From “US: The Resurrection of American Terror” by Rev. Kenneth W. Wheeler
In his book titled America’s Unholy Ghosts, Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College, Kentucky, addresses how the white Christian Church lost its way. In a May 3, 2019 interview discussing the book, he argues that the white Christian Church was intentionally designed to harmonize with slavery. It did that by reducing Christianity to soul salvation, seeking to make Christianity compatible with the interests of slaveholders and with the interests of the most wealthy landowners. Goza goes on to say something that reveals how sinister this kind of melding was in the practical sense. “[White Christians] wanted a multicultural Church, where our slaves could sit in the balconies, where we could save their souls, and yet still keep them enslaved.”
Goza’s analysis is one that holds truth. It is a truth that the white Church and white Christians must come to terms with. White Christians sought to protect something that should have never needed to be protected or upheld. Slavery was defenseless. No human being was meant to own another human being. The idea that slavery could be reconciled with the vision of God was doomed from the beginning. It created a spiritual crisis that we are still trying to work our way through, still trying to find resolution for. In 2016, eighty-one percent of white Evangelical Christians voted for a white, wealthy, racist, and morally and ethically bankrupt man to be their president because their version of Christianity was polluted. Their version of Christianity was twisted by the same white supremacist view of the world as those white Christians in the 1800s who were trying to reconcile slavery with the Bible and the interests of the wealthiest of landowners.