WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM:

Publisher: The Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 164pp., ISBN 97814661179.

In this vitally important scholarly book, Anthea Butler holds a mirror up to the conservative evangelical Christianity in today’s America and the image it reflects is powerful and excruciating. Racism is, and should always be, an anathema to religion. But it seems a vast majority conservative evangelical Christians in the US unashamedly wear the badge of ‘White Evangelical Christianity’ and are even proud of it. The author, an associate professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading historian, grapples long with the question, “does being evangelical really mean being white?”’ The answer of course is obvious, “Evangelicalism is synonymous with whiteness”, she concludes. While the ideal definition of ‘Evangelicalism’” is