Judgment as Unveiling: Race, Empire, and the Crisis of Sacred Authority in
America
Timothy P. Cotton
Abstract
This paper argues that the contemporary resurgence of reactionary politics in the United
States—often attributed to the rise of populist figures in the twenty-first century—cannot be
adequately understood as the product of a single leader or moment. Rather, it contends that the
election of an African American president in 2008 functioned as a symbolic rupture within a
long-standing racialized and theologically informed social order, exposing latent structures of
identity, power, and fear that had been culturally normalized rather than resolved. Drawing on
sociological theories of status threat and cultural formation, alongside theological analyses of
empire, chosenness, and judgment, the paper situates the backlash not as an anomaly but as a
predictable response to perceived loss of normative authority.
By tracing the genealogy of racial hierarchy and sacred order from European
Christendom through American civil religion, the paper demonstrates that racism in the United
States operates less as an individual moral failure and more as a formative cultural immersion
sustained by theological narratives of order, providence, and restoration. The presidency of
Barack Obama is examined as a moment of symbolic crisis that rendered these narratives
unstable, provoking a reaction aimed not at policy disagreement but at the restoration of a
threatened moral and social hierarchy. Within this framework, subsequent political movements
are interpreted as restorative rather than revolutionary, oriented toward undoing rather than
reimagining.
The paper concludes by offering a theological reading of backlash as a form of
judgment understood not as divine punishment but as revelation—an unveiling of the fragile
foundations upon which claims of innocence, dominance, and sacred legitimacy rest. Against
narratives of restoration, it proposes a theology of hope grounded not in the recovery of lost
authority but in the possibility of transformation, repentance, and the relinquishment of imperial
identity.
I. Introduction
Judgment as Unveiling and the Crisis of Sacred Authority
In recent years, political commentary in the United States has tended to explain the
resurgence of reactionary and exclusionary movements by focusing on individual leaders,
electoral cycles, or discrete policy disputes. Such explanations, while not without merit, struggle
to account for the depth, persistence, and emotional intensity of the backlash that has reshaped
American public life in the twenty-first century. The scale of this reaction—its willingness to
abandon democratic norms, sacralize national identity, and legitimate cruelty in the name of
restoration—suggests that more is at stake than ordinary political disagreement. What is being
contested is not merely power, but meaning; not simply governance, but the legitimacy of a long-
standing social and moral order.
This paper argues that the election of an African American president in 2008 functioned
as a symbolic rupture within a racialized and theologically informed conception of American
authority. Rather than marking the resolution of racial history, this moment exposed unresolved
structures of identity, hierarchy, and belonging that had been culturally normalized rather than
resolved. The backlash that followed should therefore be understood not as an irrational
aberration nor as the invention of a charismatic populist figure, but as a reaction to the perceived
collapse of a sacred order—one in which whiteness, national dominance, and moral authority
were mutually reinforcing and largely unquestioned.
Sociological accounts of political reaction often describe this phenomenon in terms of
status threat: the fear experienced by historically dominant groups when their normative position
appears endangered by demographic, cultural, or symbolic change. While this framework is
essential, it remains incomplete unless paired with a theological analysis of how authority itself
has been sacralized within Western and American history. In the United States, political power
has rarely been justified on pragmatic grounds alone. It has been framed instead through
narratives of providence, chosenness, destiny, and moral exceptionalism—narratives inherited
from European Christendom and reshaped through the development of American civil religion.
Within this framework, challenges to racial hierarchy are experienced not simply as political
losses but as violations of a divinely sanctioned order.
The presidency of Barack Obama represented such a challenge at the level of symbol and
imagination, regardless of the limits or moderation of his actual policies. His election disrupted
an unspoken theological grammar in which authority, legitimacy, and national identity had long
been associated with whiteness as an unmarked norm. The widespread insistence that the United
States had entered a “post-racial” era following this election paradoxically intensified the
backlash, as it denied the depth of unresolved racial formation while rendering expressions of
resentment both illegitimate and inexpressible—until they found new political permission.
Interpreting this backlash theologically requires rethinking the category of judgment. Rather than
understanding judgment as divine punishment imposed from without, this paper adopts a
conception of judgment as unveiling—an exposure of truths long obscured by power, myth, and
moral insulation. From this perspective, the reactionary turn in American politics reveals not the
sudden emergence of racism or authoritarian impulse, but the fragility of the sacred narratives
that had sustained claims to innocence and moral superiority. The crisis is therefore not merely
political but theological: a crisis of sacred authority itself.
By tracing the genealogy of racial hierarchy and sacred order from European
Christendom through American nationhood, and by examining the Obama presidency as a
moment of symbolic disruption, this paper seeks to illuminate why backlash has proven so
resilient, why it cannot be reduced to individual animus, and why appeals to restoration exert
such powerful affective force. The argument proceeds on the assumption that racism operates
less as a matter of conscious intent than as a formative cultural immersion, shaping perceptions
of normalcy, belonging, and legitimacy even among those committed to justice. Consequently,
the paper resists moralizing explanations in favor of structural and theological diagnosis.
The paper unfolds in seven sections. Following this introduction, it first examines the
pre-American roots of race, hierarchy, and sacred order within European Christendom and
imperial theology. It then considers the United States as an inherited theological project in which
race and providence were woven into national identity. The analysis next turns to the Obama
presidency as a moment of symbolic crisis and to subsequent political movements as attempts at
restoration rather than innovation. The final sections reflect on racism as formation rather than
intent and conclude with a theological account of judgment and hope that rejects restorationist
nostalgia in favor of transformation and repentance.
II. Race, Order, and Empire Before America
Theological Genealogies of Hierarchy
Any attempt to understand the contemporary racial backlash in the United States that
begins with modern electoral politics risks mistaking symptoms for origins. The structures
exposed in the present moment were not invented in America, nor did they arise primarily from
modern scientific racism. Rather, they emerged from a much older theological and imperial
imagination in which hierarchy, difference, and domination were woven into a sacred vision of
order. Race, in this sense, must be understood not as a biological category that later acquired
theological justification, but as a theological and moral category that preceded and shaped
modern racial classification.
Within European Christendom, social hierarchy was not merely tolerated; it was actively
moralized. Difference was interpreted as divinely ordered, and inequality was rendered
meaningful through appeals to providence, vocation, and natural law. Empire did not simply
require administrative power; it required a moral narrative capable of legitimating conquest,
subjugation, and extraction. Theology supplied that narrative by aligning divine order with
imperial order, thereby transforming domination into obedience and hierarchy into virtue.
Crucially, this theological imagination did not operate primarily through explicit
doctrines of racial superiority as they would later appear, but through the construction of
normativity. Certain bodies, cultures, and ways of being came to represent order, rationality, and
authority, while others were marked as disorderly, deficient, or in need of governance. What
would later be named “whiteness” functioned initially not as a racial identity but as an unmarked
position of proximity to power—an assumed norm against which all difference was measured.
The moral force of this normativity lay in its invisibility: it did not appear as domination but as
common sense.
The expansion of European empire intensified this theological ordering of the world.
Colonial encounters were framed not merely as economic or territorial ventures but as
civilizational and salvific projects. The language of Christian mission merged seamlessly with
the logic of empire, producing a theological anthropology in which non-European peoples were
positioned as objects of discipline, conversion, and improvement. This fusion of Christianity and
colonialism did not simply justify violence; it reconfigured Christian imagination itself, binding
faith to possession, mastery, and control.
In this context, race functioned as a stabilizing mechanism for empire. It offered a way to
naturalize hierarchy by locating difference within bodies rather than within political
arrangements. Yet this naturalization was always theological at its core. Claims about
civilization, reason, and moral capacity were inseparable from claims about divine intention and
order. As a result, racial hierarchy was not experienced primarily as injustice but as fidelity—to
God, to creation, and to history itself.
What emerges from this genealogy is the recognition that racism cannot be adequately
addressed as a deviation from Christian theology or Western moral tradition. It is, instead, a
distortion that arose within them, shaped by the demands of empire and sustained by sacred
narratives of order. The theological imagination that sanctified hierarchy did so not through overt
cruelty alone but through appeals to peace, stability, and moral coherence. Difference became
dangerous not because it was evil, but because it threatened the perceived harmony of a divinely
ordered world.
This legacy would be carried forward into the American context, where it would be
adapted rather than abandoned. The collapse of European Christendom did not dissolve its
theological structures; it displaced them. As imperial authority migrated westward, so too did the
sacred narratives that underwrote it. America did not invent a racialized sacred order ex
nihilo—it inherited one, reshaped it through its own historical circumstances, and rendered it
central to its national identity.
Understanding this inheritance is essential for interpreting later moments of crisis. When
racial hierarchy is embedded within a sacred vision of order, challenges to that hierarchy are
experienced not as political disagreements but as theological threats. What is ultimately at stake
is not simply who governs, but whether the world still makes sense—whether authority remains
intelligible, innocence sustainable, and history trustworthy. The modern backlash, therefore,
cannot be grasped apart from this deeper genealogy of race, empire, and sacred order.
