The Legacy of White Supremacist Christianity Is Alive and Well

Mythologies of race and religion

6 min read

Just now

When we talk about Christianity in the US, one of the most obvious things we have to contend with right off the bat is the white supremacy that covers it. Much of the contemporary discourse surrounding Christianity in the US today is surrounding ideas about so-called “Christian nationalism”, an ideology that seeks to fuse right-wing Christianity with politics in a much more theocratic, reactionary way. This right-wing perversion of Christianity is something that has been talked about for a long time, I’ve even touched on it myself a few times.

The specific problem of the explicitly white supremacist strain of Christianity that we see in the US, though, is something that I think deserves considerable attention, if for no other reason than the fact that it is so harmful. I think one of the things that makes this particular strand of Christianity so dangerous is the fact that it dresses itself up in Christian clothing when it is really anything but. As I’ve explained before when writing about this, reactionaries like to cloak their rhetoric in Christianity, but they have more of an interest in the hierarchical aesthetic of Christianity, rather than the substance of Christian doctrine.