I grew up a queer and autistic kid amidst white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and toxic Christianity. My Buchanan-ite parents and neighbors said things like “Might makes right”, “Manifest destiny”, and “I’m Right of Attila the Hun”. I was taught the “Curse of Ham” by Christofascists who worshipped the slavers’ Jesus, the Jim Crow Jesus, the colonialist Jesus, the Jesus used to justify brutal bigotry and domination.
As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”
Opinion | The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It – The New York Times
The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that chattel slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed this arrangement was not just possible but also divinely mandated.
I don’t know how I survived the spiritual abuse, the rapture anxiety, the continuous threat of eternal conscious torment, and the heteronormative and neuronormative domination. In many ways, I didn’t. I’m still unpacking and deconstructing all these decades later, with the help of the ex-evangelical and #EmptyThePews communities.
#EmptyThePews points to the necessity of abandoning and confronting anti-democratic Christianity. Some religion embraces pluralism, but fundamentalism, in its intolerance, undermines pluralism, and white evangelical Protestantism is a variety of fundamentalism.
These are our stories—of heartbreak and hope, terror and courage, rupture and reconciliation. We hope they’ll resonate with you in some way, whether you’re a believer, a former believer, or one of the increasing number of people raised without religion. Love it or hate it, America has begun to empty the pews. May this anthology help usher in a new sort of testimony.
Table of Contents
The Canaries of Unreconstructed America
Thus, I speak from painfully acquired experience when I state:
The Republican Party is a hate group for Unreconstructed America.
Y’all in the Republican party worship the bigot version of Jesus that I was brought up on.
Those of us who escaped toxic Christianity know it from the inside.
And we know y’all. We see y’all.
We see your racial hatred, your indifference to suffering, and your refusal to examine systemic causes. We see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy. We see your deflection, false equivalence, fear-based socialization, projection, and defensive fetishes.
All of that and so much more is what those of us who escaped have to unpack and deconstruct.
Witnessing the tiny moral universe of my Christofascist youth raging into dominance since 2016 has been emotionally devastating, in large part due to its predictability. Those of us who left toxic, high-demand religion have been sounding the alarm the whole time. We are canaries.
Those Burning Crosses Are Symbols of Evangelicalism
Heed this reminder from we canaries:
Those burning crosses are symbols of evangelicalism.
Exvangelical: White Evangelical Racism with Dr. Anthea Butler on Apple Podcasts
I’m not here to fix evangelicals. That’s the job of those who still find value in it. My purpose in writing was to hold up the historical mirror to the movement, and show them who they really are.
Killing in the Name Of
Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
You justify those that died by wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
You justify those that died by wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
And some of those who burn crosses, are the same that hold office
And they're...
Killing in the name of
Killing in the name of
And now you do what they told ya
And now you do what they told ya
And now you do what they told ya
And now you do what they told ya
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control
And now you do what they told ya!
Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
You justify those that died by wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
You justify those that died by wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites
Come on!
Yeah! Come on!
The terrorists, the sheriff, and the church are all working together.
Exvangelical: White Evangelical Racism with Dr. Anthea Butler on Apple Podcasts
A Concise History of White Evangelical Bigotry
White Evangelical Racism tells a concise history of the evangelical movement and-here is the hard part-the racist and racial elements that imbue its beliefs, practices, and social and political activism. It is racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans. It is racism that impels many evangelicals to oppose immigration and turn a blind eye to children in cages at the border. It is racism that fuels evangelical Islamophobia. It was evangelical acceptance of biblically sanctioned racism that motivated believers to separate and sell families during slavery and to march with the Klan. Racist evangelicals shielded cross burners, protected church burners, and participated in lynchings. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.
White Evangelical Racism | Anthea Butler | University of North Carolina Press
“To a great extent, the evangelical church in America supported the status quo. It supported slavery; it supported segregation; it preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet.” These words, uttered in 1970 by Tom Skinner-the son of a Black preacher and a former gang member turned evangelist-still ring true today.
White Evangelical Racism | Anthea Butler | University of North Carolina Press
Evangelicals’ support for current-day policies that seem draconian and unchristian is linked inescapably to a foundational history that we will uncover in this book. American history chronicles evangelical support for and participation in racist structures in America. Skinner got it right.
White Evangelical Racism | Anthea Butler | University of North Carolina Press
Why did you choose the subtitle The Politics of Morality in America?
The subtitle is about the thesis of the book: simply put, morality isn’t a religious issue for evangelicals, but a political tool they hide behind that allows them to obscure the racist and sexist pronouncements and laws they often back and promulgate. From the ways in which white women were put on a pedestal by white men in the Reconstruction and Redemption era, to the lifting up of the “family” as a way to disparage Black families as not being “moral” if there wasn’t a two-parent household, evangelical moral issues about sex, family and money have never been applied stringently to themselves or their leadership the same way they’ve applied it to other religions or ethnic groups.
One of the book’s theses is that evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support cost them a lot. But has it? What would you say to someone who suggests that their reputation with the general public hardly matters, given both the short political memory of white Americans and that the Electoral College, Senate representation, filibuster, gerrymandering, and voter suppression grant them disproportionate power anyway?
It may not matter to evangelicals that their reputations are shattered—after all they are used to saying that they’re persecuted. It fits their narrative. It does matter that the news media and voters keep believing that they actually care about moral issues. They care about power. And many of them are in power, so that is a concern for all sorts of policy issues, especially for reproductive and sexual rights.
It matters that the media and voters understand that moral issues are a tool for wielding power, and for obfuscating evangelicals’ need for access to it. It may be that they have power because of patriarchy and whiteness, but the pendulum swings, always. While their ascension has seemed to be a steep, uphill climb, I think the jig, as they say, is up.
One more note. There isn’t much about Trump in this book, for one particular reason: evangelicals didn’t become this because of Trump. Trump was simply the apotheosis of who they have been for a long time. He was close to the pinnacle of all they could want in a leader. He was just a bit too crass for the more refined evangelicals.
Trump’s own racism allowed him to do what other candidates couldn’t: solidify the support of a majority of white Christians, not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy.
By activating the white supremacy sequence within white Christian DNA, which was primed for receptivity by the perceived external threat of racial and cultural change in the country, Trump was able to convert white evangelicals in the course of a single political campaign from so-called values voters to “nostalgia voters.” Trump’s powerful appeal to white evangelicals was not that he spoke to the culture wars around abortion or same-sex marriage, or his populist appeals to economic anxieties, but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance amid a rapidly changing environment.
Behold the Spectrum
Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.
We are stable parts of the human genome.
If you believe in a Maker, Maker built us in.
Look to Maker and behold the Spectrum!
If you don’t subscribe to a Maker,
Look to Nature and behold the Spectrum!
Spectrums and fractals are all around us and within us.
We are emergent!
How Glorious!
You are not a computer
You are complex and undefined
So why let yourself be limited to binary desires?
To binary identities and binary ideals
Like switching on or switching off
Choosing a bow tie or high heels
But the world tells us (01 01 01 01 01)
No we are not (01 01 01 01 01)
Body or head not (01 01 01 01 01)
Capacity for love not (01 01 01 01 01)
So let it be complicated
And hard to understand
You know they would envy you
If they got their heads out of the sand
So make them uncomfortable
And challenge their ideals
Because those antiquated notions
Are blinding what is real
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
I am bigger than a hexadecimal
Binary by The Spook School
Fun Fact About Santa Claus
Fun fact: Some toxic Christians extend their justification of patriarchy into “eternal subordination of the Son”, a heresy that provoked Santa Claus to slap a man.
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