III. America as an Inherited Theological Project
Race, Providence, and Civil Religion
The transfer of imperial authority from Europe to the North American continent did not
mark a theological rupture so much as a translation. The decline of European Christendom did
not dissolve the sacred narratives that had legitimized hierarchy and domination; instead, those
narratives were reconfigured within a new national project. The United States emerged not as a
secular alternative to empire but as an inherited theological experiment—one in which
providence, chosenness, and moral exceptionalism supplied continuity where monarchy and
established church had fallen away.
From its earliest articulations, American identity was framed in explicitly theological
terms. The language of covenant, destiny, and divine favor permeated political imagination,
allowing national expansion and social hierarchy to be interpreted as fulfillment rather than
conquest. This theological framing proved especially effective in reconciling Enlightenment
ideals of liberty with the realities of slavery, displacement, and racialized violence. Rather than
exposing contradiction, appeals to providence and divine order absorbed it, transforming
injustice into necessity and domination into vocation.
Within this framework, race functioned as a crucial stabilizing mechanism. Whiteness
became intertwined with notions of moral capacity, self-governance, and legitimate authority,
while nonwhite bodies were positioned as objects of control, discipline, or improvement. This
ordering was rarely articulated as hatred; it was far more often justified as stewardship,
civilization, or even benevolence. The moral power of this arrangement lay precisely in its
capacity to present itself as natural and self-evident, requiring no explicit defense because it
appeared to align seamlessly with divine intention.
American civil religion further entrenched this theological ordering by sacralizing
national history itself. Founding moments were rendered sacred, political institutions were
invested with moral authority, and national success was interpreted as evidence of divine
blessing. This civil religion did not replace Christianity but functioned alongside it, shaping the
imagination of believers and nonbelievers alike. Within such a framework, critique of the nation
could easily be construed as impiety, and challenges to racial hierarchy could be experienced as
threats not merely to social order but to moral meaning.
Crucially, this sacralization of national identity depended upon narratives of innocence.
American power was repeatedly framed as reactive rather than aggressive, benevolent rather than
coercive, reluctant rather than expansionist. Violence, when acknowledged at all, was justified as
tragic necessity in the service of a higher good. These narratives insulated the nation from moral
reckoning and rendered racial hierarchy compatible with self-understandings of virtue,
faithfulness, and righteousness. Racism thus persisted not despite America’s moral ideals but
through them.
The theological inheritance of empire also shaped how authority itself was perceived.
Legitimate power was associated with stability, continuity, and order, while disruption was
coded as chaos or rebellion. Movements that sought racial equality therefore faced not only
political resistance but theological suspicion, as they appeared to threaten the coherence of a
divinely sanctioned social arrangement. Even when reform was tolerated, it was often framed as
gradual, controlled, and paternalistic—carefully managed so as not to unsettle the deeper
structures of authority and normativity.
By the twentieth century, these inherited theological patterns had become so deeply
embedded that they often escaped conscious articulation. The language of race increasingly
appeared secularized, while its theological foundations remained operative beneath the surface.
Appeals to “law and order,” “traditional values,” and “national greatness” functioned as coded
continuations of earlier sacred narratives, preserving the association between whiteness,
legitimacy, and moral authority without requiring overt theological justification. In this sense,
American racism did not persist because theology was too present in public life, but because it
was present in ways that had become invisible.
This inherited theological project helps explain why moments of racial disruption
generate such intense affective responses. When race is woven into a sacred narrative of national
purpose, challenges to racial hierarchy are experienced as existential threats. What is endangered
is not merely social dominance but the intelligibility of history itself—whether the nation
remains chosen, whether its power remains righteous, and whether its past can continue to be
regarded as fundamentally good. The defense of racial hierarchy thus becomes a defense of
meaning, clothed in the language of patriotism, tradition, and moral concern.
Understanding America in this way—as an heir to imperial theology rather than a
departure from it—clarifies why later political crises cannot be reduced to policy disagreement
or partisan conflict. They represent moments in which inherited sacred narratives strain under the
weight of historical exposure. The next section will examine how the election of Barack Obama
functioned as precisely such a moment: a symbolic disruption that rendered long-standing
theological assumptions unstable and precipitated a backlash oriented toward restoration rather
than transformation.
IV. The Obama Presidency as Symbolic Crisis
Status Threat and the Collapse of Normative Authority
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 cannot be understood solely in
terms of partisan realignment or policy preference. While his administration pursued largely
conventional centrist governance, the symbolic meaning of his election far exceeded the
substance of his legislative agenda. Obama’s presidency represented a disruption at the level of
imagination—a challenge to the unmarked normativity that had long structured American
conceptions of authority, legitimacy, and belonging. What was destabilized was not simply
political power but a sacred narrative in which race, leadership, and moral authority had been
tacitly aligned.
From a sociological perspective, this disruption is best understood through the concept of
status threat. Status threat arises when historically dominant groups perceive their normative
position as endangered, not necessarily by material loss but by symbolic displacement. The
significance of Obama’s election lay precisely in this symbolic register. His presence in the
highest office of the nation rendered visible what had previously gone unmarked: the racialized
assumptions embedded within American political authority. Whiteness, long functioning as the
default backdrop of leadership, was suddenly exposed as a particularity rather than a universal
norm.
Importantly, this symbolic rupture occurred alongside widespread declarations that the
United States had entered a “post-racial” era. Such claims, while often intended as celebratory,
functioned paradoxically to intensify resentment. By framing Obama’s election as evidence that
racial history had been overcome, these narratives denied the persistence of structural inequality
while simultaneously foreclosing legitimate avenues for addressing it. For those whose sense of
identity and moral standing was already destabilized, the insistence that racism no longer
mattered transformed grievance into grievance without language—resentment stripped of
socially acceptable expression.
Within this context, opposition to Obama quickly exceeded policy disagreement and
assumed a more visceral character. His legitimacy was questioned through conspiracy theories,
coded racial rhetoric, and appeals to tradition and “real America.” These reactions were not
anomalies but predictable expressions of a deeper anxiety: the fear that the symbolic center of
the nation was shifting beyond recovery. Obama’s presidency suggested not merely a temporary
deviation but a trajectory—one in which demographic change, cultural pluralism, and historical
reckoning threatened to become permanent features of American life.
The intensity of this reaction reveals the extent to which authority in the United States
had been sacralized. Political leadership was not experienced as procedurally contingent but as
morally representative. To challenge the racial coding of authority, therefore, was to unsettle a
sacred order in which national identity, virtue, and power were mutually reinforcing. The
backlash that emerged was animated less by specific grievances than by a diffuse sense of loss:
loss of innocence, loss of centrality, and loss of the assurance that history itself remained on
one’s side.
This sense of loss was further amplified by the near election of a woman to the
presidency in 2016. The prospect of Hillary Clinton’s presidency compounded the symbolic
threat already introduced by Obama, reinforcing the perception that traditional hierarchies of
authority were collapsing. Gender and race intersected here not simply as categories of
representation but as markers of normativity. The possibility that leadership might no longer be
reflexively associated with white male identity intensified the urgency of restorationist desire.
What was at stake was not a single election but the perceived end of a world in which dominance
could be taken for granted.
It is crucial to note that these dynamics were not limited to explicit expressions of racism
or sexism. Many who experienced this moment as destabilizing would not identify themselves as
prejudiced and may sincerely affirm commitments to equality. Yet formation precedes intention.
When identity has been shaped within a cultural order that equates normativity with moral
legitimacy, the disruption of that order is experienced as disorientation rather than injustice. The
resulting backlash thus appears, from within, not as hatred but as defense—defense of order,
coherence, and meaning.
Interpreting the Obama presidency as symbolic crisis also clarifies why subsequent
political movements have been oriented toward reversal rather than innovation. The affective
energy driving backlash politics has been directed not toward imagining new futures but toward
reclaiming a past in which authority felt secure and unquestioned. This orientation explains why
undoing the policies and symbolic legacy of the Obama era assumed such moral urgency, even
when alternative visions remained incoherent or contradictory. What mattered was not what
came next, but what could be erased.
Seen through this lens, the election of Obama did not create racial resentment so much as
legitimate its expression by rendering it intelligible to itself. Long-standing anxieties that had
previously been managed through silence, denial, or coded language found a focal point around
which to coalesce. The presidency functioned as a mirror, revealing the fragility of a sacred order
that had depended upon invisibility for its stability. The crisis was not that America had changed,
but that it could no longer convincingly pretend it had not.
The following section will examine how this crisis was met politically—not through
transformation or repentance, but through a restorationist project that sought to reassert lost
authority. In doing so, it will explore why backlash movements have proven so durable and why
their appeal extends beyond any single leader or electoral cycle.
