Why are thousands of churchgoing Christians supporting a political agenda that would ban immigrants from our shores, ignore growing income inequality, demean women and fail to address climate change?

David Gushee, the outgoing president of the American Academy of Religion, has a one-word answer to that question: racism.

“What many white Christians worship most faithfully is ourselves, our beloved whiteness, the nostalgia of white communities that we remember and envision, and the white God that we have made in our own image,” Gushee told academy members meeting in Denver last weekend for their annual conference. This worship of whiteness, he charged, had nothing “to do with Jesus of Nazareth,” and “leads us wide open to the idolatry of Donald Trump.”

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