Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

In the 1990s, Wilson had coauthored Southern Slavery: As It Was, which questioned the supposed “brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties” of slavery. The slave trade might have been unbiblical, he allowed, but slavery most certainly was not. To the contrary, the radical abolitionists were the ones “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.” Horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda. The life of a slave had been a life of plenty, of ample food, good medical care, and simple pleasures, marked by “a degree of mutual affection between the races” that could never be achieved through coercive federal legislation. In 2005 he published Black and Tan, a sequel that presented Robert E. Lee as “a gracious Christian gentleman, a brother in Christ,” and claimed that Christian slave owners were “on firm scriptural ground.”