V. Restoration, Not Revolution
Political Reaction as Sacred Reclamation
If the Obama presidency functioned as a symbolic crisis, the political energies that
followed must be interpreted not as the birth of a new ideology but as an attempt to recover an
older one. The animating desire of contemporary backlash politics has been restorative rather
than creative. It is oriented less toward constructing a coherent future than toward reclaiming a
past in which authority felt stable, moral hierarchy seemed intelligible, and national identity
could be imagined as innocent. In this sense, the movement is not revolutionary. It is a project of
sacred reclamation—an effort to reassert a threatened normative order by undoing the symbolic
and institutional gains associated with racial, cultural, and gendered disruption.
This restorationist orientation helps explain why “undoing” has often carried more
affective weight than “doing.” The moral energy of backlash politics is frequently expended on
reversal: dismantling or delegitimizing policies, institutions, and cultural symbols associated
with perceived displacement. Such reversal is not merely strategic; it becomes virtuous. To
reverse is to heal, to cleanse, to restore what was thought to be proper. Where progressive
politics often frames change as moral advance, restorationist politics frames change as moral
contamination and portrays reversal as the recovery of purity.
The moral logic of restoration also clarifies why incoherence has not been a fatal
weakness for reactionary movements. Restoration is not an integrated policy platform; it is an
affective and symbolic orientation. It does not require a consistent program so long as it provides
a felt return of dominance and certainty. What matters is the performance of recovered
authority—the public display that the old order has not been permanently lost. Within such a
framework, contradiction can be tolerated, and even celebrated, because the primary goal is not
rational coherence but the reestablishment of social and moral hierarchy.
This dynamic is visible in the way cruelty can be reframed as strength. When authority is
perceived as threatened, restraint can appear as weakness and empathy as betrayal. Restorationist
politics often treats the willingness to harm as evidence of seriousness and authenticity: proof
that one is no longer constrained by “political correctness,” institutional norms, or the moral
demands of pluralistic life. The target of such harm is rarely accidental. It often falls upon those
who symbolize the displacement that provoked the status threat in the first place—immigrants,
racial minorities, religious outsiders, sexual minorities, and political dissenters. Cruelty thus
becomes not merely a tactic but a ritual enactment of reclaimed dominance.
At this point the theological dimension becomes unmistakable. Restorationist politics is
sustained by a narrative of lost glory and promised return, a narrative that closely resembles
religious patterns of fall and redemption. The nation is imagined as having fallen from greatness
due to corruption, betrayal, or impurity, and salvation is offered in the form of
restoration—returning the nation to what it “really” is. The rhetoric of greatness functions here
as a theological claim about essence: the nation possesses a true identity, and present
disorder represents deviation from that essence. To restore the nation is therefore not simply to
win an election, but to recover a sacred calling.
This is why the movement cannot be reduced to mere partisanship. The political becomes
liturgical. Slogans, spectacles, and symbolic gestures take on a sacramental character,
communicating belonging and authority beyond rational argument. The leader functions less as a
policymaker than as an icon: a sign that the lost order can be reclaimed and that the taboo against
explicit dominance has been lifted. In such conditions, the leader’s personal incoherence or
moral failure does not necessarily disqualify him; it may even intensify his appeal, insofar
as it demonstrates immunity from elite moral norms and reinforces the sense of
transgressive permission.
The restorative logic also explains why backlash politics persists beyond any single
figure. If the problem were merely a personality cult, the movement would collapse with the
decline of the personality. Instead, it continues because it addresses an underlying crisis of sacred
authority. It offers a way to interpret the destabilization of normativity not as a call to repentance
or transformation but as a temporary aberration that can be corrected through will, strength, and
purification. As long as demographic change and historical reckoning continue, the desire for
restoration will remain politically potent.
This framework also clarifies why similar dynamics appear, though in locally specific
forms, beyond the United States. Global right-wing movements often differ in policy and
rhetoric, but they share a common grammar: anxiety over displacement, sacralized national
identity, nostalgia for moral homogeneity, and the portrayal of pluralism as decay. The
transnational resonance of restorationism indicates that the phenomenon is not reducible to a
single national context, even if the American case provides an especially vivid instance.
Reactionary politics travels well because it meets a widespread demand produced by modernity
itself: the desire for fixed identity amid perceived cultural dissolution.
To interpret this restorationism theologically is not to claim that it is consciously
religious. Rather, it is to recognize that it functions as a form of political theology—an implicit
account of meaning, legitimacy, and salvation. The movement promises a return to innocence
without confession, a recovery of dominance without moral reckoning, and a restoration of
sacred authority without transformation. Its power lies in the fact that it offers redemption while
avoiding repentance.
The next section will deepen this diagnosis by turning from movements and symbols to
formation itself. If restorationist politics draws strength from a sacred narrative of lost authority,
it also depends upon a deeper condition: the formative power of culture to produce moral
blindness. Understanding racism as formation rather than intent will clarify why backlash is not
merely the possession of extremists but a potential temptation for ordinary persons formed
within a racialized sacred order.
VI. Racism as Formation Rather Than Intent
Cultural Immersion and Moral Blindness
If restorationist politics draws its power from a sacred narrative of lost authority, it also
depends upon a deeper and more pervasive condition: the formative capacity of culture to shape
perception, desire, and moral judgment prior to conscious choice. One of the most persistent
obstacles to understanding racism in the United States is the tendency to treat it primarily as an
individual attitude—an episodic moral failure located in personal intent. Within that framework,
racism becomes a problem of “bad people” rather than a structure of formation, and the
conversation quickly collapses into defensiveness or denial. Yet if the preceding genealogy is
correct—if racial hierarchy has been embedded within sacred narratives of order, providence,
and legitimacy—then racism must be approached not merely as a moral defect but as a formative
environment: a cultural immersion that teaches persons what is normal long before they decide
what is right.
This distinction between formation and intent matters because modern moral discourse
often relies upon a thin account of agency. It imagines individuals as autonomous moral choosers
who stand outside their cultural worlds, capable of neutral evaluation and untainted judgment.
But human beings are not formed in this way. They are social creatures whose sense of the good
is shaped by language, institutions, habits, fears, and communal stories. Racism, therefore,
persists not only through explicit bigotry but through the ordinary processes by which societies
reproduce norms. It operates through what is assumed, what goes unspoken, and what appears
“natural.”
The power of such formation is most visible in the phenomenon of moral blindness.
Moral blindness is not merely ignorance; it is a structured incapacity to see what a culture has
trained its members to overlook. In racialized societies, the privileges associated with dominant
identity become invisible precisely because they appear normal. The result is that inequity is
experienced not as injustice but as inevitability, and demands for equity are perceived as
disruption rather than repair. This blindness is often intensified by narratives of innocence: the
conviction that one is personally moral, fair-minded, and unprejudiced, which then functions as a
shield against critique. Within this logic, the admission of structural racism is experienced as an
accusation against personal character, and defensive denial becomes almost automatic.
This is why the common insistence “I am not racist” is sociologically and theologically
inadequate. It may express sincere personal intention, but it does not address formation. One may
genuinely reject racial hatred while still inhabiting—and unconsciously reproducing—the
normative assumptions of a racialized order. The issue is not primarily hypocrisy; it is formation.
Inherited narratives of authority and belonging shape reflexes of fear, suspicion, and credibility.
They determine whose pain is believed, whose anger is legitimate, whose claims sound
“reasonable,” and whose presence feels like threat. These reflexes do not require explicit
prejudice; they require only immersion in a social world where certain bodies are coded as
normative and others as suspect.
Theologically, this account of formation resonates with deeper Christian diagnoses of
sin—not merely as a series of bad choices but as a power that shapes perception and desire.
Racism, in this sense, is not adequately described as individual malice; it is an aspect of what
might be called the “principalities and powers” of social life: a structured distortion of communal
existence that trains persons to love order more than justice and innocence more than truth. The
desire for restoration, then, is not simply political preference; it is a spiritual temptation toward
the recovery of dominance without confession.
This framework also clarifies why backlash politics can appear morally compelling to
those who participate in it. If one has been formed to equate normativity with legitimacy, then
the disruption of normativity will feel like disorder. The defense of the old order can therefore be
experienced not as oppression but as responsibility: preserving stability, protecting community,
or safeguarding moral values. The more deeply one is invested in narratives of national
innocence and sacred authority, the more threatening historical exposure will become. In such
cases, the call to reckon with history is heard not as an invitation to truth but as an attack on
meaning.
Understanding racism as formation rather than intent also helps explain why ordinary
persons can be drawn into patterns of exclusion without identifying themselves as bigoted.
Cultural immersion produces moral reflexes that feel self-evident: who belongs, who threatens,
who deserves, who is credible. These reflexes are reinforced through media narratives,
institutional practices, neighborhood segregation, and political rhetoric that encodes fear as
prudence. The result is a society in which racial hierarchy can be defended as common sense and
injustice can be denied as exaggeration, even while individuals maintain a self-image of fairness.
Such blindness does not absolve responsibility; it deepens it. If racism were merely an
attitude, then rejecting hatred would be sufficient. But if racism is formative, then moral
responsibility includes the labor of re-formation: learning to see what one has been trained not to
see, to hear what one has been trained to dismiss, and to repent not only of overt acts but of the
hidden loyalties that sustain unjust order. This is a slow and often painful process because it
requires relinquishing innocence. Yet without this relinquishment, the desire for restoration will
continue to find spiritual and political fuel.
