Read on Twitter
When white Evangelical leaders discredit Christian support for #BLM with "Jesus came to save individuals from sin, not political change," this is #TheologyOfPrivilege. It's a dominant theology and long est. strategy for marginalizing critiques of the status quo's injustice 1/
What is #TheologyOfPrivilege? If the status quo is comfortable for you; if you benefit from the current relations of exploitation in society, you have the #Privilege of feeling non-political. You can label calls for change as political and treat your theology as pure. 2/
There is a history of #TheologyOfPrivilege in Christianity. Think of Luther’s ultimate response to exploited, starving German (Christian) peasants and their theological critiques of the feudal status quo: slaughter them, they’re not real Christians! 3/ http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Doc.52-ENG-12%20Articles_en.pdf
Of note for US white evangelicals, one enduring version of #TheologyOfPrivilege was pioneered by pro-Slavery theologians precisely to undermine Christian theological critiques of slavery: the “Spirituality of the Church.” 4/
According to them, abolitionists fundamentally distorted the Gospel because Christ came to do Godly work of saving sinners, not worldly pursuits of changing society; “vertical” relations between man and God, not irrelevant “horizontal” relations between people…like slavery. 5/
In this way pro-Slavery theologians competitively sought to monopolize all Christian and moral authority for themselves, painting abolitionists as superficial politically obsessed radicals who don’t really understand God, how society works, and morality. Sound familiar? 6/
This was about pro-Slavery pastors retaining their moral authority & convincing the majority of southern whites who did not own slaves that it was in their interests (and God's will!) to support slave-owning oligarchy that exploited them too. If that isn't political, what is?! /7
Want to know the next times in US history when “Spirituality of the Church” rhetoric got activated with a vengeance? When southern white elites wanted to disenfranchise blacks and roll back Reconstruction, and when they faced the Civil Rights movement! 8/
As Carolyn Renee Dupont shows, Spirituality of Church was always a White Supremacist theology, and after slavery ended evangelical #TheologyOfPrivilege with its class and racial hierarchies remained, ready to be deployed against MLK and Civil Rights. 9/ https://nyupress.org/9780814708415/mississippi-praying/
Despite the strategic forgetting urged by contemporary conservative evangelical leaders, the overwhelming response of conservative white Protestants to the Civil Rights movement (including the “neo-Evangelical” ilk of Billy Graham) was harsh theological opposition 10/
See Curtis Evans's article about White Evangelical Protestant responses to Civil Rights, illustrating the deeply political investment of their supposedly pure theology in maintaining white supremacy and discrediting anything that denaturalized it. 11/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/40211995?seq=1
If this seems shocking to you, spend time reading about “anti-miscegenation” laws, how recent they were, and the overwhelming support of white evangelical leaders for them. Oh, and society is still often quite a hostile space to inter-racial couples. 12/ https://uncpress.org/book/9781469607276/almighty-god-created-the-races/
What goes unsaid, what remains invisible, and what gets to be “forgotten” by those promoting #TheologyOfPrivilege is crucial. One thing that remains invisible is how they benefit from society's racism, inequality, and systems of exploitation. Again, sounds pretty political! 13/
Refusal to dismantle an unjust status quo only seems non-political when status quo feels natural (or divinely ordained!). And the status quo does not feel natural when you attend to its history of injustice or the voices of people it crushes. 14/
This is why those who benefit from the way things are throw tantrums about “Revisionist History” when we educate about voices and histories that are strategically forgotten (slave, Native American, women, LGBTQ, etc). This disrupts the myth of the apolitical status quo. 15/
Thus history like #1619Project only looks revisionist to those (eg @SenTomCotton) whose power and moral authority depend on the Erasure of History. In the same way, #TheologyOfPrivilege folks decry as “political” anything that unmasks their #Privilege. 16/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/30/tom-cotton-wants-save-american-history-he-gets-it-all-wrong/
Just as Peggy Pascoe explores how the strategic forgetting of anti-miscegenation is a political act that makes white patriarchy seem natural, so #TheologyOfPrivilege erases history to make our White Supremacist society seem natural and apolitical. 17/ https://www.amazon.com/What-Comes-Naturally-Miscegenation-America/dp/0199772355
All theology is political! Also, there is a long, racist, and exploitative Christian history to #TheologyOfPrivilege. Its contemporary champions need that history to remain forgotten since their moral and Christian authority depend on it. Let’s not make their lives easy… /Thread
