At noon on Wednesday, August 5, Robert P. Jones will present “The Legacy of White Supremacy in U.S. Christianity” as part of the History Is Lunch series. The streaming-only program will be shown live on the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Facebook page and available afterwards on the MDAH YouTube channel and on our History Is Lunch page.
“In Jackson, Mississippi, and across the South, religious and civic leaders fought fiercely to keep white Christian churches segregated,” said Jones, author of the new book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. “They believed if racial integration came to their communities, it would ‘enter through the front door of churches.’”
Jones will discuss the 1963 Jackson church visit campaign—the last action led by Medgar Evers before he was assassinated—and white Christian resistance to it, as well as the ways in which white Christian churches functioned as cultural legitimizers of white supremacy and how contemporary public opinion data reflect that legacy today.
Jackson native Robert P. Jones earned his BS in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College, his MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his PhD in religion from Emory University. He is the founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute PRRI. Jones’s book The End of White Christian America won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. In addition to regular writing at The Atlantic, Jones has been featured by The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and other media outlets. He serves on the national program committee for the American Academy of Religion and is a past member of the editorial boards for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the American Political Science Association journal Politics and Religion.
Signed copies of Jones's book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity are available through the Mississippi Museum Store. Call 601-576-6921 or email hyurkow@mdah.ms.gov to place an order.