The Curious Religion of Christians Who Don’t Believe the Bible

If you’ve been around Christians in leadership spaces at all, you’ll remember just a few years ago multiethnicity became the topic and target du jour. At conferences, in articles, from pulpits, you’d encounter statements like, “We want churches to look like Heaven,” alluding to the gathering in eternity of people from every nation and language group.

At the same time, the United States entered a seemingly new phase of its existence-long rollercoaster with race and racial inequality. Fallout from the deaths of Black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and George Floyd each individually and collectively thrust Americans into wide-ranging debates about race in this country. The latest layer centers around the relative merits and shortcomings of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in corporate and non-profit America.

Put these two social movements side by side, and you’d expect two parallel realities: a society struggling with what it means to live life together and a church modeling multi-ethnic unity. Curiously, the data says otherwise.

In a new book, sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Glen Bracey ask why, in a broad national study, they “repeatedly” found that the people most opposed to racial justice efforts — the people who score the highest on “prejudice measures” — are ostensibly the same people pursuing diverse, multiethnic churches.

According to the book, their research ultimately showed an emerging religion familiar to but ultimately different from Christianity, which they call the religion of whiteness.

Yes, the idea that a large percentage of self-identified Christians are actually adhering to an emerging religion seems crazy. On a phone call in early spring, Emerson agreed. The “answer on the surface seems crazy,” he said. Yet he found “repeated support” for the crazy thesis.

Emerson isn’t new to reporting uncomfortable tensions among American Christians. More than two decades ago, in 2001, Emerson and sociologist Christian Smith published Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, which documents differences in how white and Black evangelical Christians understand certain theological and cultural questions. This new project, The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith, which comes out in May from Oxford University Press, Emerson and co-author Glenn E. Bracey, initually meant as a follow up to Divided By Faith. But the research, conducted from 2019 to 2023, told a story beyond race-based theological differences.

“The argument is that there exists a second religion within many white Christian churches and among many white Christians,” Emerson said. “That second religion is all about faith, but it’s not about Christ, per se. It’s about race. It’s a religion of race, what we call the religion of whiteness.”

Here’s how Emerson described their research: Three thousand participants got a question: Should the Bible be used to determine what is right or wrong? If a respondent identified as a Christian and responded, “Yes, the Bible ‘always’ should be used to determine right or wrong,” he or she received a set of four Bible-based statements and was asked his or her level of agreement:

From Deuteronomy 24:4: In the system of laws that God gave Israelites to follow, there were laws that protected foreigners from being treated unjustly. Therefore it is good to have laws that protect foreigners from being treated unjustly.

From Acts 6:1–7: When an ethnic minority group thought they were being treated unjustly, the apostles’ response was to empower the leaders in that minority group to solve what they thought was the injustice. Therefore, it’s good to empower minority leaders.

From Nehemiah: The prophet Nehemiah confessed sins committed by himself, his nation, and his ancestors. Therefore, it’s good to do that.

The fourth was a control question related to unwholesome speech.

On the control question, Emerson said they found no differences across the racial groups: “The majority of all Christians, no matter what racial group, strongly agree you should not use unwholesome words,” he said.

“But for the other three, the majority of all racial groups ‘strongly agree’ that you should protect foreigners, you should empower minorities, and you should confess your group’s sins — except for one group. And that’s white Christians. … White Christians almost always stood alone as different from other Christian groups.”

In all, according to Emerson, only a third of white Christians agreed that the Bible commends protecting foreigners, empowering minorities, and confessing group sin. The others, he said, attributed their less-than-full agreement to questions about the context of the particular verse or passage in question. Naturally, Emerson and Bracey followed up with the two-thirds of white respondents along with people from other groups who also expressed questions about context. Even then, they found stark differences among the ways white participants approached the context.

“When we had African American groups, Hispanic groups, Asian groups, they would pull out their Bibles or Bible apps and start looking at the context and discussing it,” Emerson said. “And the white groups, they would say the same thing, but they would not then try to figure out what the context was. We interpret that as a defense mechanism to not have to agree with what the Bible apparently says.”

The Bible-agreement portion of the survey only represents an example of Emerson’s research, and he says they included 75 different measures. Each yielded, in his words, the “exact same result.”

He explained: “What we’re finding is that consistently two-thirds of white Christians seem to put the religion of whiteness over traditional Christianity. Not all of them; that’s the key. One-third don’t, but two-thirds do.”

For many years, at least in my lifetime, pastors and seminary types have looked at phenomena like Emerson and Bracey’s report through a particular lens. The idea basically goes like this: People who claim to be Christians but don’t exhibit the beliefs or traits consistent with Christianity are likely not Christians in the historic sense but what we’ve come to call cultural Christians, or people who benefit emotionally or socially from being a part of Christian stuff but who are ultimately more committed to a bygone American lifestyle. This sentiment comes through in the widespread comment, dubiously attributed to 20th-century evangelist Billy Graham, that a high percentage — was it 70? 75? 85? — of Christian church members are indeed unsaved.

Emerson seems unconvinced of that simple of an explanation. He finds instead that adherents of the religion of whiteness appear generally and genuinely convinced that their beliefs reflect Christianity.

“All of these folks are, in our best guess and from what we saw, faithfully trying to be Christian,” Emerson said of the two-thirds or white respondents who did not agree with the summaries of Bible teachings on diversity. “There’s this complication that happens mostly in white churches, but you can find it in other kinds of churches, too, that we call a competing religion. It becomes a sect or kind of a creed that rises to status. It’s a distortion of traditional Christianity.”

And he means Christianity broadly. Of course, American evangelicals have been the center of much race-related talk in the political and social arenas since at least the late 1970s. Yet while evangelicals are included in this “distortion” of Christianity, Emerson and Bracey aren’t telling an evangelical story.

“When we analyzed and compared white evangelicals to white Catholics and white mainliners, there wasn’t a difference,” Emerson said. “The religion of whiteness has followers across all of those groups.”

Emerson is quick to point out that his research does not indicate that every white Christian doesn’t believe the Bible or that every Asian, Hispanic, or Black Christian does. But social patterns are about majorities.

“You find variation within every group, always. What matters when you’re talking about groups is what the majority thinks. In that case, there is no variation. Every other racial group thinks completely differently about these issues of race than do white Christians.”