Anthea Butlers’ White Evangelical Racism is a slim volume explaining a complex issue. She succeeds admirably in explaining how “race and racism have been foundational parts of evangelicalism in America, fueling its education, political, social, and cultural mores” (p. 10), by bringing together a range of arguments and distilling them in a cogent and accessible book.

While she provides a brief chapter examining the nineteenth century, including evangelicalism's relationship to slavery and the Lost Cause, Butler is primarily concerned with the period since World War II, because, she argues, “when evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold” (141). As a result, she believes, white evangelicals have become enamored with power and that “they are the Pharisees” (145). Her choice here is certainly reasonable, though some further comment on the crisis of modernism, evolution, and the development of fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s could have been beneficial.

Butler brings together the main themes scholars have examined, distilling them for a general audience. Her primary source materials, mostly from evangelical news outlets, focus on the most recent events, such as Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy. Scholars who are enmeshed in the problems of race and religion will, therefore, find much that is already familiar. Butler's intended audience—evangelicals, not scholars—might well be in for significant surprises, or, in her words, some “hard truth to swallow” (p. 9). Certainly, those hard truths include how slaveowners and segregationists used the Bible to defend racist situation. Yet, Butler offers even more difficult truths as she discusses how evangelicals deploy their religious beliefs to reinforce racist institutions and racist assumptions long after blatant discrimination became unacceptable. Butler has labeled one popular mechanism for enforcing whiteness as “evangelical hostage taking,” by which she means the blaming of individual moral failings, and the nation's acceptance of moral failings like homosexuality and abortion, for social ills and disasters, citing Jerry Falwell's famous blaming of 9/11 on abortion as a notable example (p105–106). Similarly, Butler notes that even though white evangelicals invite African Americans and other non-whites into their fold, the do so on the condition that “nonwhite believers would take on (italics in original) the practices and viewpoints of white members and leadership” regardless of their personal context. To belong, she says, “they had to emulate whiteness” (78–82).

For Butler, the campaign and election of Barak Obama “stripped the gloves off the carefully crafted racial reconciliation of the 1990s and moved evangelicals toward an alliance with outwardly racist movements” (121). While Butler brings in existing scholarship, the recentness of these issues leads Butler to rely more on news stories and social media feeds than prior scholarship. She cites Franklin Graham's citing of Hebrews 13:17 in his response to police shootings of African Americans; Graham told people such shootings could be avoided if they simply submitted to the police authority (133). Likewise, Graham considered Dylan Roof's massacre of African American Christians as a sign of religious persecution, noting “there are people out there looking for Christians to kill” (134) while forgetting the Roof was a member of an Evangelical Lutheran church and his intent was not to kill Christians but, rather, start a race war. Butler is careful to note Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention who condemned the shooting and told Baptists they had to choose between the cross and the Confederate flag, they could not honor both (134–5). Yet, Butler sees racism so deeply embedded in white evangelical religion that she holds little hope for significant change. Evangelicals may have condemned racism and repented their past racism, Butler says, “but did little to structurally change it” (144).

White evangelicals, the very people Butler is writing for, will indeed find some bitter truths in her work should they choose to seriously engage its ideas. Certainly, it will challenge much their self-perception. Scholars who have been working on issues of race and religion will find this a concise distillation of the field. For both, however, Butler's broad strokes will lead to a variety of quibbles. For example, Butler could have addressed the roles of Biblical inerrancy and literalism in defining different paths of evangelicalism and explored the question of whether these beliefs may make certain evangelical traditions more susceptible to racism than others. She also could have addressed the tendency within the broader Christian community to dismiss certain views as “not really Christian” in much the same way the Christian Right dismisses antithetical views as “not really American,” a point she directly addresses as sustaining evangelicalism's embedded racism (p. 124). Yet, these are indeed quibbles.

Anthea Butler's White Evangelical Racism is a highly useful volume. It is well written, concise, and accessible. Its appeal to scholars is its effective distillation of considerable scholarship into a cohesive explanation of the problem of race in evangelical religion. For a broader audience, it will serve as clear introduction to, and explanation of, the entanglements of white evangelical religion and racism.