Chapter 6 of Before You Lose Your Faith addresses racism. But not just any racism. Its writer, Claude Atcho, seeks to defuse accusations of racism within white evangelicalism. Unfortunately, he does it in the worst imaginable way: with various logical fallacies and utterly failed, debunked arguments like the No True Scotsman. In a lot of ways, this chapter really exemplifies evangelicals’ inability to engage meaningfully with the dealbreaking flaws in their flavor of Christianity. And in this chapter’s case, the dealbreaking flaw is the Bible’s chameleon-like ability to twist and contort to fully support any opinion that any Christian could ever possibly have.

(The Butternut Squash and Mushroom Lasagna recipe I mentioned in the introduction.)

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Everyone, meet Claude Atcho

As we saw last week in Chapter 5, the one trying to rationalize evangelicals’ bigotry against LGBT people, this one covers evangelicals’ endemic racism. And accordingly, just as Chapter 5 is written by a lesbian, Chapter 6 is written by a Black man.

Claude Atcho, this chapter’s writer, works as a pastor. The bio blurb in the book says he pastors Fellowship Memphis, but he left there at the end of 2021 to plant a new church in Charlottesville, Virginia. His new church, named Church of the Resurrection, is an Anglican church. Their statement of faith says they take a “Mere Christianity” approach to their beliefs.

That phrase refers to the awful book by C.S. Lewis that I discussed last week. It means that they try to boil Christianity down to what they view as its essential components. As well, their statement of faith refers to various other creeds. One of these, the Jerusalem Declaration, sounds alarmingly culture-warry. For example, #8 on the list specifically denies same-sex couples the right to marry. In fact, it denies gays the right to have romantic relationships at all.

This declaration also uses terms like “orthodox” which I’ve learned to associate with Calvinists. Anglicans can certainly be hardcore Calvinists as well as quite evangelical. Atcho’s church is probably both, or I don’t imagine that The Gospel Coalition (TGC), which organized this book, would have asked for him to contribute a chapter in the first place.

(Interestingly, with the dizzying number of creeds and statements and articles and councils and associated holy books that Anglicans revere, it doesn’t sound like anything about Church of the Resurrection actually meets its own goal of practicing “Mere Christianity.”)

Rachel Gilson, who brought us the last chapter about bigotry, is one of only two female-sounding names in this entire book. And that other woman, Karen Swallow Prior, is probably there because she’s the best academic they could possibly convince to write for them.

I’m suddenly wondering just how many Black men I’ll find on the contributors’ list. (I counted. The answer turns out to be “3”.)

Before You Lose Your Faith is still talking from the ‘is Christianity good‘ side, not ‘is it true’

In Chapter 1, Trevin Wax sliced deconstruction into two big concerns:

  • Is Christianity objectively true?
  • Does the practice of Christianity bring good things to people/humanity/believers?

In this view, some people deconstruct more because they figure out that Christians’ claims are objectively false, while others begin that path because they realize just how evil it all really is.

To an extent, this might be the case for Christians nowadays. It’s the one good idea I’ve seen so far in the entire book. In my own case, noticing all the injustices in evangelicalism—and how little our faith really changed adherents’ mindsets and lives for the better—got me looking closer at the claims I believed were true. I hit both ends of that equation.

However, I’ve noticed that Christians who deconstruct nowadays but still remain Christian afterward tend not to examine Christians’ basic claims too closely. It’s like they’re nervous about finding out that none of those claims are true. As well, I’ve seen many of them treat ex-Christians like petulant children for even wanting our beliefs to be built only from claims that are objectively true and well-supported by reality.

In the first section, “Deconstruct Deconstruction,” Before You Lose Your Faith tried to set ground rules for deconstruction. Now, in the second section, “Deconstruct the Issues,” it seems that the writers will be taking for granted that Christianity’s claims are true. Instead, they will be trying to make the case that their religion is good.

They’ll fail, but by golly they’ll try at least.

