Race Rendered Theologically: The Entangled Theological and Racial Discourse of Josiah Strong, 1885-1915

Abstract

Analyzing the relationship between white mainline Protestant theology and white supremacy in the twentieth-century United States raises methodological challenges because of the coded language of dog-whistle politics and color-blind racism, and the shifting categories of whiteness, Christian, and American. The challenge is how to identify the racial implications of theological arguments not explicitly marked as such. This paper examines how theological constructs explicitly linked to white supremacist projects may continue to replicate whiteness and racial logics even when they become detached from explicit racial markers by tracking the shifting theo-racial discourse of white U.S. Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong from 1885-1915. Drawing on Ann Stoler’s theorization of the “polyvalent mobility” of racial discourse, I demonstrate how racial essentialisms entwined in Strong’s theological discourse shift while the grammar of an evolutionary logic that hierarchizes categories of being based on these shifting essentialisms remains consistent. The result is a subsuming of racial grammar into a more narrowly articulated theological discourse, and the subsuming of a global imperial project of assimilation to Anglo-Saxon U.S. Protestant “civilization” into a global evangelizing project. Ultimately, for Strong, religious training becomes a eugenic tactic as the three social laws of Christ become evolutionary laws, and conversion to Strong’s “Christianity of Christ” becomes the culmination of both God’s plan for humans and the evolution of humans. This paper demonstrates one instance in which racial and theological discourse are intertwined even when devoid of racial markers, and how, in certain instances, theological claims made on behalf of Christianity may also function as claims on behalf of whiteness.