Yes, American Christianity Is Racist On Purpose

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]My evangelism teacher in Bible school said, "You got to get them lost before you can get them saved." And if you can't make this people feel, that's why David Livingston when he went to Africa as a missionary said that the first step of missions is to destroy the local culture. Destroy it through capitalism because as you create a desire for western goods, they will realize how worthless they are and they will listen to the missionary about their god. That is an effective strategy by the way that the the church growth movement that was alluded to earlier is also a movement in missionaries uh among missionaries. And it says that the groups most likely to respond to the message of the gospel are groups that have been traumatized.

[00:00:39]>> And so those are the places you should work among traumatized groups and then tell them about the gospel. Um, this is not a big surprise. It uh that that people who are down and out on their luck, somebody else comes along who's rich and powerful and tells them, "Here's how I got rich and powerful."

[00:00:53]Uh, they they might they might believe that.

[00:00:56]>> This is the current Grand Wizard of the KKK. As interviewed by Christian influencer Bryce Crawford. Clan leaders throughout history have typically been cops, local industry owners, elected officials, and pastors. Yeah, in this case, this guy is a pastor. The clan is an explicitly Protestant Christian group after all. Now, even though this popular Christian influencer faced zero repercussions for saying this to a militant racist on camera, >> you're the grand wizard of the Nice Party of the KKK and I love you. I think you're a kind, gentle human being, and I've had a joy talking to you.

[00:01:29]>> Still, most American Christians don't see the clan favorably. Many would say ideas of racial supremacy at least, are wrong, even sinful. But have you ever noticed how white supremacist talking points and evangelical Christian rhetoric kind of take the same shape?

[00:01:46]They both like to claim that their group is responsible for civilization itself.

[00:01:50]They readily ignore the achievements of other groups, characterize other groups as inherently broken, and then state that they are clearly superior.

[00:01:59]Certainly you could you can't compare what has been done in Africa. I don't think you can anyway and what advancements they have made compared to advancement that Europeans have made in culture, education, in science, in health, in faith, in music. You can't you can't find a compar there Beethoven coming out of Africa. Well, you could zoom out and you could look at the big picture numbers of the impact of atheism in societies, which is often loss of hope, loss of peace, loss of comfort, loss of purpose, loss of moral values and dignity and human personhood. Even consciousness is denied many times, many times with atheism. And you could zoom out and look at the positive impacts of Christianity helping build civilization and create our moral compass that even the atheists operate from today. The big picture benefit is the testimony of the world is that Christianity is better than atheism.

[00:02:51]>> It's easy enough to push back on this rhetoric. Anyone can cite examples of great moral accomplished people from all kinds of backgrounds. I mean, specifically, black humanists and agnostics have played monumental roles in US history as scholars, as philosophers, as physicians, and as political organizers, and more. Hell, it was a party of black Marxists in the 60s who started free breakfast programs in schools. White supremacists and Christian supremacists have a tidy comeback to this though. Did you catch the apologist bit about where atheists get morality?

[00:03:23]>> Look at the positive impacts of Christianity helping build civilization and create our moral compass that even the atheists operate from today.

[00:03:30]>> Yes, their comeback is to say, "Sure, others are capable of good, but not on their own. When they do anything good, they're just copying us or doing what we told them." What are the blessings that that the black people give them to the world? What do you tell them?

[00:03:45]>> Uh they would the blessings that black people give to the world.

[00:03:48]>> Yeah.

[00:03:49]>> Oh, I think that they're them just being alive in general is a blessing. I believe the value of life is a general blessing.

[00:03:54]>> But how did that bless the world?

[00:03:56]>> Well, how do you bless the world?

[00:03:57]>> Well, I'm talking about me. I I probably could have blessed the world too much, you know, because I'm not a scientist.

[00:04:03]Okay. But I know Michelangelo blessed the world. I know that all kinds of of people in history have built cathedrals and worship the Lord and and built science and advancement and education and schooling and so forth and blessed the world. We've gone to Africa and we brought them education. We brought them hospitals. We brought them uh sense of nobility. We we we interjected a a culture, a white Aryan culture into the heartland of Africa. A large portion of that was in a in a black area. And my mom never had a concern about my dad taking me in in the summer when I was in school into the areas because those people were under the rule of law. And they and that rule of law was governed govern them and they they attempted it appears like maybe I'm wrong but it appears they attempted to be like the white man. And so they fashioned their whole society and their structure and their families after white culture. And uh so you had families back then. 85% of the black families had a father at home.