Chapter 6 of Before You Lose Your Faith starts with a poorly-framed question

This chapter, written by Claude Atcho, starts off with a poorly-framed question in its title:

Race: Is Christianity a White Man’s Religion?

It seems clear that white evangelical leaders have figured out that their constant onslaught of racism has caught the attention of younger Americans. Indeed, Atcho positions it as a dealbreaker for Millennials and Gen Z people (p. 53):

With our culture eager to be on the right side of history, this question is no longer exclusive to black folks or other ethnic minorities. White people, especially millennials and Gen Z, are reluctant to embrace a faith that even remotely feels like a tool for past or present oppression.

And then, Atcho outlines three “general reasons” that make younger Americans think Christianity is “a white man’s religion.” These are (p. 54):

  1. “History of Oppression.” White Christians have used their religion to perpetuate and enforce racist systems and oppression on people of color (POC), especially Black people.
  2. “Whitewashed Jesus.” I mean, just look at how white Christians portray Jesus. And it’s how they’ve portrayed him for ages and ages. That iconic image of a creamy-skinned Jesus with fair locks and blue eyes is the default depiction for much of the world.
  3. “Lingering Apathy Toward Racial Justice in the Church.” This is mostly an evangelical problem, of course, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Atcho positions it as an overall-Christian concern.

He’s not wrong, of course. He’s just over-generalizing. There’s distinctly one flavor of white Christianity that particularly commits all of these wrongs.

And Atcho’s solution to these three problems is nothing short of a stunning example of doublespeak and hand-waving.

How to solve a problem like systemic racism in Before You Lose Your Faith

Like all the chapters in Before You Lose Your Faith, this one is very short. In fact, they’re shorter than one of my usual blog posts. They’re probably even shorter than what I write about them. As usual, I probably spend more time analyzing this stuff than its writers spent writing it.

(And that realization makes me appreciate my readers even more. Thank you so much for traveling with me this long and this far. I’m always mindful of your time and try to be worth what you spend with me.)

But this chapter, more than any other so far, made my head just spin. Atcho draws extensively upon evangelical apologists’ carefully-curated bullshit arguments to refute the idea that Black people and their allies would be well-advised to avoid Christianity.

Claude Atcho’s overall argument is that TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ isn’t racist. Only fakey-fake fake Christians are racist. If deconstructing Christians are concerned about racism in their religion, they need to find a church that adheres to TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. That’ll solve their problem forever.

Attack of the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and the fake Scotsmen in Before You Lose Your Faith

But first, we get an argument from authority. Hey, you remember how Malcolm X spoke against Christianity as racist and harmful to Black people? Well, just ignore him. We should look instead to Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned writer, speaker, and preacher. (I’m not exaggerating.)

See, Douglass thought Christianity was wonderful when practiced correctly, and since that’s also what Atcho thinks, it must be true (p. 55):

In essence, Douglass provides a 19th-century answer to our question. Christianity isn’t the white man’s religion, because what his slave owners practiced wasn’t biblical Christianity but a distortion condemned by the very Bible they perverted.

And that should be prompting readers to ask a very pertinent question right about now:

How does Atcho know that slave owners distorted Christianity? Because their Christianity produced apologetics for an atrocity? Because it dehumanized people and endorsed a cruel and evil practice? Or because it resulted in really bad news for many, many Black people? Because those slave owning Christians sure thought abolitionists distorted the religion.

It’s not that I dislike Atcho’s vision. In overall sentiment, it’s probably closer to a best-case Christianity than anything racists espouse. But I know that nothing in Christianity can be considered TRUE CHRISTIANITY™.

How to tell a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ from all the fakey-fake fake ones

The Christians who developed those atrocity apologetics used the same techniques that Atcho’s favored “biblical Christian” scholars use. And it was easy for them to do so. The Bible is replete with endorsements for slavery. It set rules and parameters around slavery. It commanded slaves to obey their masters. And it told masters exactly how hard to beat disobedient slaves and how long to wait before raping the women they had purchased and captured in war.