At this point the meaning of judgment as unveiling begins to sharpen. What is being
exposed in the present crisis is not only the extremism of a few but the fragility of the moral self-
understanding that has long underwritten dominant identity. The unraveling of sacred authority
reveals the extent to which innocence has been constructed and maintained through the denial of
history. The next section will therefore turn explicitly to the theological claim at the heart of this
paper: that the contemporary backlash may be read as judgment—not as punitive divine
intervention, but as revelation, the unveiling of what power has concealed and what innocence
has refused to know.
VII. Judgment as Unveiling
Crisis, Exposure, and the Possibility of Hope
If racism operates as formation and backlash politics as restoration, then the present crisis
cannot be interpreted adequately as an episodic deviation in an otherwise healthy democratic
order. It must be read as an exposure of what has long been operative beneath the surface: the
theological and moral scaffolding that has sustained sacred authority while insulating it from
historical reckoning. The language of judgment, in this context, is not a rhetorical flourish. It
names a theological reality: crisis as disclosure, the unveiling of truths that power has concealed
and that innocence has refused to know.
To speak of judgment here is not primarily to speak of punishment. In many popular
imaginations, divine judgment is conceived as external retribution—an act by which God
intervenes to penalize wrongdoing from without. Yet there is another and deeply biblical sense
of judgment as revelation, a making-manifest of what is hidden. Judgment, in this sense, is the
disclosure of truth: the exposure of falsehood, the unmasking of idolatries, and the collapse of
narratives that have sustained injustice by rendering it invisible. Such judgment does not require
a dramatic supernatural intrusion; it can occur through historical events that tear away moral
coverings and reveal the fragility of claims to innocence.
The contemporary backlash may be read within this register. It reveals, first, the extent to
which American moral identity has depended upon a sacralized narrative of chosenness. The
nation has repeatedly imagined itself as uniquely virtuous, uniquely blessed, and uniquely
ordained for history’s purposes. This imagination has functioned as a shield against critique: if
the nation is fundamentally righteous, then its violence must be regrettable but justified, its
inequalities temporary but benign, its power ultimately benevolent. Judgment as unveiling
disrupts this moral insulation by forcing the recognition that domination has not been accidental
to the national story but integral to it.
Second, the crisis reveals the instability of sacred authority when it is grounded in
normativity rather than truth. For generations, authority has been experienced as natural because
it has been aligned with the unmarked norm of whiteness and its cultural extensions. When that
norm is destabilized—by demographic change, by symbolic rupture, by demands for historical
reckoning—authority does not simply adjust; it panics. Restorationism emerges as a spiritual
reflex: the attempt to regain certainty without transformation. The desire to “return” becomes an
attempt to escape judgment by rebuilding the very myth that judgment exposes.
Third, judgment reveals the cost of innocence. The moral self-understanding of the
nation—and of many within it—has been sustained by the assumption that one can be good
without knowing, righteous without seeing, and faithful without reckoning. But innocence is not
neutral. It is a moral achievement purchased by denial. Judgment as unveiling therefore strikes at
the level of identity, not merely opinion. It threatens the stories by which persons and
communities have interpreted themselves as just. This helps explain why truth-telling can
provoke rage: not because truth is unclear, but because it demands the surrender of innocence.
The theological significance of this moment is that it forces a choice between restoration
and conversion. Restoration seeks to preserve sacred authority by recovering the old order;
conversion accepts the collapse of false authority as necessary for truth. Conversion does not
mean simply adopting new opinions. It means re-formation—learning to see differently, to
belong differently, and to hope differently. It requires the relinquishment of domination as a
condition of moral clarity. In this sense, conversion is not a private spiritual act detached from
politics; it is a public reorientation of desire, identity, and communal imagination.
This is where hope must be carefully distinguished from optimism. Optimism expects
improvement through continuity; it assumes that the world can be repaired without deep rupture.
Hope, in a more theological sense, often emerges precisely through rupture, because rupture
exposes the unreality of what has been trusted. Hope is not the assurance that the old order will
be restored, but the possibility that a truer order can be born. Such hope is costly. It requires the
willingness to live through exposure without retreating into denial or nostalgia. It refuses the
cheap comfort of innocence and embraces the difficult freedom of truth.
Interpreting backlash as judgment therefore does not entail a posture of smug
condemnation. Judgment implicates everyone formed within the system it unveils. The point is
not to identify villains from a position of purity, but to recognize the depth of the distortion and
the necessity of transformation. The present crisis exposes not only extremist rage but also the
ordinary habits of perception that have enabled racial hierarchy to persist. In that sense, judgment
is mercy insofar as it makes repentance possible. It opens the door to conversion by stripping
away the illusions that have protected domination from being named.
Yet judgment also clarifies what repentance must entail. It cannot be reduced to polite
tolerance or abstract commitments to equality. It must include the renunciation of restorationist
desire—the refusal to seek salvation through recovered dominance. It must include a rethinking
of sacred authority itself, shifting allegiance from national innocence to truth and justice. And it
must include a willingness to inhabit a pluralistic social world without interpreting difference as
decay. In this way, the crisis becomes a test of theological integrity: whether faith will be used to
defend lost authority or to participate in the transformation that exposure demands.
The conclusion will draw these threads together and state the argument in its final form.
If the backlash is a revelation of sacred authority in crisis, then the task before the church and the
public is not to manage the discomfort of change but to name the idolatries that have been
exposed and to refuse the false gospel of restoration. The question is not whether America can be
returned to what it was, but whether it can be freed from what it has pretended to be.
VIII. Conclusion
Beyond Restoration: Toward Conversion
This paper has argued that the contemporary reactionary resurgence in the United States
is best understood neither as the creation of a single leader nor as a temporary partisan
disturbance, but as a crisis of sacred authority revealed through a symbolic rupture. The election
of Barack Obama in 2008 did not generate racism as a new phenomenon; it exposed the degree
to which racial hierarchy had long been embedded within a theological and cultural imagination
that treated whiteness as normative, national power as providential, and American identity as
morally insulated. The backlash that followed is therefore not adequately explained by policy
disagreement or economic grievance alone. It is a response to perceived displacement, an
affective defense of a sacred order whose coherence depends upon the invisibility of its own
foundations.
By tracing the genealogy of this sacred order from European Christendom through the
development of American civil religion, the paper has situated modern backlash within a longer
history of empire and theological legitimation. The United States did not invent the fusion of
hierarchy and sacred meaning; it inherited it, translated it into a national key, and rendered it
central to its self-understanding. Within such a framework, challenges to racial hierarchy are
experienced not simply as political contests but as threats to meaning itself—threats to
innocence, authority, and the trustworthiness of national history.
Against interpretations that locate racism primarily in personal intent, this paper has
emphasized racism as formation: a structured immersion that shapes moral perception and social
reflex prior to conscious choice. This account clarifies why backlash politics can appeal to
ordinary persons who do not identify as bigoted, and why restorationist movements can flourish
despite incoherence. Restoration offers something deeper than policy: it promises a return to
certainty and moral innocence without the vulnerability of reckoning. It offers redemption
without repentance.
For this reason, the present crisis must be interpreted theologically as judgment—not as
punitive intervention from outside history, but as unveiling within history. Crisis discloses what
sacred narratives have concealed. It exposes the idolatries that have been normalized as
patriotism, the hierarchies that have been baptized as order, and the innocence that has been
sustained through denial. Such judgment is not the privilege of moral spectators; it implicates all
who have been formed within the system it reveals. Yet it is also mercy, insofar as exposure
makes repentance possible.
The decisive question, then, is whether the United States—and the communities within
it—will respond to unveiling with restoration or with conversion. Restoration attempts to reassert
sacred authority by recovering the old order. Conversion accepts the collapse of false authority
as necessary for truth. Conversion renounces the desire to reclaim dominance as salvation and
embraces the slow work of re-formation: learning to see differently, to belong differently, and to
hope differently. In this sense, the alternative to backlash is not merely better policy or more
persuasive rhetoric, but the relinquishment of an imperial imagination that has long fused
authority with innocence and normativity with righteousness.
Theological hope, in this context, must not be confused with optimism. Hope is not the
expectation that the old order will stabilize or return. It is the courage to live through exposure
without retreating into denial, nostalgia, or scapegoating—and to allow the unveiling of
judgment to become the beginning of truth. If the crisis of sacred authority is indeed a revelation
of what has long been hidden, then the task is not to rebuild the myth of innocence, but to refuse
the false gospel of restoration and to pursue the costly freedom of conversion.
Sources and Further Reading
Sociological and Political Analysis (Backlash, Populism, Status Threat)
Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential
Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 19 (2018):
E4330–E4339.
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian
Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the
American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).
Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and
the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2016).
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald
Trump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2019).
Race, Whiteness, and Structural Formation
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence
of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006).
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1985).