[00:05:01]>> I would say that some of the most good that we can measure in the world is because of hospitals, orphanages, universities, elderly care. All of that comes out of Christian charity. So I'd say that we can contribute all those institutions to the innovation that Christianity gives us in our charity work. And historians, sociologists, they'll agree that hey, maybe I'm a secular atheist. I'm sure you said you're a deconstructionist. So, I'm sure you're very aware of Bart Urman. He's a New Testament scholar who's an atheist, but he still says we have all of our values and our moral framework today because of Christian virtue.

[00:05:36]>> In saying this, the supremacists reassert their claim to superiority.

[00:05:40]See, if all good things are just an imitation of them, then every time another group does a good thing, they can paradoxically claim credit for it.

[00:05:48]Historically, black universities produced some of the best scholars in the country. Well, white people invented school, so that's another point for us.

[00:05:57]Doctors Without Borders was started by secular leftists, you say. Well, medicine is really our tradition. So, you can thank us conservative Christians for that one. Some of us know how crafty these claims are. Notice how they say that their group created specific institutions like universities and hospitals and use that to imply that their group actually did something far greater than that. that they invented education and medicine or even intelligence and compassion themselves.

[00:06:27]This amounts to a laughably ahistorical claim. Neither white people nor Christians created medicine or education or religion or music or art or charity or democracy or anything so fundamental to human culture. All of these things have existed throughout the world since long before Christianity or so-called whiteness were invented. Traditions of medicine, agriculture, foraging, weaving, diplomacy, charity, construction, natural and moral philosophy all date back thousands of years in cultures across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. In most cases, these were not housed in what Westerners would call a university or hospital. But the fact that these traditions have not always been centralized in that precise way does not diminish their significance as moral and intellectual achievements. There are actually some pretty massive benefits to decentralized education and medicine.

[00:07:25]Like cultures with those traditions don't typically hoard their knowledge and extort you for the rest of your life if you want some of it or you know let you just die right in front of them if you can't pay handsomely for medical care. A lot of people just don't know any of this, though. They've been taught an intentionally biased history full of misinformation and lies by omission. So common and so thorough is this kind of indoctrination that it's even turned some of the most clear-cut victims of white Christian supremacy into apologists for its crulest acts.

[00:08:00]>> If it wasn't for Christianity, my ancestors would still have been enslaved. If it wasn't for Christianity or for white settlers bringing us over here and teaching us Christianity, I might be the descendant of someone that wants to force me into female, you know, genital, what is it called? Female circumcision, right? Or be forced to have something that's called dry sex.

[00:08:20]Look that up. That's insane. But many African cultures believe that it is um that it is sinful for a woman to be aroused. So, they literally put sand, look this up, they put sand inside of them before having sex. This is the the pagan cultures that Christianity went out and eradicated. And I will agree that it was frustratingly difficult to to accept that part of Christianity. But when you look at what they were doing, >> this indoctrination is made even easier by a historical fact that she mentioned herself.

[00:08:52]>> The pagan cultures that Christianity went out and eradicated. And I will agree that it was frustratingly difficult to to accept that part of Christianity. Christian supremacists and white supremacists have eradicated cultures. Many they destroyed entirely as in the largest genocide in all of human history, the European conquest of the Americas. Many others they severely damaged and continue to subjugate. As I described in my video about evangelical missions in Latin America, the indoctrinated don't realize, however, that non-white, non-Christian cultures were not destroyed or subjugated because they were supposedly backward. The white Christian was able to convince you that these cultures were backward because these cultures were first destroyed or subjugated. Without members of these cultures around to write history or set the record straight, it's easy to characterize them as inferior and thereby defend white Christian supremacy. Why are there Christian supremacists in the first place, though?

[00:09:56]And why do they share so much rhetoric with white supremacists? You might expect me to say that this is because Christianity is inherently chauvinistic.

[00:10:04]But no, I think that's too simple an answer and fails to account for the massive diversity of thought and action across Christian communities and throughout time. There's a more concrete reason why white supremacy and Western Christianity tend to converge in this way. They were each molded into their current form in order to serve the same purpose. It's story time or history time. It's both. And my primary source for this upcoming history section is Dr. Eric Williams book, Capitalism and Slavery. You should give it a read. But first, a quick reminder that black Americans are not just being attacked in the abstract today. Now that the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, black communities are having their representation in politics suppressed even further through gerrymandering.

