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Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible.
Today I’m going to be returning to the subject of Critical Race Theory, which was the subject of my recent episode The Critics of Critical Race Theory. The focus in this episode will be on a particular idea that is not one that I came up with but was rather hit upon by my partner during a long nighttime drive, an idea which I’ll be referring to as the divine reward attribution fallacy and which we explored and developed through several conversations.
The divine reward attribution fallacy is a special case of the fallacies of false attribution and magical thinking, and arises from the following argument:
- Some Christians interpret earthly privilege and prosperity as divine favor (where divine favor means God’s approval of one’s actions).
- Society is structured such that patriarchy and white supremacy confer privilege and prosperity.
- Therefore, some Christians will attribute prosperity resulting from participation in patriarchy and white supremacy to God’s favoring these positions.
When I released my last episode about Critical Race Theory in June, the debate over whether the subject should be taught in schools, and the general debate over how and what history should be taught, had become very heated, and that has not abated in the subsequent months. What is at stake, as professor of history and education Adam Laats said on the radio show It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, is how we teach what the pronouns we and they mean, and what they’ve meant through history (Sanders et al., 2021). While I think much of the discourse is completely unreasonable, it’s understandable that this be a particularly incendiary issue. This is a point I’ve made on the show many times before and I’ve found it in more sources than I can name: enemies are esssential to identity, and so this debate is one that concerns the foundations of our national identities. Quoting Laats:
You see the heat and the passion coming out of these anti-CRT protestors, and it’s not actually about the real Critical Race Theory… it’s about this notion that they are no longer able to control their sense of who we are as a country, and that their kids are being told that we white Americans should not think of ourselves as the sole protagonists in the story of American history.
My previous episode covered in some detail what exactly Critical Race Theory is, and I’ll review the key points here.
In the 1970’s, several thinkers—Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, among others—observed that the civil rights movement of the prior decades had largely stalled out, and that, in some cases, progress made by this movement had even been reversed. In order to study and address this, they applied the theories of Critical Legal Studies to the social concept of race, thus establishing Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).
Critical Race Theory is a diverse field of thought but, in general, holds to the following presuppositions:
- Racism is normal rather than aberrational. It is an expected consequence of the structure and history of our society and intrinsic to these things rather than some sort of unexpected malfunction in the system.
- Racial hierarchies in society serve society’s dominant interests.
- Race is socially constructed rather than being a natural biological category.
- The history of the social construction of race is differentially related to other social factors such as labor demands.
- Individuals do not have multiple independent identity classifications but rather a single identity which exists at the intersection of the various demographics to which they belong.
- Oppressed minorities have access to knowledge inaccessible to the dominant group.
Although not listed explicitly as one of the fundamental propositions of Critical Race Theory, Delgado and Stefancic also note that Critical Race Theory is fundamentally revolutionary, questioning “the very foundations of the liberal order…” (ch. 1, para. 6).
As I noted in the other episode, as a general matter, I’m in agreement with all of this. This is not to say that I agree with everything that has been said under the general rubric of Critical Race Theory, but I certainly agree with the fundamentals.
Differential racialization and what is called the interest convergence theorem—the theory that apparent progress on race relations has been made only when such progress served the interests of the dominant group—are among the more controversial aspects of Critical Race Theory. It’s a cynical theory, to be sure, but I find it entirely consistent with the behavior of the American hegemony. We can, as an example, take the statements of the popular and influential conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly who, in the years leading up to 1979, mobilized her base to successfully deny the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and who, to me, stands as one of the most iconic faces of American religious, racial, and patriarchal hegemony.
In 1998, commenting on revelations that then-president Bill Clinton had had an affair with one of his interns and then lied about it, Schlafly said, “At stake is whether the White House will become a public relations vehicle for lying and polling, akin to a television show, or will remain a platform for the principled articulation of policies and values that Americans respect” (quoted in Du Mez, 2020). At the heart of the issue, Schlafly said, was the question of “whether we are going to allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls” (ibid.). The scandal became a central talking point among American conservative politicians, who used it to highlight the moral degredation of the opposing party and their own implicit moral superiority. In 2016, this same party, along with Schlafly herself, endorsed the candidacy of TV show host and notorious liar Donald Trump for president. Indeed, the last book Schlafly wrote before her death was titled The Conservative Case for Trump.