Nowhere in the Bible do we encounter any suggestion that slavery is cruel or evil, or that it must be stopped, or even that its god disapproves of it in the slightest. At the time its books were written, humans considered slavery as just part of their world, and therefore, so did their gods.

As usual, with this chapter of Before You Lose Your Faith, the only way to tell who the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are is to use the judging Christian as the point of comparison. TRUE CHRISTIANS™:

  • Embrace roughly the same package of nonsense that the judge does
  • Haven’t gotten caught (yet) doing anything the judge thinks is totally off-limits
  • Die in the traces with both previous conditions still being true (but this last point is brought out only in the case of people who’ve left the judge’s fold)

But that’s what almost all Christians do. They judge other Christians by themselves, denying the precious label to anyone who is too different or too embarrassing.

Thus, I absolutely, positively assure you that slavery-endorsing Christians throughout history have considered themselves the TRUE CHRISTIANS™, which made the abolitionists opposing them into the fakey-fake fake ones. We see the same behavior and thinking in modern Christians who are proudly, unapologetically racist to the bone. Or sexist. Or theocracy-craving.

And they all have Bible verses to support their various points of view.

A curious example of intellectual dishonesty

This chapter is interesting to me not just because it relies so heavily on No True Scotsman argumentation. It also interests me because so far, it contains the most blatant attempt to equate white evangelicalism with general Christianity.

Racism is a hot-button issue that white evangelicals are struggling with right now. And one can easily understand why. White Christians in general tend to be the most racist people in America. But within white Christianity, white evangelicals tend to be the most rabid racists of them all. Recently, Anthea Butler had a book published about the entrenched racism of white evangelical Christians in particular.

It’s no accident that evangelicals’ beloved culture wars began with “seg academies.” These were segregated private Christian schools run by white evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell. Indeed, the culture wars only branched to anti-abortion crusades when their architects realized that segregation didn’t sell well outside of the Deep South. Nowadays, many evangelical culture-war talking points denigrate Black people and minimize (or even outright ignore) Black suffering in America. Nor was anybody really surprised when white evangelicals glommed onto Donald Trump; his blatant and unending racism often seemed deliberately-designed to pander to his fans’ deep-seated anger against Black people.

So in every conceivable way, racism is baked right into the rotted, festering core of modern white American evangelicalism.

To try to make this level of racism sound like a general-Christianity problem feels intellectually dishonest. It’s not a generally-Christian problem. I mean, maybe racism is way more widespread in mainline groups than I thought. He’d know more there than I would.

That said, white evangelicals in particular are incredibly racist as a group. But this chapter never discusses white evangelicals in particular. It only discusses white Christians from the furthest possible zoomed-out perspective, dissolving white evangelicals into the whole body of Christians.

Considering this entire book was organized by almost-entirely white evangelicals and uses only white evangelical talking points from hardline SBC-type Christians to address competing viewpoints, this dissolving act is absolutely bizarre to read.

Clearly, readers of Before You Lose Your Faith are meant to assume that white Christianity is the problem here. Well, all those white fakey-fake fake Christians, at least.

The dishonesty of equating the long-ago past with current Christian groups

I was also put off by this chapter’s Appeal to Ancient History. In this logical fallacy, the argument states that a particular fact was true. Therefore, it fully applies and is true today.

In this case, the fallacy runs like this:

  1. Early Christianity had roots in Africa. Many of the earliest leaders in the religion hailed from places like Egypt and Ethiopia. (True, though this doesn’t necessarily mean they were all Black. Cleopatra probably wasn’t.)
  2. Africa gets mentioned in several places in the Old and New Testaments. (Also true, but again, see above note.)
  3. Therefore, racism isn’t a problem in the TRUE™ flavors of the religion. (WTF?)

Yes, and women held leadership roles in the very earliest Christian communities. The exact diocese that Atcho’s church belongs to, Diocese of Christ Our Hope, ordains men and women both. (Their main leadership page reveals not a single Black face in the bunch, but I saw several white women on it.) But I know of many other evangelicals who argue very passionately that TRUE CHRISTIAN™ churches cannot possibly have female pastors. Heck, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is on its way to another schism based on that point of contention alone!

