White churches’ in-group safety blinded members to the harm they caused outsiders

Evidence

I think the fact that white churches produced such a strong sense of safety and security for those of us who were inside the institution is why it is so hard for white Christians to see the harm it did to those who were outside it, particularly African Americans, and the other kinds of damage it did to us, numbing our own moral sensibilities and limiting our religious development. The problem was not that the community functioned to enhance the lives of those within it; all good communities do that. Rather, the problem was that it had developed in such a way that its main goal was protecting and improving white Christians’ lives within an unjust social status quo, which is to say a context of extreme racial inequality and injustice. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to base nation and other institutional-harm readings where in-group comfort masks external costs. — connects to: A group’s protective shield fails when the setting redefines its members as outsiders; White Christianity’s function was protecting white racial innocence — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 69
• DEEPTHINKING: Naming in-group comfort itself as the mechanism of moral harm is a genuinely counterintuitive structural claim a reader would sit with.

Broader Connections

• White Christianity’s function was protecting white racial innocence #complicates (0.80) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 69
• A group’s protective shield fails when the setting redefines its members as outsiders #complicates (0.75)