This President has been many things since arriving: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language.

But he’s also been a floodlight. He’s fully exposed millions of people who’d kept themselves carefully concealed. I can really see them now in ways I never could previously. It’s all out in the open.

Intellectually I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation, but I’d convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren’t as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been. As a pastor in largely white churches in the south over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church was changing. It may have been a combination of privilege and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice.

I surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to—were as afflicted with supremacy as they apparently are. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners and so worship America and so abhor difference. They were really good at pretending and in my naivety I suppose I was more than willing to believe them even if they weren’t.

<snip> The remainder may be read at https://johnpavlovitz.com/2019/11/01/this-presidency-has-exposed-my-white-christian-friends/