Ep. 32 - Race, Religion and the American South – with Alan Cross

In preparation for the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Scholars Academy’s annual Roots of Social Justice: Alabama Civil Rights Tour spring break trip, Dean Jordan conducted a remote interview with Reverend Alan Cross, a native Southerner, Baptist pastor, and expert on race and religion in the American South. For more about Cross’s work and the topics discussed in this episode, see this NPR story from July 2020: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity. Cross is a contributor to The Bulwark, and his writing there can be found at https://www.thebulwark.com/author/alan-cross/. In 2019, he published an essay in the New York Times on religious freedom and the death penalty (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/opinion/alabama-domineque-ray-death-row.html), and he has also written on the dangers of “Great Replacement Theory” (https://thedispatch.com/article/christians-too-must-oppose-great/) and the role of Black slave preachers in setting the stage for the Civil Rights movement (https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/why-we-should-be-thankful-for-caesar-blackwell-the-alabama-baptist-slave-preacher/). His book When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus, can be purchased at https://www.amazon.com/When-Heaven-Earth-Collide-Evangelicals/dp/1603063501.