Theology, Empire, Civil Religion, and Hope
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1952).
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), esp.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Abstract
This paper argues that the contemporary resurgence of reactionary politics in the United
States—often attributed to the rise of populist figures in the twenty-first century—cannot be
adequately understood as the product of a single leader or moment. Rather, it contends that the
election of an African American president in 2008 functioned as a symbolic rupture within a
long-standing racialized and theologically informed social order, exposing latent structures of
identity, power, and fear that had been culturally normalized rather than resolved. Drawing on
sociological theories of status threat and cultural formation, alongside theological analyses of
empire, chosenness, and judgment, the paper situates the backlash not as an anomaly but as a
predictable response to perceived loss of normative authority.
By tracing the genealogy of racial hierarchy and sacred order from European
Christendom through American civil religion, the paper demonstrates that racism in the United
States operates less as an individual moral failure and more as a formative cultural immersion
sustained by theological narratives of order, providence, and restoration. The presidency of
Barack Obama is examined as a moment of symbolic crisis that rendered these narratives
unstable, provoking a reaction aimed not at policy disagreement but at the restoration of a
threatened moral and social hierarchy. Within this framework, subsequent political movements
are interpreted as restorative rather than revolutionary, oriented toward undoing rather than
reimagining.
The paper concludes by offering a theological reading of backlash as a form of
judgment understood not as divine punishment but as revelation—an unveiling of the fragile
foundations upon which claims of innocence, dominance, and sacred legitimacy rest. Against
narratives of restoration, it proposes a theology of hope grounded not in the recovery of lost
authority but in the possibility of transformation, repentance, and the relinquishment of imperial
identity.
I. Introduction
Judgment as Unveiling and the Crisis of Sacred Authority
In recent years, political commentary in the United States has tended to explain the
resurgence of reactionary and exclusionary movements by focusing on individual leaders,
electoral cycles, or discrete policy disputes. Such explanations, while not without merit, struggle
to account for the depth, persistence, and emotional intensity of the backlash that has reshaped
American public life in the twenty-first century. The scale of this reaction—its willingness to
abandon democratic norms, sacralize national identity, and legitimate cruelty in the name of
restoration—suggests that more is at stake than ordinary political disagreement. What is being
contested is not merely power, but meaning; not simply governance, but the legitimacy of a long-
standing social and moral order.
This paper argues that the election of an African American president in 2008 functioned
as a symbolic rupture within a racialized and theologically informed conception of American
authority. Rather than marking the resolution of racial history, this moment exposed unresolved
structures of identity, hierarchy, and belonging that had been culturally normalized rather than
resolved. The backlash that followed should therefore be understood not as an irrational
aberration nor as the invention of a charismatic populist figure, but as a reaction to the perceived
collapse of a sacred order—one in which whiteness, national dominance, and moral authority
were mutually reinforcing and largely unquestioned.
Sociological accounts of political reaction often describe this phenomenon in terms of
status threat: the fear experienced by historically dominant groups when their normative position
appears endangered by demographic, cultural, or symbolic change. While this framework is
essential, it remains incomplete unless paired with a theological analysis of how authority itself
has been sacralized within Western and American history. In the United States, political power
has rarely been justified on pragmatic grounds alone. It has been framed instead through
narratives of providence, chosenness, destiny, and moral exceptionalism—narratives inherited
from European Christendom and reshaped through the development of American civil religion.
Within this framework, challenges to racial hierarchy are experienced not simply as political
losses but as violations of a divinely sanctioned order.
The presidency of Barack Obama represented such a challenge at the level of symbol and
imagination, regardless of the limits or moderation of his actual policies. His election disrupted
an unspoken theological grammar in which authority, legitimacy, and national identity had long
been associated with whiteness as an unmarked norm. The widespread insistence that the United
States had entered a “post-racial” era following this election paradoxically intensified the
backlash, as it denied the depth of unresolved racial formation while rendering expressions of
resentment both illegitimate and inexpressible—until they found new political permission.
Interpreting this backlash theologically requires rethinking the category of judgment. Rather than
understanding judgment as divine punishment imposed from without, this paper adopts a
conception of judgment as unveiling—an exposure of truths long obscured by power, myth, and
moral insulation. From this perspective, the reactionary turn in American politics reveals not the
sudden emergence of racism or authoritarian impulse, but the fragility of the sacred narratives
that had sustained claims to innocence and moral superiority. The crisis is therefore not merely
political but theological: a crisis of sacred authority itself.
By tracing the genealogy of racial hierarchy and sacred order from European
Christendom through American nationhood, and by examining the Obama presidency as a
moment of symbolic disruption, this paper seeks to illuminate why backlash has proven so
resilient, why it cannot be reduced to individual animus, and why appeals to restoration exert
such powerful affective force. The argument proceeds on the assumption that racism operates
less as a matter of conscious intent than as a formative cultural immersion, shaping perceptions
of normalcy, belonging, and legitimacy even among those committed to justice. Consequently,
the paper resists moralizing explanations in favor of structural and theological diagnosis.
The paper unfolds in seven sections. Following this introduction, it first examines the
pre-American roots of race, hierarchy, and sacred order within European Christendom and
imperial theology. It then considers the United States as an inherited theological project in which
race and providence were woven into national identity. The analysis next turns to the Obama
presidency as a moment of symbolic crisis and to subsequent political movements as attempts at
restoration rather than innovation. The final sections reflect on racism as formation rather than
intent and conclude with a theological account of judgment and hope that rejects restorationist
nostalgia in favor of transformation and repentance.
II. Race, Order, and Empire Before America
Theological Genealogies of Hierarchy
Any attempt to understand the contemporary racial backlash in the United States that
begins with modern electoral politics risks mistaking symptoms for origins. The structures
exposed in the present moment were not invented in America, nor did they arise primarily from
modern scientific racism. Rather, they emerged from a much older theological and imperial
imagination in which hierarchy, difference, and domination were woven into a sacred vision of
order. Race, in this sense, must be understood not as a biological category that later acquired
theological justification, but as a theological and moral category that preceded and shaped
modern racial classification.
Within European Christendom, social hierarchy was not merely tolerated; it was actively
moralized. Difference was interpreted as divinely ordered, and inequality was rendered
meaningful through appeals to providence, vocation, and natural law. Empire did not simply
require administrative power; it required a moral narrative capable of legitimating conquest,
subjugation, and extraction. Theology supplied that narrative by aligning divine order with
imperial order, thereby transforming domination into obedience and hierarchy into virtue.
Crucially, this theological imagination did not operate primarily through explicit
doctrines of racial superiority as they would later appear, but through the construction of
normativity. Certain bodies, cultures, and ways of being came to represent order, rationality, and
authority, while others were marked as disorderly, deficient, or in need of governance. What
would later be named “whiteness” functioned initially not as a racial identity but as an unmarked
position of proximity to power—an assumed norm against which all difference was measured.
The moral force of this normativity lay in its invisibility: it did not appear as domination but as
common sense.
The expansion of European empire intensified this theological ordering of the world.
Colonial encounters were framed not merely as economic or territorial ventures but as
civilizational and salvific projects. The language of Christian mission merged seamlessly with
the logic of empire, producing a theological anthropology in which non-European peoples were
positioned as objects of discipline, conversion, and improvement. This fusion of Christianity and
colonialism did not simply justify violence; it reconfigured Christian imagination itself, binding
faith to possession, mastery, and control.
In this context, race functioned as a stabilizing mechanism for empire. It offered a way to
naturalize hierarchy by locating difference within bodies rather than within political
arrangements. Yet this naturalization was always theological at its core. Claims about
civilization, reason, and moral capacity were inseparable from claims about divine intention and
order. As a result, racial hierarchy was not experienced primarily as injustice but as fidelity—to
God, to creation, and to history itself.
What emerges from this genealogy is the recognition that racism cannot be adequately
addressed as a deviation from Christian theology or Western moral tradition. It is, instead, a
distortion that arose within them, shaped by the demands of empire and sustained by sacred
narratives of order. The theological imagination that sanctified hierarchy did so not through overt
cruelty alone but through appeals to peace, stability, and moral coherence. Difference became
dangerous not because it was evil, but because it threatened the perceived harmony of a divinely
ordered world.
This legacy would be carried forward into the American context, where it would be
adapted rather than abandoned. The collapse of European Christendom did not dissolve its
theological structures; it displaced them. As imperial authority migrated westward, so too did the
sacred narratives that underwrote it. America did not invent a racialized sacred order ex
nihilo—it inherited one, reshaped it through its own historical circumstances, and rendered it
central to its national identity.
Understanding this inheritance is essential for interpreting later moments of crisis. When
racial hierarchy is embedded within a sacred vision of order, challenges to that hierarchy are
experienced not as political disagreements but as theological threats. What is ultimately at stake
is not simply who governs, but whether the world still makes sense—whether authority remains
intelligible, innocence sustainable, and history trustworthy. The modern backlash, therefore,
cannot be grasped apart from this deeper genealogy of race, empire, and sacred order.