In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention “passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion” (emphasis mine); but in subsequent decades, with abortion proponents framing the issue as “women controlling their reproduction” and abortion’s becoming linked to feminism—when it conflicted with dominant patriarchal interests, in other words—opposition to the procedure became a keystone political issue for fundamentalist politicians (ibid.).
We see in these examples and many others that morality itself is differential to the political needs of the hegemony. Are we to expect that their attitudes towards race would be any different?
Returning to our argument for the divine reward attribution fallacy, I’ll state first that the argument is a valid one: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. If someone interprets earthly posperity as divine favor, and if patriarchy and white supremacy confer priviledge and prosperity in our society, then it must be true that the person in question will interpret the results of their patriarchy and white supremacy as God favoring those positions. An explicit attribution by the person in question is unnecessary here; they will interpret their posperity as God’s favor whether or not they acknowledge their actions as being rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy.
If you accept our argument as valid, then our claim rests on the truth of the premises. I’ll take the first as being uncontroversial, but it’s worth noting that the Latin phrase Annuit Cœptis, which is intended to mean “God favors our endeavor,” appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States and on the one-dollar bill. And what is this endeavor that God so favors? For the centuries on either side of the Great Seal’s adoption in 1782, it was, in substantial part, the genocide or enslavement of anyone non-white and the subjugation of women.
God’s being, for many Christians, not only a white person but specifically a white man will be addressed in more detail in my next essay, which will be looking at contemporary evangelical Christian rhetoric and in particular a new book by popular pastor John Mark Comer. , by way of focusing on the racial aspect, let’s take a quick survey of American history from the standpoint of racial oppression and how Christianity has played into that.
In the 15th century, prior to its rediscovery by Europeans, the Americas were populated by approximately sixty million people belonging to various indigenous cultures (Pre-Colonization Populations of the Americas ~1492, 1983). While we must admit a wide margin of error in such population estimates, the point here is that an extensive population with its own cultures, languages, and religions was already well-established by the time European pillagers and conquerors arrived, starting in the 16th century. From this point forward, the indigenous populations rapidly declined, falling to only ten percent of their pre-colonization levels within only two centuries (ibid.), largely as the result of diseases brought to the Americas by the conquerors and colonists and by genocides that they carried out against the indigenous peoples. This conquest was justified, in part, by Christian religion (Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 14; Cavanaugh, 2009), and when we look to the Bible—as we soon will—we will find that the Christians had every reason to believe that God had bountifully rewarded their righteous conquest of the heathen tribes with the land and wealth of two entire continents, almost a third of the entire world.
God also rewarded the colonists with a source of cheap labor: African slaves. Founding father James Madison reported that the profit yield from a slave relative to costs was upward of 2000% (Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 33), and the practice of slavery was, as with the conquest of the Americas, biblically justified (Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery?, n.d.). In 2005, evangelical Christian pastor and theologian Doug Wilson released the book Black and Tan, in which he claimed that slave owners were “on firm scriptural ground” (quoted in Du Mez, 2020). The book presently enjoys a 4.3 star rating on Amazon, and while I haven’t read it myself, should anyone be concerned that my source has cherry picked a quote from it in order to present it in an unfavorable light, here’s another quote from one of the book’s 51 five-star reviewers: “Wilson points out that the Bible does not see slavery as evil in and of itself and that godly people from Abraham to Philemon could own slaves provided that they treated them in a biblical way. He posits that some Southern slave owners may have treated their slaves in a biblical way. The Bible does not demand immediate emancipation.” Another reviewer says that, of three lessons that can be taken from this book, the third is “[t]hat the sins of the South were connected with what they did and did not do for their slaves, rather than the institution of slavery itself.”
Slavery was de jure abolished in the United States in the middle of the 19th century, after the Civil War, but the former slaveowners retained the wealth they had accumulated through the practice, and the former slaves were never properly compensated for their labor or servitude and remained under institutional, systemic, and social oppression for at least another century before finally being granted de jure access to the institutions and wealth enjoyed by white Americans, institutions which are predicated, in part, on prior access to wealth, access which non-white Americans have been historically denied. Thus, even subsequent to the Civil Rights movement and continuing through the present day, white Americans have continued to reap the rewards of white supremacy, and those who believe that earthly prosperity is evidence of God’s favor therefore have clear biblical reasons to believe—whether implicitly or explicitly—that God is a white supremacist who fully endorses this nation’s history of brutal treatment towards people of color.