Atcho compares apples to oranges by comparing the earliest centuries of his religion to the racism of modern white evangelicals (er, sorry, modern white Christians generally). I’m sure many Christian racists are well aware of the earliest African churches and seats of Christian power. Knowing that stuff doesn’t lead to less racism.

Christianity could have started up in Africa, stayed in Africa, and flourished in Africa before spreading to the rest of the world, and it still wouldn’t make today’s evangelicals any different. White evangelicalism doesn’t look anything like 2nd- or 4th-century Christianity (or even 8th- or 15th-).

Nor does it matter in the least how Black American Christians felt about their faith or their god in centuries past. White evangelicalism today is a whole different beast, one whose racism is more dogwhistle than snarled outright, one whose prejudices show in much more subtle ways. Before You Lose Your Faith doesn’t and can’t address those changes.

Indeed, white evangelicalism exists today as a regressive right-wing authoritarian and totalitarian political movement with a few buntings of Jesus window-dressing flung across it. But Atcho’s got an answer for that, too.

Before You Lose Your Faith devolves once again to a purely mythic view of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™

We’ve seen this last flaw often in Before You Lose Your Faith: The book takes for granted the idea that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ will not suffer from XYZ flaw. If we see Christians with XYZ flaw, then we know that they are not TRUE CHRISTIANS™.

In this case, if a person wishes to practice TRUE CHRISTIANITY™, then Atcho assures them that they’ll find no racism in such groups. They can’t be racist, because their flavor of Christianity is pure, the real deal, the completely authentic “biblical Christianity” that prevents such rot and foulness.

In Preston Sprinkle’s bigotry-for-Jesus book, People to Be Loved, we saw this same attitude on display. He was sure that if someone only had the enormous luck to join TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ instead of some fakey-fake flavor, then they couldn’t possibly be bigoted. They’d have to, as the night follows the day, behave with honor and dignity toward all people.

But every single Christian who is sure that they’ve latched onto TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ is considered a fake Christian by half a dozen others. And every one of them has Bible verses aplenty to support their opinion.

Nor does it matter how any Christians conceptualize Jesus. There are as many Jesuses as there are Christians, it seems. Some Jesuses are more like boyfriends, others more like warm and loving fathers, and still others like stern lawgivers and judges. The Jesus who cares enormously about Black people and hates racism is only one of those Jesuses.

What matters is what Christians themselves nowadays are doing on the ground, not what Jesus they’ve built for themselves. Though their actions often reflect the Jesus they’ve built to worship, their actions are very much what matter most. I cringe to imagine someone who’s got a particular version of Jesus in mind, only to discover all the groups in that area criticizing that conceptualization and offering a competing version instead.

The thorny history of white evangelicalism and racism

With all respect to Claude Atcho, I suspect he’s found a way to rationalize away white evangelicals’ deep and abiding racism to maintain his faith. When someone’s supremely motivated to do something, they’ll pull out the stops to get what they think they need.

For that matter, I’ve felt uncomfortable writing this post, even. I’m whiter than mayonnaise. And I know that Black people have a perspective of Christianity that can be deeply troubling even to themselves. It’s impossible to divorce the modern iterations of the religion from what so many white Christians did with it for centuries to excuse their embrace of slavery. Christianity today rests on the foundation of what those earlier Christians did with it and to it and for it.

It’d be nice if today’s Christians did some introspection on their recent-ish history, and if they maybe even wondered what made those slavery-embracing white Christians so sure that Jesus completely approved of what they were doing to so many Black people.

In the same way, every Christian ideally should wrestle with Christianity’s long history of coercion starting around the 4th century. When their leaders got coercive power, they used it to the hilt. That coercion kept their religion alive for many centuries past its natural expiration date. But I’d worry that such introspection would only make white evangelicals yearn even more for those halcyon days of theocracy. They’re already grouchy enough about the Enlightenment. Let’s not push our luck.

