Us : The Resurrection of American Terror

“The white racist has ruled the world for a long time, and the crises we are undergoing now are involved with the fact that the habits of power are not only extremely hard to lose; they are as tenacious as some incurable disease.” — James Baldwin

In this heart-wrenching yet stubbornly hopeful narrative, Evangelical Lutheran pastor Kenneth Wheeler exposes white supremacy as America's greatest threat. Transcending the boundaries of memoir, scholarship, theology, and sharp political critique, Pastor Wheeler takes readers on his own seven-decade-long journey that lays bare the terror of being Black in America. From his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi under the trauma of Jim Crow segregation to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Wheeler steadily holds a mirror up to a nation drowning in a rising tide of white supremacy.

This is a come-to-Jesus book in every sense of that phrase. Grounded in scripture and engaging in scholarly conversation with voices such as Isabel Wilkerson and James Cone, Wheeler demonstrates how the wound of white supremacy fundamentally diminishes all of our humanity.

“US: The Resurrection of American Terror” offers a deeply vulnerable and piercing portrait of the human toll of white supremacy and points to the Cross as a place of hope and reconciliation. This is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the toxic and deadly interplay between anti-Blackness, nationalism, and Christianity in America.

Intentionally resistant to providing cheap answers or an easy blueprint for the way forward, Wheeler instead uses his prophetic voice to call on white Christians in particular to engage in the deeply personal yet collective work of facing ourselves in order to turn away from who we have become. It is only from this place of seeing who we are, he argues, that we can hope to reclaim the fullness of our humanity and embrace what it means to be people created in the image of God.

“There are some things if you are white in America that you will never have to think about, worry about, or have fears about. This is the power and privilege of white supremacy.” — Rev. Kenneth W. Wheeler