For Bannon’s free thinkers, race reality was not only becoming their reality, it was becoming God’s reality—a connection with a long history in America. From the time slaves were first brought to America, preachers drew from the book of Ephesians to justify the practice, quoting the line “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” as evidence that slave ownership was godly. In the early nineteenth century, Episcopal bishop Stephen Elliott suggested that those who wished to end slavery were behaving in an ungodly way.
