whytheracecardisplayed
Apr 16, 20231 min
#religion
Few readers will challenge Butler’s scathing account of evangelical support for slavery, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow, and lynching. Where her argument may get hard for her audience is when she begins to build a pathway from the past to the present, refusing to allow evangelicalism’s old sins to remain old.
Her choice to make Billy Graham the link between past sins and new bigotries seems intentionally provocative, but Butler defends her choice: “The creation of twentieth-century evangelicalism—and its relation to racial politics—are best interpreted through the story of its great representative, Billy Graham, ‘America’s White Jesus’”.