By Tex Sample
White working-class people are the canary in the mine. Poorly understood and perceived as a threat to the common good – unintelligent, self-destructive, utterly incapable of leveraging their own privilege - white working-class people have recaptured the cultural and political imagination in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Pundits, politicos, cultural commentators, party leaders and many others are scrambling to understand what makes this demographic tick with mixed results. Scape-goated for all things racist and identified as the voting block that gave the country its most divisive leader in a generation, they are not what they seem: so much more than common xenophobes and red-hat wearing nostalgics for a lost time of white supremacy, this group begs for a richer, more nuanced portrait if they are to be loved and impacted by Christian faith and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Tex Sample is a specialist in church and society, a much sought-after lecturer, storyteller, workshop leader and consultant. He is also the Robert B. And Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at The Saint Paul School of Theology. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.