Sept. 5, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

Jim Wallis, who founded the Sojourners community, recalls meeting with a diverse group of pastors from a number of Southern states one day in Georgia in response to concerns about voter suppression laws being passed in some state legislatures.

An example was a measure recently passed in Georgia making it illegal to provide drinks or snacks to those waiting in line at a polling place—when everybody in the room had observed that the lines were always longest at polling places in communities of color.

The pastors soon recalled Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 about giving water to the thirsty and food to the hungry, and suddenly the clash between allegiances of faith and politics came clearly into focus.

So begins Wallis’ latest book, “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.” He goes on to tell of his experience growing up in Detroit in a white evangelical church, where raising uncomfortable questions about race with the adults there was met with a warning: “If you keep asking those kinds of questions, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.”

Wallis says the rise of white Christian nationalism is a “Bonhoeffer* moment” for the church in the U.S., calling for an organized group of people of faith to resist, just as the “Confessing Church” movement resisted the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany.

The voter suppression measures Wallis and that group of pastors were meeting about are but one manifestation of this racialized authoritarian movement rooted in a perversion of Christian faith. Rev. William Barber has called it “slaveholder religion,” and it’s anti-gospel.

Because it maintains the racist status quo, and white Christian nationalism is intended to keep it in place, Wallis says resistance requires us to cross the color line for democracy. Wallis says it’s “the beginning of the journey to repent, repair, and redeem America’s original sin for white people, and especially for white Christians.”

With the general election coming in November, this series of columns will begin to address Christian nationalism because there’s a greater urgency of naming and discerning what our response as Christians will be to this “false white gospel.” But addressing it will likely last well beyond my lifetime and probably yours.

Could this be a “Bonhoeffer moment” for us, as well?

Let’s get started and find out.

*Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident and a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book “The Cost of Discipleship” is described as a modern classic.