III. America as an Inherited Theological Project
Race, Providence, and Civil Religion
The transfer of imperial authority from Europe to the North American continent did not
mark a theological rupture so much as a translation. The decline of European Christendom did
not dissolve the sacred narratives that had legitimized hierarchy and domination; instead, those
narratives were reconfigured within a new national project. The United States emerged not as a
secular alternative to empire but as an inherited theological experiment—one in which
providence, chosenness, and moral exceptionalism supplied continuity where monarchy and
established church had fallen away.
From its earliest articulations, American identity was framed in explicitly theological
terms. The language of covenant, destiny, and divine favor permeated political imagination,
allowing national expansion and social hierarchy to be interpreted as fulfillment rather than
conquest. This theological framing proved especially effective in reconciling Enlightenment
ideals of liberty with the realities of slavery, displacement, and racialized violence. Rather than
exposing contradiction, appeals to providence and divine order absorbed it, transforming
injustice into necessity and domination into vocation.
Within this framework, race functioned as a crucial stabilizing mechanism. Whiteness
became intertwined with notions of moral capacity, self-governance, and legitimate authority,
while nonwhite bodies were positioned as objects of control, discipline, or improvement. This
ordering was rarely articulated as hatred; it was far more often justified as stewardship,
civilization, or even benevolence. The moral power of this arrangement lay precisely in its
capacity to present itself as natural and self-evident, requiring no explicit defense because it
appeared to align seamlessly with divine intention.
American civil religion further entrenched this theological ordering by sacralizing
national history itself. Founding moments were rendered sacred, political institutions were
invested with moral authority, and national success was interpreted as evidence of divine
blessing. This civil religion did not replace Christianity but functioned alongside it, shaping the
imagination of believers and nonbelievers alike. Within such a framework, critique of the nation
could easily be construed as impiety, and challenges to racial hierarchy could be experienced as
threats not merely to social order but to moral meaning.
Crucially, this sacralization of national identity depended upon narratives of innocence.
American power was repeatedly framed as reactive rather than aggressive, benevolent rather than
coercive, reluctant rather than expansionist. Violence, when acknowledged at all, was justified as
tragic necessity in the service of a higher good. These narratives insulated the nation from moral
reckoning and rendered racial hierarchy compatible with self-understandings of virtue,
faithfulness, and righteousness. Racism thus persisted not despite America’s moral ideals but
through them.
The theological inheritance of empire also shaped how authority itself was perceived.
Legitimate power was associated with stability, continuity, and order, while disruption was
coded as chaos or rebellion. Movements that sought racial equality therefore faced not only
political resistance but theological suspicion, as they appeared to threaten the coherence of a
divinely sanctioned social arrangement. Even when reform was tolerated, it was often framed as
gradual, controlled, and paternalistic—carefully managed so as not to unsettle the deeper
structures of authority and normativity.
By the twentieth century, these inherited theological patterns had become so deeply
embedded that they often escaped conscious articulation. The language of race increasingly
appeared secularized, while its theological foundations remained operative beneath the surface.
Appeals to “law and order,” “traditional values,” and “national greatness” functioned as coded
continuations of earlier sacred narratives, preserving the association between whiteness,
legitimacy, and moral authority without requiring overt theological justification. In this sense,
American racism did not persist because theology was too present in public life, but because it
was present in ways that had become invisible.
This inherited theological project helps explain why moments of racial disruption
generate such intense affective responses. When race is woven into a sacred narrative of national
purpose, challenges to racial hierarchy are experienced as existential threats. What is endangered
is not merely social dominance but the intelligibility of history itself—whether the nation
remains chosen, whether its power remains righteous, and whether its past can continue to be
regarded as fundamentally good. The defense of racial hierarchy thus becomes a defense of
meaning, clothed in the language of patriotism, tradition, and moral concern.
Understanding America in this way—as an heir to imperial theology rather than a
departure from it—clarifies why later political crises cannot be reduced to policy disagreement
or partisan conflict. They represent moments in which inherited sacred narratives strain under the
weight of historical exposure. The next section will examine how the election of Barack Obama
functioned as precisely such a moment: a symbolic disruption that rendered long-standing
theological assumptions unstable and precipitated a backlash oriented toward restoration rather
than transformation.
IV. The Obama Presidency as Symbolic Crisis
Status Threat and the Collapse of Normative Authority
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 cannot be understood solely in
terms of partisan realignment or policy preference. While his administration pursued largely
conventional centrist governance, the symbolic meaning of his election far exceeded the
substance of his legislative agenda. Obama’s presidency represented a disruption at the level of
imagination—a challenge to the unmarked normativity that had long structured American
conceptions of authority, legitimacy, and belonging. What was destabilized was not simply
political power but a sacred narrative in which race, leadership, and moral authority had been
tacitly aligned.
From a sociological perspective, this disruption is best understood through the concept of
status threat. Status threat arises when historically dominant groups perceive their normative
position as endangered, not necessarily by material loss but by symbolic displacement. The
significance of Obama’s election lay precisely in this symbolic register. His presence in the
highest office of the nation rendered visible what had previously gone unmarked: the racialized
assumptions embedded within American political authority. Whiteness, long functioning as the
default backdrop of leadership, was suddenly exposed as a particularity rather than a universal
norm.
Importantly, this symbolic rupture occurred alongside widespread declarations that the
United States had entered a “post-racial” era. Such claims, while often intended as celebratory,
functioned paradoxically to intensify resentment. By framing Obama’s election as evidence that
racial history had been overcome, these narratives denied the persistence of structural inequality
while simultaneously foreclosing legitimate avenues for addressing it. For those whose sense of
identity and moral standing was already destabilized, the insistence that racism no longer
mattered transformed grievance into grievance without language—resentment stripped of
socially acceptable expression.
Within this context, opposition to Obama quickly exceeded policy disagreement and
assumed a more visceral character. His legitimacy was questioned through conspiracy theories,
coded racial rhetoric, and appeals to tradition and “real America.” These reactions were not
anomalies but predictable expressions of a deeper anxiety: the fear that the symbolic center of
the nation was shifting beyond recovery. Obama’s presidency suggested not merely a temporary
deviation but a trajectory—one in which demographic change, cultural pluralism, and historical
reckoning threatened to become permanent features of American life.
The intensity of this reaction reveals the extent to which authority in the United States
had been sacralized. Political leadership was not experienced as procedurally contingent but as
morally representative. To challenge the racial coding of authority, therefore, was to unsettle a
sacred order in which national identity, virtue, and power were mutually reinforcing. The
backlash that emerged was animated less by specific grievances than by a diffuse sense of loss:
loss of innocence, loss of centrality, and loss of the assurance that history itself remained on
one’s side.
This sense of loss was further amplified by the near election of a woman to the
presidency in 2016. The prospect of Hillary Clinton’s presidency compounded the symbolic
threat already introduced by Obama, reinforcing the perception that traditional hierarchies of
authority were collapsing. Gender and race intersected here not simply as categories of
representation but as markers of normativity. The possibility that leadership might no longer be
reflexively associated with white male identity intensified the urgency of restorationist desire.
What was at stake was not a single election but the perceived end of a world in which dominance
could be taken for granted.
It is crucial to note that these dynamics were not limited to explicit expressions of racism
or sexism. Many who experienced this moment as destabilizing would not identify themselves as
prejudiced and may sincerely affirm commitments to equality. Yet formation precedes intention.
When identity has been shaped within a cultural order that equates normativity with moral
legitimacy, the disruption of that order is experienced as disorientation rather than injustice. The
resulting backlash thus appears, from within, not as hatred but as defense—defense of order,
coherence, and meaning.
Interpreting the Obama presidency as symbolic crisis also clarifies why subsequent
political movements have been oriented toward reversal rather than innovation. The affective
energy driving backlash politics has been directed not toward imagining new futures but toward
reclaiming a past in which authority felt secure and unquestioned. This orientation explains why
undoing the policies and symbolic legacy of the Obama era assumed such moral urgency, even
when alternative visions remained incoherent or contradictory. What mattered was not what
came next, but what could be erased.
Seen through this lens, the election of Obama did not create racial resentment so much as
legitimate its expression by rendering it intelligible to itself. Long-standing anxieties that had
previously been managed through silence, denial, or coded language found a focal point around
which to coalesce. The presidency functioned as a mirror, revealing the fragility of a sacred order
that had depended upon invisibility for its stability. The crisis was not that America had changed,
but that it could no longer convincingly pretend it had not.
The following section will examine how this crisis was met politically—not through
transformation or repentance, but through a restorationist project that sought to reassert lost
authority. In doing so, it will explore why backlash movements have proven so durable and why
their appeal extends beyond any single leader or electoral cycle.
V. Restoration, Not Revolution
Political Reaction as Sacred Reclamation
If the Obama presidency functioned as a symbolic crisis, the political energies that
followed must be interpreted not as the birth of a new ideology but as an attempt to recover an
older one. The animating desire of contemporary backlash politics has been restorative rather
than creative. It is oriented less toward constructing a coherent future than toward reclaiming a
past in which authority felt stable, moral hierarchy seemed intelligible, and national identity
could be imagined as innocent. In this sense, the movement is not revolutionary. It is a project of
sacred reclamation—an effort to reassert a threatened normative order by undoing the symbolic
and institutional gains associated with racial, cultural, and gendered disruption.
