Growing up in church I used to sit back when the pastor made the call to the altar. He’d begin by asking a question concerning how we were living our lives and in what state we wanted to leave it. I’d watch from my seat as the weary souls of Black folk lined up to kneel down before God. Occasionally, the pastor would come lay hands on some — especially if they were new to the church. They’d catch the holy ghost and their bodies would convulse. Ushers were always on standby to help contain the movement. No one at the altar batted an eye — too concerned, no doubt, with working out their own salvation.

I understood the altar call to be a tradition to help wayfaring souls — the unsaved and those needing to renew their “sacrifice” to God — find absolution. Its roots, however, were much more radical. Long before white evangelicals came to be categorical adherents of the cult of white supremacy, evangelist Charles Finney created the idea of the altar call. A primary purpose of this “new measure” within the church was to enlist converts into the abolitionist movement. It was an outgrowth of his Systematic Theology, which centered on the “unity of moral action.” At the time, and even now, he was criticized by Christian leaders for being a “huckster” and a “quack.”

Finney believed that “all unconverted abolitionists are slaveholders in heart, and, so far as possible, in life” and therefore a “child of the devil.” His “new measure” gave white folks an opportunity to sacrifice for the liberation of Black people. Professor and historian of race and religion, Edward J. Blum, observed, however, that “the Civil War and the abolition of slavery [did not] redeem the soul of white America.” Early in his career, Dr. King suggested that “maybe God called [Black people] here…to save the soul of this nation.” Suffrage and the end of de jure segregation, he found, didn’t bring salvation for white America either. Prior to his death he came to realize that Black people’s unearned suffering could not redeem them. White folks would have to work out their own salvation.

Iconoclasm

In 1997, American author and historian Noel Ignatiev delivered a speech at a conference in Berkeley, California. Throughout his talk, he made the case that the purpose of analyzing white identity is not merely to interpret it but to abolish it. This call for abolition was not for an adoption of color blindness. It was, counterintuitively, the exact opposite. White folks, he argued, must begin to actually see themselves as white. Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick, explains why in his essay, The Matter of Whiteness:

As long as race is something applied only to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm…The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.

This subversion of whiteness is the only way for white folks to become visible to themselves. For how can they abolish an idol which they cannot see?

Religions are built on myths and rituals. To renounce the cult of white supremacy requires unlearning the myths that uphold it. The myth of American meritocracy. The myth that Black people’s problems are due to cultural pathology. The myth of reverse racism. The myth that having liberal politics or Black friends and relatives means you are free of idolatrous ways.

The core rituals, which give the idol of whiteness its legitimacy, must also be abandoned:

Absolving white folks’ sins— past and present — via the legal system, print and digital media, literature and in general public discourse. Demonizing or disregarding the victims of the various forms of ceremonial white violence via the same channels.

This apostasy is what Ignatiev called being a “traitor to the white race.” It is to “nominally [classify] as white but” also “[defy] white rules so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon the privileges of whiteness.” What is necessary, then, is self-exile. For to challenge the very foundation of the imaginary construct known as the “white community” is to alienate one’s self from it. From this fission, Ignatiev says, can come the “building of a new human community.”