starts with Brown versus the Board of Education. 1954 The Supreme Court makes a unanimous and important decision that segregation in education is unconstitutional. And really, a lot of what we learn and there. Students are left with thinking that once the court rules desegregation in schools actually occurs. And the reality is far from that. So it would be another ten years, a full decade before we see any meaningful school desegregation in the states of the South. But we don't see anything happening whatsoever in the North because Brown versus the Board of Education did not apply to schools that did not segregate explicitly by law. The greatest worry of the Negroes of Harlem is not color. Discrimination, but the squalid conditions in which they have to live. And school segregation in northern cities like New York worked hand-in-glove with practice called mortgage redlining, where the federal government gave banks the discretion to determine which neighborhoods were good and bad investments. They considered all white neighborhoods to be good investments, and so they would funnel mortgage funds there. They considered all black neighborhoods or racially mixed neighborhoods to be bad investments. And so banks would deny mortgage funding there. So while the North may have prided itself on not formally instituting segregation, economic realities contributed to racial divisions in many places, including New York City, which is home to the nation's largest public school system. It had been segregated in 1954 when a Supreme Court rules and it remained segregated. Ten years later, in 1964, during the height of the civil rights struggle. Ten years after Brown versus Board of Education, black and Brown students in New York City were more often learning in dilapidated buildings, in more crowded classrooms, and with far fewer resources than their white peers. And so understanding this, in 1964, parents and students of these African-American youngsters and Puerto Rican youngsters, they actually organized a citywide boycott of the public schools to protest the disproportionate allocation of resources. All we want is equal education. That's all equal education. It takes a tremendous amount of effort because in the school district in New York City is just massive local activists, primarily black women who are mothers. And then Reverend Milton Lampson do the work of organizing parents and students to stay out of school for one specific day. Nobody can do these children more harm than these children are being done every day in this public school system. And in my opinion, the refusal of the board to already have taken immediate steps to correct these evils is a disgrace and a crime. Chicago, Boston, other cities in the Midwest and North had similar school boycotts that were sort of themed and organized by some of the same people that really tried to press the issue that school segregation was not just a Southern issue, it was a northern issue as well. And just like in the south, there were white parents in New York that pushed back against desegregate schools. They call themselves parents and taxpayers, and they were led by a woman named Rosemary Gunning. It was important that they hardly ever used racial epithets, and they wouldn't explicitly say that they didn't want black and Puerto Rican students in their schools, but they would use a series of code words they would say were in favor of neighborhood schools or were opposed to bussing. They have a tremendous amount of power on the school board, tends to listen to them more than they listen to the black and Puerto Rican activists. And it certainly had a lot of impact nationally. The northern Midwestern politicians. Right. In the loopholes in the Civil Rights Act 1964 that explicitly prevent this, the Rights Act from applying to school segregation in places like Chicago, New York, Boston. I mean, it's one of the reasons it takes so long to get any meaningful integration in the North is that these white activists push back so hard that politicians were scared of offending their local constituents. And now. They are the bad since 1964. I don't see much of any progress being made in the education systems holistically in America. The fact that we're talking about the same subject, the same questions more than 50 years later, and we're given basically the exact same answer is no progress. Segregation. Well, New York City schools are still segregated. It's a function of the fact that we have never actually adequately addressed the problem of segregated schools. That now goes back more than half a century. Thank you. Education in America likes to lie. When you hear about segregation, you think it was a thing of the past and that, you know, after the civil rights movement, everybody's all good and Kumbaya down the street, you know, And it's just not it's just not true. Leon Nunez is part of Integrate NYC, a student led group fighting against segregation in New York City schools today. Nunez wasn't taught about the 1964 boycott in history class, but she learned about it through her work as an activist. History is so very important and reading through the artifacts and what their demands are and seeing how they're not at all very different from what we're demanding today is kind of sad. But also, I think a little empowering because they did that, you know, and learning the lessons from what made it successful and whether room for improvement can help us right now. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6102117/white-christian-americans-sins/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6102117/white-christian-americans-sins/"},"headline":"The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview","datePublished":"2021-09-29T11:00:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-14T09:15:13.614Z","description":"Robert P. 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