This restorationist orientation helps explain why “undoing” has often carried more
affective weight than “doing.” The moral energy of backlash politics is frequently expended on
reversal: dismantling or delegitimizing policies, institutions, and cultural symbols associated
with perceived displacement. Such reversal is not merely strategic; it becomes virtuous. To
reverse is to heal, to cleanse, to restore what was thought to be proper. Where progressive
politics often frames change as moral advance, restorationist politics frames change as moral
contamination and portrays reversal as the recovery of purity.
The moral logic of restoration also clarifies why incoherence has not been a fatal
weakness for reactionary movements. Restoration is not an integrated policy platform; it is an
affective and symbolic orientation. It does not require a consistent program so long as it provides
a felt return of dominance and certainty. What matters is the performance of recovered
authority—the public display that the old order has not been permanently lost. Within such a
framework, contradiction can be tolerated, and even celebrated, because the primary goal is not
rational coherence but the reestablishment of social and moral hierarchy.
This dynamic is visible in the way cruelty can be reframed as strength. When authority is
perceived as threatened, restraint can appear as weakness and empathy as betrayal. Restorationist
politics often treats the willingness to harm as evidence of seriousness and authenticity: proof
that one is no longer constrained by “political correctness,” institutional norms, or the moral
demands of pluralistic life. The target of such harm is rarely accidental. It often falls upon those
who symbolize the displacement that provoked the status threat in the first place—immigrants,
racial minorities, religious outsiders, sexual minorities, and political dissenters. Cruelty thus
becomes not merely a tactic but a ritual enactment of reclaimed dominance.
At this point the theological dimension becomes unmistakable. Restorationist politics is
sustained by a narrative of lost glory and promised return, a narrative that closely resembles
religious patterns of fall and redemption. The nation is imagined as having fallen from greatness
due to corruption, betrayal, or impurity, and salvation is offered in the form of
restoration—returning the nation to what it “really” is. The rhetoric of greatness functions here
as a theological claim about essence: the nation possesses a true identity, and present
disorder represents deviation from that essence. To restore the nation is therefore not simply to
win an election, but to recover a sacred calling.
This is why the movement cannot be reduced to mere partisanship. The political becomes
liturgical. Slogans, spectacles, and symbolic gestures take on a sacramental character,
communicating belonging and authority beyond rational argument. The leader functions less as a
policymaker than as an icon: a sign that the lost order can be reclaimed and that the taboo against
explicit dominance has been lifted. In such conditions, the leader’s personal incoherence or
moral failure does not necessarily disqualify him; it may even intensify his appeal, insofar
as it demonstrates immunity from elite moral norms and reinforces the sense of
transgressive permission.
The restorative logic also explains why backlash politics persists beyond any single
figure. If the problem were merely a personality cult, the movement would collapse with the
decline of the personality. Instead, it continues because it addresses an underlying crisis of sacred
authority. It offers a way to interpret the destabilization of normativity not as a call to repentance
or transformation but as a temporary aberration that can be corrected through will, strength, and
purification. As long as demographic change and historical reckoning continue, the desire for
restoration will remain politically potent.
This framework also clarifies why similar dynamics appear, though in locally specific
forms, beyond the United States. Global right-wing movements often differ in policy and
rhetoric, but they share a common grammar: anxiety over displacement, sacralized national
identity, nostalgia for moral homogeneity, and the portrayal of pluralism as decay. The
transnational resonance of restorationism indicates that the phenomenon is not reducible to a
single national context, even if the American case provides an especially vivid instance.
Reactionary politics travels well because it meets a widespread demand produced by modernity
itself: the desire for fixed identity amid perceived cultural dissolution.
To interpret this restorationism theologically is not to claim that it is consciously
religious. Rather, it is to recognize that it functions as a form of political theology—an implicit
account of meaning, legitimacy, and salvation. The movement promises a return to innocence
without confession, a recovery of dominance without moral reckoning, and a restoration of
sacred authority without transformation. Its power lies in the fact that it offers redemption while
avoiding repentance.
The next section will deepen this diagnosis by turning from movements and symbols to
formation itself. If restorationist politics draws strength from a sacred narrative of lost authority,
it also depends upon a deeper condition: the formative power of culture to produce moral
blindness. Understanding racism as formation rather than intent will clarify why backlash is not
merely the possession of extremists but a potential temptation for ordinary persons formed
within a racialized sacred order.
VI. Racism as Formation Rather Than Intent
Cultural Immersion and Moral Blindness
If restorationist politics draws its power from a sacred narrative of lost authority, it also
depends upon a deeper and more pervasive condition: the formative capacity of culture to shape
perception, desire, and moral judgment prior to conscious choice. One of the most persistent
obstacles to understanding racism in the United States is the tendency to treat it primarily as an
individual attitude—an episodic moral failure located in personal intent. Within that framework,
racism becomes a problem of “bad people” rather than a structure of formation, and the
conversation quickly collapses into defensiveness or denial. Yet if the preceding genealogy is
correct—if racial hierarchy has been embedded within sacred narratives of order, providence,
and legitimacy—then racism must be approached not merely as a moral defect but as a formative
environment: a cultural immersion that teaches persons what is normal long before they decide
what is right.
This distinction between formation and intent matters because modern moral discourse
often relies upon a thin account of agency. It imagines individuals as autonomous moral choosers
who stand outside their cultural worlds, capable of neutral evaluation and untainted judgment.
But human beings are not formed in this way. They are social creatures whose sense of the good
is shaped by language, institutions, habits, fears, and communal stories. Racism, therefore,
persists not only through explicit bigotry but through the ordinary processes by which societies
reproduce norms. It operates through what is assumed, what goes unspoken, and what appears
“natural.”
The power of such formation is most visible in the phenomenon of moral blindness.
Moral blindness is not merely ignorance; it is a structured incapacity to see what a culture has
trained its members to overlook. In racialized societies, the privileges associated with dominant
identity become invisible precisely because they appear normal. The result is that inequity is
experienced not as injustice but as inevitability, and demands for equity are perceived as
disruption rather than repair. This blindness is often intensified by narratives of innocence: the
conviction that one is personally moral, fair-minded, and unprejudiced, which then functions as a
shield against critique. Within this logic, the admission of structural racism is experienced as an
accusation against personal character, and defensive denial becomes almost automatic.
This is why the common insistence “I am not racist” is sociologically and theologically
inadequate. It may express sincere personal intention, but it does not address formation. One may
genuinely reject racial hatred while still inhabiting—and unconsciously reproducing—the
normative assumptions of a racialized order. The issue is not primarily hypocrisy; it is formation.
Inherited narratives of authority and belonging shape reflexes of fear, suspicion, and credibility.
They determine whose pain is believed, whose anger is legitimate, whose claims sound
“reasonable,” and whose presence feels like threat. These reflexes do not require explicit
prejudice; they require only immersion in a social world where certain bodies are coded as
normative and others as suspect.
Theologically, this account of formation resonates with deeper Christian diagnoses of
sin—not merely as a series of bad choices but as a power that shapes perception and desire.
Racism, in this sense, is not adequately described as individual malice; it is an aspect of what
might be called the “principalities and powers” of social life: a structured distortion of communal
existence that trains persons to love order more than justice and innocence more than truth. The
desire for restoration, then, is not simply political preference; it is a spiritual temptation toward
the recovery of dominance without confession.
This framework also clarifies why backlash politics can appear morally compelling to
those who participate in it. If one has been formed to equate normativity with legitimacy, then
the disruption of normativity will feel like disorder. The defense of the old order can therefore be
experienced not as oppression but as responsibility: preserving stability, protecting community,
or safeguarding moral values. The more deeply one is invested in narratives of national
innocence and sacred authority, the more threatening historical exposure will become. In such
cases, the call to reckon with history is heard not as an invitation to truth but as an attack on
meaning.
Understanding racism as formation rather than intent also helps explain why ordinary
persons can be drawn into patterns of exclusion without identifying themselves as bigoted.
Cultural immersion produces moral reflexes that feel self-evident: who belongs, who threatens,
who deserves, who is credible. These reflexes are reinforced through media narratives,
institutional practices, neighborhood segregation, and political rhetoric that encodes fear as
prudence. The result is a society in which racial hierarchy can be defended as common sense and
injustice can be denied as exaggeration, even while individuals maintain a self-image of fairness.
Such blindness does not absolve responsibility; it deepens it. If racism were merely an
attitude, then rejecting hatred would be sufficient. But if racism is formative, then moral
responsibility includes the labor of re-formation: learning to see what one has been trained not to
see, to hear what one has been trained to dismiss, and to repent not only of overt acts but of the
hidden loyalties that sustain unjust order. This is a slow and often painful process because it
requires relinquishing innocence. Yet without this relinquishment, the desire for restoration will
continue to find spiritual and political fuel.
