This is an excellent resource for those who identify as Christians but have become disillusioned with those in the church that side MAGA politics.

Attorney Robert Callahan is full of righteous anger; anger over the way white evangelical Christianity is misrepresenting the mission and values of Jesus Christ. He sets forth persuasive arguments and ample evidence to support his contention. Black church members are discouraged from discussing issues of concern because it may make white male conservatives uncomfortable and we can’t have that in the church. (Hmmm, why is the white male demographic the standard for sensitivity?)

As a white female Christian, I have witnessed a similar, but lesser, marginalization in male headship congregations. I found many of Callahan’s points transferable. For example, how abusive does a church environment have to be before you head for the exit? 50% of the time? Or 25%? How do you know whether to leave or to stay? If it is time to leave, how do you continue to grow spiritually and find fellowship?

While the author and his family have experienced church hurt, his underlying commitment to his faith is strong. This book is a call for repentance, borne out of genuine love for the American evangelical church which has lost its way.

This book looks at White Christianity and their churches. There is still major racism and horrible behavior aimed at African Americans, especially in the South. This book hopes to ignite righteous anger and have people step up and leave organizations that continue to degrade those of color. I like that he mentioned his white allies because it shows that some of us have walked away from churches that have discriminated against minorities. Hopefully, black and white pastors will read this book. There is a lot to learn.
The author is a lawyer by trade so the book looks through a law lens. Not actual laws but the way cases are set up. I wasn't fond of this but I appreciate he played to his strength.

An honest and straightforward book regarding white Christianity. The author lays it all out there to open the eyes and hearts to the hypocrisies infiltrating the American church. As per the book description, I relate as a progressive white ally seeking understanding of what went wrong. This is a book that everyone who desires to see a change not just for our generation but for the next should read.

I was provided a complimentary copy of the book from Westminster John Knox Press via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Fire in the Whole: Embracing Our Righteous Anger with White Christianity and Reclaiming Our Wholeness by Robert G. Callahan II

Lawyer and civil rights activist Robert Callahan adds his unique voice to other Church members who have become frustrated by their churches’ ignoring biblical principles and pervasive racism among its members while aiming instead for political power, compromising the gospel for earthly glory. This book is for those who feel they need permission to feel angry, or to leave a congregation where they feel unheeded and marginalized. Robert’s testimony should be heeded by pastors seeking to understand why their non-white church members may feel that integration into the church too often means compromise.

Note: I met Robert almost 20 years ago when he and his wife first came to the church in Waco, TX that became the basis of his critique in the book. We lost touch after I moved away shortly thereafter, but I have followed him on Twitter. Westminster John Knox Press via NetGalley provided an advanced copy of this to me to review at my request and without the requirement that I publish a review. The opinions are my own.

Robert writes in an entertaining style that only a Gen Y could write, deeply steeped in 1980s television reruns, science fiction, and music. But there are plenty of moments where the author bares his soul with raw emotion. He writes a brief memoir of his childhood as a young Black man growing up in a military family, his parents giving him a middle-class upbringing in the deep South where he was frequently the only Black person in his school or neighborhood. Robert’s parents made a point of repeatedly bucking the de facto segregation by taking the family to malls and restaurants where they knew they’d be discriminated against.

“My parents worked tirelessly to ensure we had quality education, opportunities, and safety—a by-product of previously having been run out of a white neighborhood when a cross was burned in our front yard” (p. 106).

His experiences instilled in him a desire to be an attorney at an early age, despite other strong interests and talents. As such, Robert is often in a position to defend the vulnerable and abused while seeing police brutality and overt racism firsthand in central Texas. Robert applies legal logic to his argument that his church (and others like it) is culpable for its sins of omission that perpetuates injuries against minorities, particularly Blacks. Christians remaining silent in the wake of Charlottesville, the lynching of George Floyd, and countless other incidents where they could stand up and perhaps make a difference locally and nationally make them just as responsible as those who commit the crimes (see p. 129). While church members may think they don't harbor racism in their hearts and have good intentions in their attempts to discourage minorities’ anger and discourse for the sake of unity, their inaction is perpetuating an evil.

