“How Am I Responsible?”: Evangelical White Rage and Moral Injury in the Interpassive Perpetration of White-Body Supremacy

Abstract

Using the language of white rage as a term for the defensive reaction of white Americans to having one’s insular and central social location exposed and threatened, this paper explores the manifestation of white rage in American Evangelical Christian culture. Utilizing a focused psychoanalytic reflection and analysis, the authors explore the seeming unintelligible dissonance between the stated personal & communal morals of the white American Evangelical Church and the actions of its leaders and members regarding social and political responses to racism. Discussing how four interlocking theological particularities mask and sustain in-group identity at the expense of an other, the authors introduce and explore the concepts of perpetration-induced trauma and interpassivity and their intersection with whiteness, Linking identification to perpetration through the interpassive participation of inhabiting whiteness, the authors then articulate how the intolerable affective states of guilt and helplessness are defended against and theologically justified through the experience of white rage.

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