Looking now to the Bible itself, let’s consider the following verses: “You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you are to possess” (Deuteronomy 5:33, NRSV); “The wicked earn no real gain, but those who sow righteousness get a true reward” (Proverbs 11:18); “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession” (Psalm 2:8); “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage” (Psalm 33:12); “I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings” (Jeremiah 17:9-10); “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Colossians 3:23-24); “For [God] will repay according to each one’s deeds” (Romans 2:6); “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).
Christians may counter that the rewards of which the Bible speaks are not of this world, that the righteous will find them only in the next life, and I agree that this is a reasonable interpretation of at least some of the verses I quoted. However, it doesn’t seem that everyone will see it that way, and besides, throughout the Bible, we find stories of individuals rewarded in this world for their obedience to God and punished in this world for their disobedience. The Book of Job ends with Job’s reward for his unquestioning submission to God’s power. In 2 Samuel 21, we find Israel and Judea punished with a famine because of Saul’s treatment of the Gibeonites, a famine which is lifted when King David allows the Gibeonites to kill seven of Saul’s children in revenge. In Genesis, when God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham obeys, halted only at the last minute by an angel, and for this obedience, Abraham and his offspring are blessed. In addition, some of the verses I quoted—specifically Deuteronomy 5:33, Psalms 2:8 and 33:12—point explicitly to a reward in this life and this world.
Christian leaders have been known to explicitly attribute calamity to God’s disfavor. In 1993, Reverend Billy Graham publicly suggested that the AIDS epidemic was God’s punishment against gay people (Barlow, 2015). According to research by the Public Religious Research Institute, in 1992, 36% of Americans agreed with this sentiment; 14% of Americans still did in 2013 (Blumberg, 2014). Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the city of New Orleans, Reverend Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, said
This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans… There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years.
Hurricane Katrina, n.d.
…thus implying that the hurricane had been a punishment from God for this.
Following an earthquake in 2010 that caused substantial damage to the nation of Haiti, the conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson claimed that the earthquake had been God’s punishment for Haiti having allegedly made a pact with the devil in order to escape from slavery (Outrage over Pat Robertson’s Rant, n.d.).
Explicit evidence that Christians attribute earthly reward to God’s favor—beyond that exact thing being written on our currency, I mean—has been more difficult to come by, but a 2017 survey by the Baylor Institute found that about half of all Americans agree that “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan” (American Values, Mental Health, and Use of Technology in the Age of Trump, 2017).
It bears mentioning that, for many American Christians, God is a white man. In 1940, the Christian artist Warner Sallman painted a portrait of a decidedly Caucasian Jesus which grew in popularity to become “the most common image of Jesus in American homes, churches, and workplaces” (Prothero, 2003, p. 117). Numerous other famous portraits of Jesus throughout history share this tendency to de-Semiticize Jesus the Jew, and by the 19th century, theories that Jesus was in fact not Jewish and even that he was a member of the so-called “Aryan race” were promulgated in order to make the Christian savior more palatable to the antisemitic Christians of the day (Kidd, 2006).
I’ve encountered a particular argument that defends the practice of depicting Jesus as someone other than a Jew of Middle Eastern descent: Jesus is the savior of all humankind, and it is thus reasonable to depict him with the features of particular ethnicities so as to aid in one’s devotional understanding of Jesus as “someone who died for me and my people, as much as any other.” Indeed, Christian art from Ethiopia depicts Jesus as Ethiopian; Christian art from Japan depicts Jesus as Japanese; and there are further examples from every culture that has adopted Christianity. I saw this argument presented last year in an article on Medium by the Catholic deacon Rev. Mr. Matthew Newsome (2020). I responded to the article with two concerns about the argument, and more recently, I’ve thought of another one. That last concern is somewhat ancillary so I’ll address it first: artistic representations of Jesus as someone other than a Jewish person seem to point to a latent fictionalism within the Christian religion: what is of primary importance is not the historical reality of Jesus, but rather the relevance of the narrative to the individual Christian. From my perspective, this is not so much a bug as a feature, because I don’t think the historical Jesus advocated for anything like the religion that is called Christianity in the modern world, yet I believe that Christian religion can still be a source of value and meaning for people. But Christians are, regardless, often adamant that the Bible is an infallible document of impeccable historical accuracy, and this is necessary for many conservative Christian policy positions. But it seems that historical accuracy can take a back seat if it means that they’re free to imagine their God as being a white person, like them.