“The trouble is that certain brands of Christianity are guided by philosophies that conflict with any orthopraxy that dignifies Black and Brown bodies. It's not that they don't understand why addressing race is important; they disagree with the premise of saying so publicly. In their minds, there is no need to address race in church” (p. 126).

Callhan finds instead that too many church members in his former predominantly white megachurch want to avoid discussing uncomfortable topics and too often engage in a “but what about…?” and introduce red herrings (ie: “but all lives matter”). Too many of his white brothers in Christ are quick to dismiss Robert’s personal experiences with racism in his city, telling him he must be mistaken or inventing other reasons for behavior, or basically gaslighting him (ignoring hundreds of years of precedent in that city).

Robert provides an excellent and concise history of American court cases showing the history of legalized racism via “Jim Crow laws” in America in order to educate those who may say “Isn’t racism a thing of the past?” Having spent part of his childhood in Tulsa where the city’s own deadly racist history wasn’t taught in school, he is correct that such a basic education is needed. From Page 74:

“This is the point that I need to drive home to all my friends in white Christianity: Throughout our nation's legal history we have witnessed millions of microadjustments in the law because the idea of equality for minorities has been, and continues to be, confounding for majority culture. And in real time, each development was met with opposition. Yet each of these pitched battles was necessary just to enforce a core idea of Christianity that too many Christians have failed to live up to: love your neighbor.

Considering how crucial the ideals of Christianity purportedly are to those who imagine that God has ordained the United States to be a ‘city on a hill,’ it's mystifying that Christianity didn't hold greater sway over the long arc of our nation's jurisprudence. Thus the proposition that our efforts toward equality should be focused on the perspective that ‘all lives matter’ is exceedingly dubious. If all flesh was created equal and ‘all lives’ mattered to God's people, America should never have needed more than 2 Corinthians 5.”

Robert walks the reader through his deeply personal awakening and eventual exodus from the church he calls “Toxic Fellowship International” beginning with events in 2016 as he was disappointed in the church’s and American evangelicals’ support of and response to Donald Trump’s nomination as a presidential candidate. This is not a story to take lightly as it’s not easy to leave a church or denomination in which you’ve invested decades and have deep personal friendships, and Robert lays out his faith journey from being unable to worship to eventually being able to read the Bible with completely fresh eyes. His story echoes parts of my own faith journey and that of others I have spoken to who have become disenchanted with their church or denomination, primarily Southern Baptists, of which “TFI” was affiliated with at least during my time in Waco.

He was right to be angry; it’s okay to be angry. A healthy relationship has some conflict. Unfortunately, conflict is not well-received in certain institutions. “Minorities quickly recognize ‘angry’ is in the same category of adjective as ‘divisive,’ and both are just around the corner from ‘uppity’” (p. 53). Callahan led a collective effort to speak to church leadership one by one that ultimately did not lead to the change they wanted to see. Details are murky on what exactly would have satisfied them, but I think the problems of institutional bureaucracy and religious nationalism were already baked into the mindset, like many Baptist congregations in the South.

This brings me to the problem I have with using “white Christianity” as the descriptive term for the particular part of the greater Church he is talking about as I feel it detracts from his book. His term is meant to capture “toxic white American capitalistic patriarchal heteronormative Christian nationalism,” which is not easy to condense (p. 13). He further details it as “Those whose orthodoxy and orthopraxy are dictated by an unshakable, yet misguided tangle of a faith and right-bridled political and social conviction that are antithetical to everything Christ represents” (ibid). I just think a term like “white Christianity” becomes a catch phrase that misses the author’s target. I wish he’d gone more with “Christian nationalist” instead of “white.”

Just prior to reading Fire, I reviewed Craig Evans’ Jesus and His World about how much we’ve learned from recent archaeological findings about the first century A.D. prior to the destruction of the second temple– ie: the time of Jesus and the very early Church. What struck me was how much the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of Jewish Pharisees was also “dictated by an unshakable, yet misguided tangle of a faith and right-bridled political and social conviction that are antithetical to everything Christ represents,” ie: the exact same problem among non-Americans, non-whites in the first century A.D. As such, I found I could substitute “Pharisee” wherever I found “white Christianity” and it largely fit. Another uncomfortable truth for all Christians is that the early Church also struggled with racism and social justice– even from apostles (Acts 6:1, Galatians 2:11-12, Titus 1:12-13a, etc.). What we’re seeing with the American evangelical church isn’t new or unique to America, therefore I really hesitate to use a blanket term like “white Christianity.”

