Marian Ronan

Crucified by Racism

The following is my review of a new book on the relationship between Christian theology and racism by Fordham theologian Jeannine Hill Fletcher. It appears in the August 24-September 6 issue of the National Catholic Reporter.

Never for a moment did I buy the notion that with the election of Barack Obama as president, the United States had become a “post-racial” society. But even for a skeptic like me, the statistics from the 2016 presidential election were difficult to absorb: Eighty-one percent of white evangelical Christians and 60 percent of white Catholics voted for Donald Trump. How could Christians vote for such an unabashedly racist candidate?

As we attempt to answer that question, it’s hard to imagine anything timelier than Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s new book. In The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, & Religious Diversity in America, Hill Fletcher draws on her expertise in interreligious theology as well as extensive research into the history of Euro-American Christianity to lay out the devastating connections between Christian theology and the ideologies of racial supremacy that underpin our current political crisis.

Then, thank God, she presents a theological paradigm to help us move toward racial and religious transformation.

(Continue reading on the NCR webpage).