At this point the meaning of judgment as unveiling begins to sharpen. What is being
exposed in the present crisis is not only the extremism of a few but the fragility of the moral self-
understanding that has long underwritten dominant identity. The unraveling of sacred authority
reveals the extent to which innocence has been constructed and maintained through the denial of
history. The next section will therefore turn explicitly to the theological claim at the heart of this
paper: that the contemporary backlash may be read as judgment—not as punitive divine
intervention, but as revelation, the unveiling of what power has concealed and what innocence
has refused to know.
VII. Judgment as Unveiling
Crisis, Exposure, and the Possibility of Hope
If racism operates as formation and backlash politics as restoration, then the present crisis
cannot be interpreted adequately as an episodic deviation in an otherwise healthy democratic
order. It must be read as an exposure of what has long been operative beneath the surface: the
theological and moral scaffolding that has sustained sacred authority while insulating it from
historical reckoning. The language of judgment, in this context, is not a rhetorical flourish. It
names a theological reality: crisis as disclosure, the unveiling of truths that power has concealed
and that innocence has refused to know.
To speak of judgment here is not primarily to speak of punishment. In many popular
imaginations, divine judgment is conceived as external retribution—an act by which God
intervenes to penalize wrongdoing from without. Yet there is another and deeply biblical sense
of judgment as revelation, a making-manifest of what is hidden. Judgment, in this sense, is the
disclosure of truth: the exposure of falsehood, the unmasking of idolatries, and the collapse of
narratives that have sustained injustice by rendering it invisible. Such judgment does not require
a dramatic supernatural intrusion; it can occur through historical events that tear away moral
coverings and reveal the fragility of claims to innocence.
The contemporary backlash may be read within this register. It reveals, first, the extent to
which American moral identity has depended upon a sacralized narrative of chosenness. The
nation has repeatedly imagined itself as uniquely virtuous, uniquely blessed, and uniquely
ordained for history’s purposes. This imagination has functioned as a shield against critique: if
the nation is fundamentally righteous, then its violence must be regrettable but justified, its
inequalities temporary but benign, its power ultimately benevolent. Judgment as unveiling
disrupts this moral insulation by forcing the recognition that domination has not been accidental
to the national story but integral to it.
Second, the crisis reveals the instability of sacred authority when it is grounded in
normativity rather than truth. For generations, authority has been experienced as natural because
it has been aligned with the unmarked norm of whiteness and its cultural extensions. When that
norm is destabilized—by demographic change, by symbolic rupture, by demands for historical
reckoning—authority does not simply adjust; it panics. Restorationism emerges as a spiritual
reflex: the attempt to regain certainty without transformation. The desire to “return” becomes an
attempt to escape judgment by rebuilding the very myth that judgment exposes.
Third, judgment reveals the cost of innocence. The moral self-understanding of the
nation—and of many within it—has been sustained by the assumption that one can be good
without knowing, righteous without seeing, and faithful without reckoning. But innocence is not
neutral. It is a moral achievement purchased by denial. Judgment as unveiling therefore strikes at
the level of identity, not merely opinion. It threatens the stories by which persons and
communities have interpreted themselves as just. This helps explain why truth-telling can
provoke rage: not because truth is unclear, but because it demands the surrender of innocence.
The theological significance of this moment is that it forces a choice between restoration
and conversion. Restoration seeks to preserve sacred authority by recovering the old order;
conversion accepts the collapse of false authority as necessary for truth. Conversion does not
mean simply adopting new opinions. It means re-formation—learning to see differently, to
belong differently, and to hope differently. It requires the relinquishment of domination as a
condition of moral clarity. In this sense, conversion is not a private spiritual act detached from
politics; it is a public reorientation of desire, identity, and communal imagination.
This is where hope must be carefully distinguished from optimism. Optimism expects
improvement through continuity; it assumes that the world can be repaired without deep rupture.
Hope, in a more theological sense, often emerges precisely through rupture, because rupture
exposes the unreality of what has been trusted. Hope is not the assurance that the old order will
be restored, but the possibility that a truer order can be born. Such hope is costly. It requires the
willingness to live through exposure without retreating into denial or nostalgia. It refuses the
cheap comfort of innocence and embraces the difficult freedom of truth.
Interpreting backlash as judgment therefore does not entail a posture of smug
condemnation. Judgment implicates everyone formed within the system it unveils. The point is
not to identify villains from a position of purity, but to recognize the depth of the distortion and
the necessity of transformation. The present crisis exposes not only extremist rage but also the
ordinary habits of perception that have enabled racial hierarchy to persist. In that sense, judgment
is mercy insofar as it makes repentance possible. It opens the door to conversion by stripping
away the illusions that have protected domination from being named.
Yet judgment also clarifies what repentance must entail. It cannot be reduced to polite
tolerance or abstract commitments to equality. It must include the renunciation of restorationist
desire—the refusal to seek salvation through recovered dominance. It must include a rethinking
of sacred authority itself, shifting allegiance from national innocence to truth and justice. And it
must include a willingness to inhabit a pluralistic social world without interpreting difference as
decay. In this way, the crisis becomes a test of theological integrity: whether faith will be used to
defend lost authority or to participate in the transformation that exposure demands.
The conclusion will draw these threads together and state the argument in its final form.
If the backlash is a revelation of sacred authority in crisis, then the task before the church and the
public is not to manage the discomfort of change but to name the idolatries that have been
exposed and to refuse the false gospel of restoration. The question is not whether America can be
returned to what it was, but whether it can be freed from what it has pretended to be.
VIII. Conclusion
Beyond Restoration: Toward Conversion
This paper has argued that the contemporary reactionary resurgence in the United States
is best understood neither as the creation of a single leader nor as a temporary partisan
disturbance, but as a crisis of sacred authority revealed through a symbolic rupture. The election
of Barack Obama in 2008 did not generate racism as a new phenomenon; it exposed the degree
to which racial hierarchy had long been embedded within a theological and cultural imagination
that treated whiteness as normative, national power as providential, and American identity as
morally insulated. The backlash that followed is therefore not adequately explained by policy
disagreement or economic grievance alone. It is a response to perceived displacement, an
affective defense of a sacred order whose coherence depends upon the invisibility of its own
foundations.
By tracing the genealogy of this sacred order from European Christendom through the
development of American civil religion, the paper has situated modern backlash within a longer
history of empire and theological legitimation. The United States did not invent the fusion of
hierarchy and sacred meaning; it inherited it, translated it into a national key, and rendered it
central to its self-understanding. Within such a framework, challenges to racial hierarchy are
experienced not simply as political contests but as threats to meaning itself—threats to
innocence, authority, and the trustworthiness of national history.
Against interpretations that locate racism primarily in personal intent, this paper has
emphasized racism as formation: a structured immersion that shapes moral perception and social
reflex prior to conscious choice. This account clarifies why backlash politics can appeal to
ordinary persons who do not identify as bigoted, and why restorationist movements can flourish
despite incoherence. Restoration offers something deeper than policy: it promises a return to
certainty and moral innocence without the vulnerability of reckoning. It offers redemption
without repentance.
For this reason, the present crisis must be interpreted theologically as judgment—not as
punitive intervention from outside history, but as unveiling within history. Crisis discloses what
sacred narratives have concealed. It exposes the idolatries that have been normalized as
patriotism, the hierarchies that have been baptized as order, and the innocence that has been
sustained through denial. Such judgment is not the privilege of moral spectators; it implicates all
who have been formed within the system it reveals. Yet it is also mercy, insofar as exposure
makes repentance possible.
The decisive question, then, is whether the United States—and the communities within
it—will respond to unveiling with restoration or with conversion. Restoration attempts to reassert
sacred authority by recovering the old order. Conversion accepts the collapse of false authority
as necessary for truth. Conversion renounces the desire to reclaim dominance as salvation and
embraces the slow work of re-formation: learning to see differently, to belong differently, and to
hope differently. In this sense, the alternative to backlash is not merely better policy or more
persuasive rhetoric, but the relinquishment of an imperial imagination that has long fused
authority with innocence and normativity with righteousness.
Theological hope, in this context, must not be confused with optimism. Hope is not the
expectation that the old order will stabilize or return. It is the courage to live through exposure
without retreating into denial, nostalgia, or scapegoating—and to allow the unveiling of
judgment to become the beginning of truth. If the crisis of sacred authority is indeed a revelation
of what has long been hidden, then the task is not to rebuild the myth of innocence, but to refuse
the false gospel of restoration and to pursue the costly freedom of conversion.
Sources and Further Reading
Sociological and Political Analysis (Backlash, Populism, Status Threat)
Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential
Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 19 (2018):
E4330–E4339.
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian
Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the
American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).
Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and
the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2016).
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald
Trump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2019).
Race, Whiteness, and Structural Formation
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence
of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006).
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1985).
Theology, Empire, Civil Religion, and Hope
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1952).
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), esp.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