Callahan challenged me with his differentiation of “multiethnic” and “multicultural” churches. He describes his former church as “multiethnic”– many church members and some staff from minorities. But not “multicultural,” which he describes as a church that fully embraces language and worship from the cultures represented including Spanish language in worship, incorporating Black spiritual hymns, etc. He rightly points out that the multicultural one looks more like heaven, but in my observation it’s very rare on earth– in fact, America may be the only place that I’ve seen it. (I’ve lived in many other countries and one constant in all of them has been ethnic segregation within the Church, particularly amongst languages, especially in larger cities, and not easily explainable by either whites or colonization.)

On his blog, Callahan writes:

"White evangelicalism (in the broadest interpretation of the evangelical label) has captured the hearts of many minorities with the lure of diversity. But, when it comes to applying its theological interpretations of the gospel into the practicalities of how we love our neighbors - especially in areas of justice - we learn that the functionality of diversity was merely window dressing. A bait & switch. There is a tremendous amount of confusion & pain that result from leaving (or being ejected from) such congregations which appropriately results in deconstruction.”

I recently listened to Russell Moore’s podcast interview with Nancy French, where she describes the frustration with how several evangelical baptists with whom she used to interact, who once argued that Mitt Romney was not morally or spiritually fit for higher office, were later caught in affairs and so many fully embraced Donald Trump. She details the awful way that ostensibly conservative Christians attacked her and her husband online, wrote awful things about their adopted Black child, and how they eventually joined a majority Black congregation where they feel more comfortable. French, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and plenty of other white people have experienced this ostracism since 2016 but don’t use “white Christianity” to describe the problem.

Similarly, phrases like “deconstruction” and “decolonize your faith,” require unpacking. LeCrae, a Black rapper who also went through an intense period where he examined the faith he received from his church versus what the Bible tells us about Jesus, cautions against using a term like “deconstruction” for this process as the word nowadays means exchanging faith for something humanistic and discarding Jesus or Scripture altogether.

Fire in the Whole reminded me most of Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. That book was recommended to me from the pulpit of an even more white megachurch in Tennessee than the “TFI” that the author attended. As such, I don’t think the distinguishing mark of an unhealthy church is whether a church or its worship is overwhelmingly white, it’s whether it’s a Gospel-centered church with a plurality of elders and pastors to hold one another accountable, takes church discipline seriously (including holding members accountable for what they post on Facebook), and – perhaps most importantly– begins any discussion into politics with the exhortation that “Jesus is our only King” and works from there.

Racism was undoubtedly an issue in individual hearts in "TFI." But the red flag for me about “TFI” was at the beginning of the book when the entire congregation was on the edge of their seats waiting for the pastor to say something about who to vote for on the Sunday prior to the election in November 2016. This would be seen as absurd by churches in most countries. We don’t elect kings, our president doesn’t pass laws, and America will rise and fall according to God’s will just like every nation and civilization before it. The Church will always survive and thrive under God’s guidance and we don’t need elected leaders to protect it. As Philip Yancey reminds us in The Jesus I Never Knew, Jesus’ disciples didn’t sit around wondering who was God’s next man to lead the Roman Empire–they didn’t have a choice, other than to submit and pray. We're blessed with being able to choose our leaders, but the Church is given a completely different mandate on earth. The Church should be the Church no matter who is elected President. This is why I think Christian nationalism and a lack of Gospel focus is a more accurate descriptor of the real problem. If you find yourself wondering whether you’re worshiping Jesus or an institution, you’re not in a healthy, Gospel-centered church.

If any of the above issues speak to you, then I highly recommend this book. It is written in the author’s own distinct voice and personality. I greatly look forward to his next book.