Real-Time Revisionism: How Racialized Narratives Legitimize White Christian Dominance in the United States

Conspiracy theorists, self-identified Christian nationalists, or conservative activists are often depicted as the faces of pro-Christian social movements in the United States. Often overlooked is the role of local churches that till the ideological ground for the seeds of once fringe social movements to grow into the “mainstream.” Drawing on ethnographic data, the author shows how a White church deploys what the author refers to as “real-time revisionism”: the process of interpreting current events in ways that align with a narrative of White Christian purity, normativity, dominance, or victimization. In this case, real-time revisionism purifies and legitimizes racialized interpretive frames. The author considers real-time revisionism an organizational mechanism, extending W.E.B. Du Bois’s previous work on revisionism in the White church. Through an analysis of the role of revisionism, the author examines how organizational leaders and church members interpret their place in what they perceive to be an increasingly secular, non-Christian, and non-White society. In this article, the author shows the value of ethnography in rendering local knowledge more visible, and encourage future scholarship to consider churches’ roles in macro-level trends that reinforce White and Christian dominance in the United States.