![]() ![]() ![]() While the brevity of this book is both a strength and a weakness, and sympathetic readers can object in good faith to some of Butler’s contemporary examples, there is no mistaking the strength and urgency of her thesis. In the pages that follow, Butler challenges those who “cannot or will not deal with the racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices, and political allegiances” (5), framing her task as an attempt to “tell the story evangelicals won’t” (12). ![]() By the end of the book’s first paragraph-during which Butler connects nineteenth-century evangelical support for slavery, Klan violence, and lynching to the more contemporary sins of religious bigotry and turning “a blind eye to children in cages at the border” (2)-the hard part of her purpose has grown into an even harder thesis: “Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (2). In her opening sentence, Anthea Butler makes both clear: “ White Evangelical Racism tells a concise history of the evangelical movement and-here is the hard part-the racist and racial elements that imbue its beliefs, practices, and social and political activism” (1). There is no mistaking the purpose of this book, as well as the author’s awareness of how this purpose will be received by her audience. ![]()
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