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October 19 - October 21, 2020
The earliest phase of the Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide. But when Protestant Christian Right leaders such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the advice of Catholic political activist Paul Weyrich to include opposition to abortion as a leading issue for the nascent movement in the late 1970s—as white Protestants were increasingly fleeing the Democratic Party over its support for civil rights—old antipathies quickly gave way to the promise of new political alliances.
Grandparents thought of Catholicism as a dangerous foreign import, a papist cult that was unchristian and incompatible with democracy.
Americanness, which made full membership in the nation contingent on skin tone and religious belief.
Baldwin argued that the need to maintain a Christian veneer over the practice of slavery further degraded an already immoral system and distorted Christianity itself:
For African Americans, the years immediately following the war were first elating and then devastating. W. E. B. DuBois famously described the period as one where “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”5
it is striking to note the conspicuous absence of religious opposition to the mob violence.
they overlook the proactive role white religious leaders and white churches played in creating a uniquely American and distinctively Christian form of white supremacy.
while actions of white southern evangelical churches have received most of the historical spotlight, one does not need to cast too far about to see similar actions and shared convictions in white mainline Protestant and white Catholic churches well beyond the former states of the Confederacy.
He was the chief architect of the withdrawal of Baptists in the South from cooperative fellowship with their northern brethren over the issue of slavery that established the Southern Baptist Convention; and he was instrumental in building a southern alternative to ministerial educational institutions in the North, which he perceived to be increasingly under the influence of abolitionists. Manly was widely recognized as the leading theological apologist for slavery in his day.
He isReverend Dr. Basil Manly Sr.
Manly asserted forcefully an unapologetic theology of white supremacy, arguing that slavery was not an unfortunate necessity but rather part of the divinely ordained hierarchical order of Christian society.
By the dawn of the Civil War, Manly was acknowledged as one of the most uncompromising religious voices supporting slavery.
Manly first issued a call for a new seminary for Baptists in the South in 1835 while he was serving as pastor of Charleston Church in South Carolina. Over the next two decades, he was “the driving force” in a movement to establish the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in May 1859.
“In Manly’s eyes, the Confederacy was the culmination of God’s plan for the world.”33
In service to the Confederacy, Manly was a steadfast and sought-after religious voice justifying slavery and white supremacy.
an overtly segregationist campaign that appealed to religious conservatives by baptizing his white supremacist politics in Christian theology, with claims such as: “God was the original segregationist” and “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.”
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, which ruled that state laws enforcing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional,
The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow ediface together.
The attempt to integrate the largest white Baptist and Methodist churches in the state was the last action Medgar Evers would oversee.
Beckwith was not brought to justice until a third trial finally convicted him in 1994.
Beckwith murdered Evers
What if, for example, Christian conceptions of marriage and family, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance?
Is it possible that the white supremacy heresy is so integrated into white Christian DNA that it eludes even sincere efforts to excise it?
had also been simultaneously entangled in justifying unspeakable racial violence, bigotry, and ongoing indifference to African Americans’ claims to equality and justice.
He lamented that white Christians “have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
the lie—that white Christians tell ourselves, on the few occasions we face our history, is that Christianity has been a force for unambiguous good in the world. No matter what evil Christians commit or what violence Christian institutions justify, an idealized conception of Christianity remains unscathed.
They are protecting their ideology or the religion from the terrible things that occur in its name. They claim only the good stuff. What gets lost in all of this is that the bad stuff may very well tell us something important about communism, Christianity, or Islam—that
As a large wall display notes, the slave Bible excludes 90 percent of the Old Testament and about half of the New Testament.
It shows the way a mutilated Bible could reinforce slavery, but it fails to cast light on the evil that an intact Bible could foster among whites.
white supremacists account for far greater numbers of domestic terrorism than any other group and a growing proportion of extremist violence worldwide.
2018 was the fourth most violent year for domestic terrorism since 1970 and that nearly eight in ten of these attacks were motivated by white supremacy.
it is no longer deniable that Christian theology underwrote and justified the white supremacist right to “[wring] their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, and thereafter the right to segregate African Americans into a permanent underclass by the force of law and lynching, white Christians point to a corrupt culture rather than a compromised Christianity.
While Manly was one of the most prominent purveyors of white supremacist theology, he was not unique among Southern Baptists, and he had counterparts in the southern branches of the other major Protestant denominations, such as William Capers, a Methodist, and James Henley Thornwell, a Presbyterian.
the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.
The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.
Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.22
“Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.
white evangelical Protestants have begun to shrink as a proportion of the population in the last decade,
Sin and salvation were ever-present in the white Christian world in which I grew up.
White Christian selectivity harnessed the Bible in service of maintaining the current status quo, which, conveniently, was structured to maintain white supremacy.
Just weeks after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, the Reverend Jerry Falwell gave this response in a sermon: “Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else—including the fighting of Communism, or participating in the civil rights reform.… Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”56 Of course, Falwell eventually reversed himself, founding his own political organization, the Moral Majority, in 1979 and becoming a major player on the political right. The
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Until we find the courage to face these appalling errors of our recent past, white Christians should probably avoid any further proclamations about what “the Bible teaches” or what “the biblical worldview” demands.
Lost Cause theology, with its underlying commitment to preserving white supremacy,
Increasing anxieties around the perceived decline of white identity and white Christian culture are driving right-wing extremism both at home and abroad. What
policed public school history textbooks for anti-South bias and produced their own alternatives, such as a white supremacist primer for schoolchildren entitled The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire, which was written in 1914 by UDC historian-general Laura Martin Rose and subsequently adopted by the state of Mississippi as a supplemental text for public schools;
These female Lost Cause crusaders had literally staked their white supremacist claims in public spaces across the South and had contributed significantly to the ideological victories fought in postwar national literary and historical circles.
Melvin Urofsky observes in his history of the Virginia Historical Society, by the end of the nineteenth century, “nearly all northern historians adopted the southern view on race in general and the inferiority of African Americans in particular.”
The North had accepted the Lost Cause narrative as fact, which was an essential element of reunion.
That narrative, perpetuated most vigorously by the UDC, was, at its core, about preserving white supremacy.
the mountain had cultural significance as a meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was granted an explicit right to continue ceremonies there undeterred during the construction.
Stone Mountain in GA
as of July 2019, there were 1,747 documented Confederate monuments, place names, holidays, and other symbols still in public spaces.
more than nine in ten of the public monuments were erected after 1895. Fully half of them were erected between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1920s, with another boomlet of intense activity between 1955 and 1970.24 In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality and justice.
