100 books like The Religion of Whiteness

When I finished this book, I felt I’d just finished a survey class on the history of the most important and consequential intersections between American racism and the American church.

I read it with a handful of other white folks who had no idea any of these specific historical moves had been made to keep white/black people separate in the founding of the major denominations, and it produced great conversation not only about the origins of our modern racial tensions within the church but also how we might move through them to a better place.

If your knowledge about specific events is thin, this book is a crash course in why most congregations became mono-cultural in the first place and—perhaps more importantly—remain so today.  

The idea of “cheap diversity” in the subtitle immediately caught my eye. Too often, churches and parachurch organizations think looking like a United Colors of Benetton commercial (way back reference!) is the end we’re seeking, where a Sunday morning appears mixed but isn’t truly integrated in any meaningful way.

Swanson helps me get beyond that superficial acceptance and suggests we need a complete rewiring of our thinking that only comes through changing our habits and liturgies, forcing myself beneath the surface and into broader communal discipleship among God’s people. 

Using the church's discipleship methods, Swanson gave me practical ways to think about challenging segregation, racial habits, and other cultural captivities that have become our norm and replacing them with more biblically aligned perspectives and behaviors.

This book came out a few months before mine, and I thought it landed as the first book written by theologically conservative people taking Critical Race Theory seriously as a lens and analytical tool without getting hung up on it as a worldview.

They look through an intensely biblical lens themselves and see CRT for what it is: a way of interpreting racial power dynamics in a broken world. I don’t think it a stretch to suggest they get us to look at CRT through Jesus’ eyes, placing it in a biblical context large enough to grasp not only what theorists want us to see but also helping us transcend their usually limited secular answers and solutions.

I thought it successfully combined both the academic and the pastoral—rare in books like this—and helped me think about the implications of looking at the world through a lens I don’t normally have… show more.

I find it difficult to locate white pastors in the Evangelical tradition who are both aware of and candid about their own racial history. It’s even more difficult to get them to admit they’ve never thought about “White” as a race and why that might be significant in a world that prioritizes skin color.

He helped me understand both the personal and social realities of living at the intersection of race, culture, and identity and how they merge into one another in my life. I appreciated how Hill puts texture on the idea of racial privilege and the advantages inherent in not having to think about race at all. I found his seven stages to expect on the path to cross-cultural “awakening” disrupting, putting on a very different spin on what it means to be “woke” in our cultural moment. 

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a story about the redemptive love of a civil rights icon who was brutally beaten, threatened, and who lived through the era of civil rights unrest and huge racism. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and has received notable awards such as a noble peace prize.

His book is a fascinating read about a man who had every reason to hate white people along the journey or racism and civil unrest but instead chose the path of love and forgiveness. He has titled it One Blood as he believes that we all have things in common, even in the midst of suffering and pain, if we allow ourselves to grow through the suffering and become the mirror image of the hate and bitterness that we have received on the journey of life.

Even if you are not a person of faith, evangelicalism in America has caused great division. Thus, understanding how conservative Christianity looks differently in white and Black communities is a good place to start being introduced to issues of race and justice. Many leaders in the church say Divided by Faith is the next most influential book for them—next to the Bible! 

Lerone Martin’s book makes a conclusive case for how influential Christian nationalism can be when it is embraced and enforced by a whole institution—like the FBI—but especially when the person leading that institution demands it be so. J. Edgar Hoover is likely one of the most influential purveyors of white Christian nationalism in American history. Some of the accounts are jaw-dropping.

D.A. Bourne weaves a story of Christian Fiction and overcoming racism during a time it’s at an all-time high. We all know racism is a touchy subject a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but it’s a sad reality many face every day. This story surrounds autoworkers and their families who find themselves faced with racial conflict that tests their faith, patience, ability to forgive, and all the things they’ve always believed in. 

In From Enemy to Brother, John Connelly, observes, “If there was a neighbor needing a Good Samaritan in the 1930s it was the Jew, yet the day’s moral theology placed Jews on the lowest rung of the ‘hierarchy of love’: after family, after other Catholics, and after members of one’s nation and race.” Jews who converted to Christianity failed to advance much higher. As Connelly shows, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, some Catholic theologians taught that conversion did not immediately free Jews of their Jewish heritage. It could take generations before Christianity completely took hold. Catholic anti-Judaic deicide teaching, fueled by centuries of Christian antisemitism, bore and nourished such a negative outlook toward Jews. In the 1930s, Catholic theologians only had to take one step further to link their primitive view of Jews and Jewish converts to the prevailing National Socialist racial teaching. The result produced an… show more.

Our enigmatic heroine, Sorrow, rules the Court of Tears, covering for her grief-maddened father, who has turned their once celebrated land into a living monument for the brother who died before she was born. Joy is literally forbidden. But in this twisty turny political tale – in which the magic slowly blooms – nothing is as it seems… I loved it!