And lastly, a strange omission in Before You Lose Your Faith

What’s weird about this chapter is that Atcho doesn’t direct more readers to flavors of Christianity that are historically more integrated and diverse, even that are Black-run and mostly if not entirely Black. There are tons of these “Black Protestant” churches. Though they share some similarities in beliefs with white evangelicalism, they are a distinct cultural group all their own. Many of these church groups are very tightly embedded in their communities, serving as vital hubs of information, activism, and support for members.

These churches might serve as a healing balm for Black people and their allies. They certainly seem to illustrate what Atcho writes about toward the end of his chapter (p. 58):

If you’re on the edge of deconstruction—or have already made the leap—recall the cloud of ancestral witnesses who testify of Christ, not because of the coercion of the white man or colonialism, but because Christianity is true and good for all people.

This “cloud of ancestral witnesses” don’t only exist in history. Many modern Christians like them can be reliably found in Black Protestant churches. But strangely, Atcho doesn’t even mention these churches. It’s like they don’t even exist. Maybe he disagrees with their doctrinal beliefs or their opinions regarding the culture wars?

Trying all too late to divorce racism from modern white evangelicalism

Overall, I don’t think Claude Atcho’s appeals to history and his attempts to raise his preferred flavor to the level of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ is going to persuade many people.

We’ve all seen too much already. Countless news stories of white evangelicals melting down with racist rage at Black people have danced across our gadget screens. So have stories of white evangelical denominations fighting endlessly about critical race theory (CRT). Christians, in particular, are likely keenly aware of white evangelicals’ racist behavior in both the public and political arenas. I’ve read countless blog and social media posts from them cringing about their brethren’s racism and lamenting it.

Many Christians might even know that the biggest Protestant denomination in America, the SBC, actually began in 1845 specifically because its leaders supported and practiced slavery. But the denomination they left wasn’t a whole lot better: its leaders wanted to remain neutral on the issue, wishing neither to officially condemn slavery nor to be seen as condoning it in any way.

Since then, not much has changed. Most white evangelicals aren’t snarling, violent racists, though. Instead, they pose as being so incredibly evolved as TRUE CHRISTIANS™ that they can’t even perceive differences in skin color. But they still bristle just as hard at the idea that they might just be packing a few specks of white privilege in their oh-so-sublime, Jesus-filled heads. And they are just as quick as their more virulent brethren to denounce any discussion of systemic racism in their ranks.

Once again, the biggest problem evangelicals have is evangelicals themselves. Denouncing racist white evangelicals as fakey-fake fake Christians doesn’t do anyone any good, especially when those evangelicals can easily support their opinions and priorities with the Bible just as easily as anti-racism advocates can. Instilling readers with this luminous hope in a loving, non-racist Jesus will last exactly as long as it takes those readers to tangle with a few of his loudest self-appointed ambassadors.

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Final notes

Final Note: I’ve striven to be respectful toward Claude Atcho in this review, as I was toward Rachel Gilson in the previous chapter. I condemn racism in all forms, accept white privilege as something that must be deconstructed in its turn and ended, and embrace the activists seeking to address racism in American society. Black Lives Matter.

Son of Final Note: It’s weird how many contributors to this book seem to absolutely idolize C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity. I’ve noticed praise for it in multiple bio blurbs of theirs all around the internet. I don’t wanna reinvent the wheel here because I think Steve Shives’ video review is chef’s-kiss definitive, but I may need to read it again and spend a blog post talking about it. It is downright weird how often this book shows up in these particular right-wing, culture-war-embracing evangelicals’ writing.

Bride of Final Note: The reason I know about this adoration of Mere Christianity is that I got curious about the makeup of the contributors and looked them all up. Out of 16 contributors to the book, three are Black men. Two are white women. The other 11 contributors appear to be white men, though one might be Eastern European or Middle Eastern.


Captain Cassidy

Captain Cassidy is a Gen-X ex-Christian and writer. She writes about how people engage with science, religion, art, and each other. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange tabby cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes. And at any given time, she is running out of bookcase space.

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