White Christian Nationalism and How We Overcome It
On Sunday, May 3, from 1:30 to 3:00 PM, the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis will engage in conversation three outstanding writers whose respective works examine the role of white supremacist ideology in the development of American Christianity and how we might overcome it.
They are Rachel Swarns, a former NYT reporter, contributing writer, and professor of journalism at NYU; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, professor of theology at Fordham; and Kevin Sack, a former NYT reporter whose byline has shared in three Pulitzer prizes and is a visiting professor at Princeton this semester.
Swarns, who describes herself as a Black woman and a practicing Catholic, is the author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (2023), which takes as its subject the Jesuit slaveholders whose 1838 sale of 272 bonded people saved their largest mission project from financial ruin, which in turn became the prestigious Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Swarns also wrote about Michelle Obama’s enslaved lineage in American Tapestry (2012).
Hill, also a practicing Catholic, is the author of The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America (2019), and the recently published Grace of the Ghosts: A Theology of Institutional Reparation (2025), which expands on Swarns’s work by discussing how the American Catholic church garnered its great wealth by dehumanizing, exploiting, and subsuming large numbers of African, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian peoples in the bloody westward march of Manifest Destiny.
As the New York Times correspondent for the infamous 2015 massacre in Charleston of nine Black parishioners at Bible study, Sack spent the subsequent decade researching and writing Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, which frames the massacre as the culmination of 200 years of persecution of Black Methodists by the city’s slaveholding Methodists and other evangelicals from the period of slavery through the civil rights movement.