[00:10:55]Nearly 40 sources have reported on this story. And while sources marked as left emphasize the GOP's efforts to erase black representation, right-leaning sources are barely covering the story at all. That is a telling fact in itself, isn't it? I was able to see that disparity in coverage as soon as I began reading the story because I found it on Ground News, an independent app and website I use in my real life and have partnered with for years now. Their platform organizes every published perspective on an issue in one place with data on each outlet's political bias, credibility, and financial incentives. I use their Vantage plan and you can get 40% off that plan by going to ground.news/skeepic.

[00:11:31]While right-leaning outlets haven't covered this story much, Ground News has a great feature called their blind spot feed, which is dedicated to surfacing important stories that are being completely ignored by one side of the political spectrum or another. So, right-leaning Ground News users stand a way better chance of seeing this story than they would without ground news. So, get ground news for the person in your life who needs a little help seeing their news blind spot. Go to ground.news/skeepic news/skeepic or scan the QR code on your screen. There you can get the same Vantage plan I use every day for just $5 a month. Taking advantage of these tools is a great step toward reading the news skeptically and staying properly informed. By signing up, you support my sponsor, which in turn supports my channel. So, thank you.

[00:12:08]All right. Western European colonialism was initially for the wealth acquisition of monarchies. They wanted to get richer, so they pillaged. Simple as that. Now to justify their claims to foreign lands and raise their claims above any moral person's scrutiny, colonizers sought the explicit and official approval of the pope. In 1455, for instance, the papable Romanus Pontifffects granted King Alonso of Portugal the right to conquest in certain African land. The Pope explicitly justified the conquest of this land and its people with the notion that colonization aids the Christianization of heathens and infidels. Subduing, capturing, enslaving people and extracting the resources upon which they live is okay, you see, because it brings people to knowledge of the true God. And knowledge of the true God is far more valuable than your life or your possessions.

[00:13:03]Now give me your life and your possessions. Later when the Spanish arrived in the Americas, concisadors recited El Ricarimento to the indigenous people they encountered in Latin with no interpreters present without anyone knowing Latin except for them. They'd tell the people that the rightful authority of all men, the Pope had granted this land to the Spanish monarch and that they must submit themselves to Spanish Christian rule. The Spanish then gave them an ultimatum. But if you do not do this and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of their highness. We shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highness may command. And we shall take away your goods and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can as to vassels who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him. And we protest that the deaths and losses which shall acrue from this are your fault and not that of their highness or ours nor of these cavaliers who come with us. Does it technically count as gaslighting if the person you're attempting to gaslight can't even understand the language you're speaking? The Pope did not sign off on this statement explicitly, but it was a pretty clear extension of the logic which earlier papal bulls established. And so the first slaves European colonizers took in the Americas were indigenous people. And the moral justification for this was the supposedly God-given right for Christians to dominate non-Christians.

[00:14:49]Building this Christian civilization in other people's land turned out to be very profitable and more countries got in on the cash grab. The British added to the labor force in their colonies by importing indentured servants. These were poor people from Britain and Ireland especially. Sometimes they simply exchanged their servitude for passage to the Americas. Sometimes these were convicts being made to serve a sentence. Oftent times people were tricked by scam artists into signing these predatory contracts. Others were outright kidnapped and sold into this kind of servitude. These people were made to work in grueling conditions for a set number of years and then released.

[00:15:29]Of course, the British along with other European colonial powers also imported African slaves. Now, here's a pivotal point in all of this. As all three of these people groups were forced to work, the people profiting off of their labor noticed some things. One, indigenous people of the Americas usually did not come from authoritarian cultures, so they were very hard to boss around.

[00:15:52]Plus, they knew the land. They had connections to people surrounding colonial settlements, and they spoke languages common in the area. So, they successfully ran away more often. All this meant they were not very profitable investments as laborers compared to other groups. Two, European indentured servants had contracts that did expire.

[00:16:14]They had some rights. Once acquired, they weren't forever enslaved. So, they promised a smaller return on investment long-term. And since they mostly looked and spoke like the free European people in the colonies, at least those who were, you know, not the elites who actually owned other human beings, they could, if they escaped, have a chance at making a life for themselves in the colonies. Also, after it became apparent to working people in Britain that state officials were literally kidnapping their own people off the streets to sell them into servitude for the empire, working people started resisting. it became more difficult to trick or capture people to sell them off. This is in part why European indentured servants became fairly expensive. And three, African slaves were given no contracts and no rights. They were slaves for life from the beginning. And that promised a lot of valuable labor for those who bought them. They were also relatively easier to acquire. They usually didn't speak the languages of the colonies.

