Let’s imagine that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the great African-American sociologist and historian, returns from the dead and observes the United States of Trump. Would he be surprised to see that white American Christians voted three times en masse for a crude and grotesque television host, whose only compass is greed, who promised them mass deportations, engages in inept imperialist wars, destroys scientific infrastructure and does not go a day without uttering racist (and sexist) remarks, which cost him no voters?
Du Bois would not be surprised in the least: apart from a few details, he would find the political and religious landscape of the 1920s, of his 1920s.
“I told you so”
Pointing to an editorial written in the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the “monkey trial,” where a Dayton teacher was convicted for teaching the theory of evolution, against which the recently allied fundamentalists had launched a crusade, he would say soberly: “I told you so,” and read the beginning of his text, which has not aged a bit.
“The truth is simple and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant and simple-minded country, curiously compounded of brutality, bigotry, religious faith and demagoguery, and capable not only of error but of persecution, lynching, murder and idiotic stupidity, as well as charity, missions, love and hope. This is America and America is what it is because Americans believe in ignorance. »
That America elected a toxic and cruel clown would not surprise him. He would remind us that white Christians flocked to listen to the “picturesque abuse of the English language” of Billy Sunday, this itinerant preacher and former baseball player, and were converted in numbers in front of his collapsible pulpit.
Du Bois would then read to us what he had to say: “Clearly, Mr. Sunday’s methods are the only ones that appeal to white Christians. Reason does not interest them. Suffering and poverty do not interest them. The lynching, the incineration of human beings and the torture of women leave them unmoved. But Mr. Sunday’s contortions bring people down the sawdust path beneath his marquee. »
The heirs of the fundamentalist movement
And if we told him that lynchings have stopped, Du Bois would tell us that they are less necessary when ICE troops carry out a reign of terror and wield the trigger, including against white people who are unfortunate enough to worry about them, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Du Bois would not be taken aback to see that this explicitly racist administration which uses and abuses the “method of force” against the most vulnerable finds its main electoral base among white evangelicals, direct heirs of the fundamentalist movement, which included many segregationists in its ranks.
Du Bois would remind us that he saw in “fundamentalism” the “American” and “spiritual” version of “fascism,” pointing to the article “The Specter of Fear,” published in 1926. He would tell us to reread that paragraph where he described “dogma” as the “surest” “means” of destroying the ability of the man in the street to form clear ideas and argue logically.”
And if we pointed out to him that Trump himself has nothing pious, he would again redirect our attention to this same text, showing the passage where he denounced the “doublespeak” of “leaders in matters of religion”. As for the collusion between Christianity, capitalism and imperialism exhibited by the Trump administration, Du Bois would not see anything very new there. “Reread “The Souls of the White People”,” he would tell us.
A misguided Christian nation
Indeed, we would discover that he was already writing in 1920 that “white Christianity is a terrible failure” and that the “number of whites who practice democracy and the disinterestedness of Jesus Christ, even with a reasonable approximation, is so small and so negligible that it could give rise to a joke.”
And if Catholic readers did not feel concerned because they believe that only Protestantism is at issue, Du Bois would point out to them that white American Catholics have voting behavior quite similar to evangelicals, that JD Vance is not Protestant, and neither are the majority of conservative judges on the Supreme Court.
Finally, while Christian nationalists repeat over and over again that the United States is a Christian nation, he would seek out an even older extract from his work, dating from 1907, and thunder against his fellow citizens by rereading it in a firm and clear voice: “It is absurd to describe the concrete religion of this nation as Christian. We are not humble, we are brazenly proud; we are not merciful, we are merciless towards our friends and towards our enemies; we are neither peaceful nor peace-loving, as our armies and warships prove; we don’t want to be martyrs, we would much rather be thieves and liars as long as we can be rich. »
Roughly one hundred and twenty years later, this paragraph perfectly describes the style of Christianity brandished by the Trump administration. It’s no coincidence: “Make America Great Again!” ” is tantamount to returning to the America of robber barons, imperialism and segregation.
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