The core culture that defines the United States is not its military, technological and economic power. Race and segregation are the defining factors in the US’s 250 years of history and economy.

Slavery, the plantation, the Civil War, black nationalism, racism and then the Jim Crow and Civil Rights movements remain the central narratives that define US and western culture and history, in spite of the disruption of two world wars, the Cold War, economic recessions, pandemics and climate change.

Racism is the narrative that drives western politics and society. Why? Because racism is in the DNA of western culture, and until it is excised it will remain a disruptive and toxic force.

Legendary Jamaican reggae artist Bob Marley — quoting Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia — could not have put it better when he stated, “Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, there will be war.”

US evangelicals

One element of US society that often exposes the inherent racism in the country is the North American evangelical community. Today many evangelicals have hit the bottom of the barrel in terms of their credibility.

An evangelical pastor, John Pavolvitz, put it this way in a 2018 open letter to white evangelicals: “People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer.”

Many white evangelicals are very much what the white church was under apartheid South Africa and in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia: hypocrites and white supremacists.

White evangelicals, Mr. Pavolvitz suggests, have become a “thinly veiled” white supremacist society that for eight years relentlessly demonised a black president, Barack Obama — “a man faithfully married for 26 years, a doting father, and a husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.”

Obama vs. Trump

Many white evangelicals denied Mr. Obama’s personal faith convictions; denied his US citizenship; and assailed his character without a shred of evidence. Against the Christian faith, these hypocrites never publicly offered prayers or solidarity for the president and his family, and they never showed him the love of Jesus Christ.

Instead, they damned him as they gave carte blanche and full absolution to his successor, President Donald Trump, a man riddled with depravity and dogged by allegations of extramarital affairs.

Such white evangelicals are allies of racist Confederates. They preach a white Jesus but don’t understand that Jesus was actually probably dark skinned.

White evangelicals may have gained a Supreme Court seat and the ear of a toxic president, but in the process they have lost their own souls. They have lost the plot.

The white evangelical church has become completely irrelevant to many “believers,” and with the defeat of Mr. Trump it will go down in history with the final defeat of the toxic Southern Confederacy. The two are tied together at the hip.

 

 

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