[00:17:15]They didn't look like Europeans, and they didn't know the land. So if they ran away, they had little hope of finding a place to settle or making it back home. This meant African slaves were usually cheaper than European servants and offered more labor value than any other group. This, Eric Williams submits, is why African slaves became the preferred source of labor and slavery became a fundamental institution for European imperialism.

[00:17:42]It made economic sense, but the practice of enslaving Africans still had a vulnerability in the early days. African slaves often worked alongside European indentured servants, and the two people groups could find common cause. They were both brutalized by the same bosses and wanted freedom. This solidarity became especially strong when servants and slaves started families together, as we know plenty of them did. Slavers had to create a way to break this bond or else risk being overthrown by a united class of European and African laborers.

[00:18:18]They found two ideological forces capable of protecting their economic interests. The triedand-rue permission structure of Christian spiritual hierarchy and a new pseudocientific notion of a racial hierarchy. We see this reflected especially in 17th and 18th century laws in the British colonies. a society controlled by slavers. In 1662, Virginia passed a law making all children of enslaved African women automatically enslaved from birth, even if the father was English. It also explicitly criminalized Christians fornicating with African people. This, of course, allowed slaveholders to retain their owned labor force across generations and legally enforce divides between the newly invented categories of Christian white people and non-Christian black people. In 1667, Virginia legally declared that baptizing a slave into the Christian faith would not exempt them from bondage. And so while Christianity could still be used to justify the enslavement of Africans, it could not be legally used as a means of liberation.

[00:19:25]The Christian spiritual hierarchy and pseudocientific racial hierarchy were integrated further. In 1682, Virginia enacted laws that made all non-Christian servants purchased by a Christian into slaves, imprisoned any white person who married a black or mixed person, whether slave or free, made it legal for slavers to kill a slave during corrective punishment, and made it illegal for any non-white person, slave or free, to physically resist any white Christian in any way. Here we see slavers sewing division between even free white and black people while further cementing Christian and racial hierarchy. I'll mention finally the 1740 slave act out of South Carolina in response to a slave revolt. This law among other things conscripted poor free white people into militarized slave patrols. Basically regular working white people were drafted into protecting the profits of rich people. This shows us again that white Christian supremacy was created not to elevate all white people or all Christians above others, but to justify the elevation of rich people above all others. Capitalism created this form of bigotry and it continues to perpetuate it today, twisting Christianity and so-called science into instruments for the division of working people and wealth accumulation for the rich. The corporatebacked, explicitly pro- capitalist and US government aligned Turning Point USA spreads pseudoscientific ideas about race and IQ.

[00:20:58]>> They don't like it because the left says they're racist because I mean you can read Charles Murray's bell curve why they don't like it.

[00:21:04]>> Yeah. And >> but would you agree we should bring back IQ test?

[00:21:07]>> Says racist things about black culture.

[00:21:09]>> Current black culture, right? From the athletes to the rap music to the music.

[00:21:14]I don't see the nuclear family elevated.

[00:21:17]nor is it an internal black cultural expectation >> and says black people are unfairly privileged through civil rights protections. This influences white working people to blame black working people for poverty. This distracts from the fact that poverty for many working people, white, black, or otherwise is an intentional feature of capitalist economies. The ultra wealthy benefit from a portion of the population always being unemployed. That way, there is always someone willing to replace any worker demanding higher pay or better working conditions. Turning Point creates moral panic about trans people supposedly being predators and lays blame for sexual crimes of all kinds at the feet of queer people. Meanwhile, the very president which Turning Point supports and the capitalists who fund Turning Point are all well known now to be prolific predators. Christian apologists unabashedly support and simultaneously deny the genocide of Palestinians posing with IDF weapons of war, claiming that killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people is justified on religious grounds.

[00:22:26]Meanwhile, the US-Israeli Empire constantly brags about how it plans to use the newly cleared Palestinian land to gain even greater wealth for itself.

[00:22:35]Christian apologists call for the US military to intervene in Nigeria to stop a so-called Christian genocide. We're trying to get the government to care about this. We're trying to push this forward to get forward movement to have the US government maybe do drone strikes to kill these terrorists so that they cannot do this stuff or do something.

