Book by Fordham University Prof Connects Christianity to Racism in America
“to demand of white Christians that they accept their responsibility for racist policies”
Attacking the faith of Christians and trying to tie Christianity to the ills of America is such a tired trope.
Campus Reform reports:
Theology prof writes book connecting Christianity to racism
Fordham University last week touted a new book that examines the connection between “Christianity, racism, and religious diversity in America.”
Written by Fordham professor of Theology Jeannine Hill Fletcher, the work “proposes strategies that will help foster racial healing in America, the first of which is to demand of white Christians that they accept their responsibility for racist policies and structural discrimination in America.”
The author told Fordham News that her studies have led her to realize that “the ideology of Christian supremacy was actually a piece that informed legislation that dispossessed native people.”
To support her position, Hill Fletcher references the Doctrine of Discovery: a belief that Christian settlers had the right to claim the land of non-Christians, but not land inhabited by fellow Christians. The professor argues that the doctrine’s historical use to deny Native Americans’ right to land does not only prove the existence of religious intolerance, but also of racism.
“In most cases, you can’t trace a direct cause from something a theologian says to this kind of practical output,” she observes. “But theologians have always had the ability to lend symbolic capital to ideas. These ideas can create conditions [that] have real-life effects.”
Hill Fletcher argues that while today’s Christians may be well-intentioned, they often do not recognize their own responsibility, through religious association, for social injustices.
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Comments
What about “white” Christians like my great-great-grandfather, who out of Christian conviction ran a stop on the Underground Railroad and preached abolition in Albany, New York?
Christians are the most diverse group on the planet, by far.
“In most cases, you can’t trace a direct cause from something a theologian says to this kind of practical output” Obviously the author did not look at Islam – a “minor” religion practiced by only a billion or two. If the author had looked at Islam, then they would have seen how slavery is enshrined the Koran and other religious texts with information on how a slave should be treated, the selling of slaves, rules regarding forced sex with slaves, and so forth.
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I find it appalling that the effort to condemn Christianity and conservatives is so overwhelming that they find every excuse, no matter how flimsy, to condemn Christianity for things such as slavery (to the point of even blaming the institution of slavery upon Christianity) and the Right while ignoring the overwhelming evidence against Islam and other religions. Additionally, they never give credit towards Christianity and its influence in America such that it became the driving force that eliminated slavery far sooner than any other country despite slavery being an institution recognized as “normal” in the rest of the world.
I’m white … I’m Christian (sorta) … I’m male. Discriminating between friend and foe is increasingly problematic. I’m almost at the point where it’s just easier to hate everyone else … because … evidently … everyone else seems to hate me.