Of the two concerns I posed in my response to Rev. Newsome’s article, the first was that the argument for more broadly representitive iconography can only be arbitrarily limited to ethnic representation. Under the Christian worldview, Jesus died not only for the men of the world, but for the women as well. In principle—though this view does not seem to have been widely adopted within Christianity—Jesus also died for trans people and non-binary people. And yet, I doubt very much that depictions of Jesus as a woman, or with top surgury scars, would be very well received by most American Christians.
And by way of explicating the last of my concerns with this argument, I’ll quote my response directly:
…[D]epiction of Jesus as a white European is morally distinct from depictions of Jesus as other ethnicities in significant ways based on white people having established a global cultural hegemony. For much of recent history and continuing into the present, much of the world has been politically and militarily controlled by white Europeans and Americans. Much of this domination has been racially-based. From 1941 to 1945, white Europeans who claimed a particular ancestry attempted to annihilate the Jewish people, whose ethnicity Jesus shares. In this context, depiction of God by white Europeans as a white European carries different moral implications than, for example, depiction of him as an Ethiopian by Ethiopians. The former reinforces white hegemony; the latter subverts it…. [White European] depictions are [therefore] not on a morally-even playing field with other ethnically-particular depictions of Jesus and may need to be treated differently.
in Newsome, 2020
In this light, the pushback against Critical Race Theory is understandable, if not sufficiently rational or justified. In a sense, Critical Race Theory is similar to the theory of evolution by natural selection in this regard, providing a historical narrative which obviates God as an explanation. If we measure the success of a nation by its wealth, power, and influence, then the United States is one of the most successful nations in history. A belief in God absent Critical Race Theory then necessarily leads to a providential viewpoint under which we can say that God indeed favors our endeavor. Given the more historical viewpoint that Critical Race Theory affords us, we’re left with two alternatives: either God endorses white supremacy, or God had nothing to do with the nation’s success. Neither view is palatable to the evangelical Christian, and so they resort to making violent threats against those whom they fear may be teaching their nation’s historical reality (Johnson, 2021).
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
American Values, Mental Health, and Use of Technology in the Age of Trump. (2017). Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.
Barlow, R. (2015, December 3). After the Wrath of God by Anthony Petro: How the AIDS Crisis Became a Moral Debate | BU Today. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2015/anthony-petro-after-the-wrath-of-god/
Blumberg, A. (2014, February 28). Shocking Number Of Americans Believe AIDS Could Be Punishment From God. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aids-hiv-gods-punishment_n_4876381
Cavanaugh, W. T. (2009). The myth of religious violence: Secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict. Oxford University Press.
Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. NYU Press.
Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright.
Hurricane Katrina: Wrath of God? (n.d.). NBC News. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9600878
Johnson, L. M. (2021). Re: Federal Action Regarding Threats Against School Boards, Administrators, Teachers, and School Staff Members. U.S. Department of Justice. https://opi.mt.gov/Portals/182/Superintendent-Docs-Images/Homepage%20and%20Press%20Releases/10.14.21%20FederalAction.pdf?ver=2021-10-15-105923-780
Kidd, Colin (2006). The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Newsome, R. M. M. (2020, June 23). Are Images of a “White Jesus” Wrong? Medium. https://testeverythingblog.com/are-images-of-a-white-jesus-wrong-ee49192dcef6
Outrage over Pat Robertson’s rant. (n.d.). Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2010/01/100117_roberston.shtml
Pre-colonization populations of the Americas ~1492. (1983). Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171896/pre-colonization-population-americas/
Prothero, S. (2003). American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sanders, S., Gutierrez, A., Hochman, J., McBain, L., Douglis, S., & Restrepo, M. L. (2021, June 25). Culture Wars Then and Now; Plus, The Creators of “Hacks.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010253490/culture-wars-then-and-now-plus-the-creators-of-hacks
Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery? (n.d.). Christian History | Learn the History of Christianity & the Church. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-33/why-christians-supported-slavery.html
Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2015). A people’s history of the United States (Thirty-fifth anniversary edition). HarperPerennial.