[00:22:53]But they conveniently omit the fact that European Christian colonialism created the insecure conditions of northern Nigeria just as many or more Muslims have been killed by the same people killing Christians there. And the US military is using this dubious narrative of a Christian genocide to justify furthering US military and corporate power. In a recent document titled Ending the Persecution of Christians in Nigeria, the US Congress called on Nigeria to divest from Russian military equipment in favor of American military equipment through sales and financing.

[00:23:27]Hm. They recommended Treasury Department programs and activities which will safeguard US national security and enhance the favorable balance of trade for the United States. And they want US Development Finance Corporation investments in Nigeria.

[00:23:44]H yes, it really sounds like protecting innocent lives is all they're interested in here. There are, of course, countless examples of white supremacists and Christian nationalists advocating for political regimes which stress the supposed moral superiority of capitalism while demonizing non-religious people and anti- capitalists as murderous.

[00:24:05]Billy Graham did this his entire career.

[00:24:07]So did Jerry Fwell. So did Charlie Kirk.

[00:24:10]And so does the so-called US Liberty Commission, which I have a video about.

[00:24:15]Christian apologists even outright say this sometimes, >> right? I'm not going to be far left. Far left is anothetically opposed to Christianity in almost every way. And the far right starts to be this really far right starts to be this mirror of the left. And so it starts to become anothetical. But there is a very strong conservative thrust that I get from my Christian faith. That is conservative family values that involves things like limited government powers, uh, personal freedoms and things like that.

[00:24:41]Capitalism is even implied not as the best thing in the world, but as personal property and working hard and getting paid what you what you owed.

[00:24:47]>> Yeah. How's that working out for you?

[00:24:49]You think? Do do most people in the capitalist world, which is most of the world, including the third world countries that we have paged and colonized? Do do most people in the capitalist world own their own homes? Do most people in the capitalist world get paid fairly? Like really, I believe you that you think Christianity means that we ought to have a system that's fair and equitable. I get that. That could actually make sense to me. But like, is your Christianity going towards supporting capitalism really delivering that, buddy? All of this to say, Christian supremacy and white supremacy share rhetoric because they were produced to serve the same function.

[00:25:26]Defend and morally rationalize the disgustingly exploitative actions of the capitalist class. This means that if we want to stop the bigotry of white supremacy and Christian supremacy, we can't just rebut its talking points and expect it to die down. No, we have to eliminate the underlying force that produces it, the system of economic and social relations that is capitalism.

[00:25:52]This is an idea that I came to from years of study and experience in fighting Christian nationalism and bigotry. And it's only somewhat recently that I realized this concept has existed in leftist thought for well over a century. Your economic system, your base, gives rise to and or fuels cultural and religious systems which morally justify and reinforce your economic system. So if you want to fight a widespread form of bigotry, you've got to cut off its source of fuel in the base. Otherwise, that bigoted piece of culture, the superructure, will keep popping back up every time you smack it down. Eliminating capitalism will not wholly eliminate Christian bigotry or racism, but it will drastically help to keep it from being such a widespread and intense force in our culture. Atheists, humanists, and skeptics, I hope you're hearing me. If you want to stop Christian nationalism, if we want to stop religious indoctrination in public schools, if we want to stop being literally called terrorists simply for advocating for our rights, we can't place our hope in debate and debunking videos or any kind of information campaign alone. We have to organize to change the economic base of this country and beyond. This conviction is what has me so involved in building real life communities, particularly at the Atheist Community of Austin and elsewhere. Real life community is where real change starts. It's going so well actually that we've outgrown our little building and could really use an addition and just lots of maintenance and repairs. If you want to help our queer, secular, leftist community center of sorts have space to serve more people in the central Texas area, we're having a 24-hour fundraiser live stream starting May 16th at 6 p.m.

[00:27:48]right here on my YouTube channel. Come watch my shenanigans on the stream and give a few bucks directly to the community. With that, thank you for watching. I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. Thank you to Ground News for sponsoring this video. Remember to use my link to get 40% off your ground news vantage plan and start seeing through the chaos of our media landscape. I genuinely use it myself. I think you'll like it. Of course, a special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. And praise be unto our lady, River, my top patron and the official savior of this channel. If you want to support my work, then subscribe and do check out my Patreon.

[00:28:20]As always, if you are an apostate in need, there are resources linked in the description to help you find community.

[00:28:25]That is very important and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments. And until next time, stay skeptical.