The Sword of the Lord Quotes

“Influenced by Wesley and the revival movement, Englishman William Wilberforce led the successful movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Charles G. Finney, known as “America’s foremost revivalist,” was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“From my limited and immature child’s point of view, Heaven was therefore populated almost exclusively by white people who lived in the United States of America, along with the original disciples of Jesus, an uncalculated number of genuine Christians who had lived throughout the ages, and many but not all of those mentioned in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which I first read at the age of eight when I found it on my parents’ book shelf.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Part of the explanation for John R. Rice’s obliviousness to the evils of racial injustice is provided by African-American author Joy DeGruy Leary in her landmark 2005 book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Leary described how former slaves and their descendants continued to experience the damage inflicted by slavery as a permanent traumatic injury for generations after the end of slavery. The aftermath of slavery was a continuing powerlessness, a pervasive sense of being disrespected, a lack of opportunity, and an internalized self-hatred taught to each new generation of black children. The consequences of slavery for the descendants of slaves included poor physical and mental health, difficulty in creating healthy families and relationships, and self-destructive impulses.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The focus on social and racial justice that strongly marked John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Charles G. Finney, Jonathan Blanchard, Charles Spurgeon, and other evangelical leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries was absent from the millions of words and scores of books John R. Rice penned during his lifetime.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“A majority of colonial Americans were either Protestants or unaffiliated with any church. However, many of the leaders of the American Revolution and signers of its Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were Deists, along with James Madison, John Adams, and possibly Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Alexander Hamilton. Most Deists believed in a supreme being who had created the universe along with the natural laws that governed it, but who then took a relatively hands-off approach to human affairs. The supreme being of the Deists could be apprehended by practical investigation and the use of reason to understand natural laws. Religious faith was not needed, nor were miracles, divine inspiration, or personal revelations of God’s spirit.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“For more than 100 years, indeed, dating back to the 1700s, evangelical Christians had cultivated a tradition of working to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth and of confronting social injustice. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and the most eloquent and influential evangelical preacher of the 18th century, fought to shorten the work day and remove abuses and oppression in factories and mines, supported the self-organization of workers into unions, created orphanages, and supported laws to protect children and women and end poverty.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Charles G. Finney, known as “America’s foremost revivalist,” was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders. He was president of Oberlin, the first college in America to educate black and white men and women in the same classrooms.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Lippman was distressed by the symbolically important behavior of fundamentalists: “In actual practice, this movement has become entangled with all sorts of bizarre and barbarous agitations, with the Ku Klux Klan, with fanatical Prohibition, with the ‘anti-evolution laws,’ and with much persecution and intolerance. This is in itself significant. For it shows that the central truth, which the fundamentalists have grasped, no longer appeals to the best brains and the good sense of a modern community, and that the movement is largely recruited from the isolated, the inexperienced, and the uneducated.”[115]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After awhile, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.[109]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Accordingly, the test of “loving your neighbor” is showing compassion for someone you might naturally be inclined to hate or fear or despise—not someone who is your natural ally or blood kin or fellow citizen.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“What does it mean to “love your neighbor?” Jesus recounted a startling parable about a Jewish man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who was beaten and robbed of his clothes and money by bandits and left to die by the side of the road. Seeing him, respectable travelers who were part of the religious establishment passed him by and went on their way. But a Samaritan stopped and had pity on the man. Samaritans were despised by the Jewish establishment of that day, viewed as enemies, ceremonially unclean, socially outcast, heretical in their beliefs. Yet the Samaritan stopped, bound up the man’s wounds, took him to a nearby inn, and nursed him through the night to make sure he could recover. This Samaritan, said Jesus, was the one who truly displayed the love of God.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“By the early 21st century, the most profound consequence of globalization and the culture of the Internet has been an expansion of our understanding of who our neighbors are. Ideas and influences can travel around the world and touch the lives of millions within seconds.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The very ground on which the structure of 20th-century fundamentalist theology and politics was built has crumbled into sand. The reason for which modern fundamentalism was created—in opposition to modernism and liberal theology—has been swept away in the avalanche of new ideas, in new dialogue between different faith traditions.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Globalization has forced us to confront an extraordinarily diverse world that is undergoing massive change at a pace unimaginable to our parents or grandparents.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The opposition of fundamentalist preachers and leaders to the civil rights movement was deeply connected to their historic separatism. They believed in an inerrant Bible that had been inspired by God, and they also believed that God explicitly ordained the separation of the races. The claims of the civil rights marchers were an affront to their interpretation of the Bible, and not just to their racial beliefs.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Although Rice’s earthly racial and political ideas drove him away from the struggle for justice in the South, the heavenly core of his faith was just enough to also drive him away from the Klan and his father Will Rice’s racial politics, and to leave him open to the claims of black people for justice on earth. His opposition to integration was oddly conditional.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“By contrast, in his sermon Negro and White published in 1958, John R. Rice said: “People of all races are members of the same human family. We are blood brothers…so whether Caucasian, Mongolian, or Negro, all races alike are descended from Adam and Eve…Everybody alive on the earth now descended from Noah and his three sons. Racial differences are incidental. We are one race of beings and all alike have the blood of Adam and the blood of Noah in our veins.” He quoted the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans in which Paul told how God offers salvation alike to all, and punishes sin alike with all, concluding that “there is no respect of persons with God who views all His children, both black and white, as equals in his sight.”[185]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“According to John R. Rice, the not guilty verdict was perfectly understandable. Responsibility for Till’s murder lay with the NAACP and other “race agitators,” and not with the white men who in fact killed him.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago youth, visited a small town in the Delta country of Mississippi. The teenager entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Within a day Till was dead, so savagely beaten that it was beyond the ability of his mother to recognize her son. Two white men were arrested: Roy Bryant, the husband of the white woman, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam.” An all-white jury quickly found the defendants not guilty, and they were released. The two men immediately provided an interview for Look magazine in which they openly admitted to and bragged about committing the crime.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“For John R. Rice, it proved to be impossible to acknowledge the consequences of slavery, because to do so would be to admit to his family’s and his region’s collective participation in a moral crime. For Southerners generally, it was easy to acknowledge the moral problem of slavery, and to remember the end of the institution with relief. But it was difficult to acknowledge the continuing damage created by slavery’s legacy because to do so would imply that they—that we, the white descendants of the slave-owning class, culture, and economy—shared guilt for a continuing moral failure.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The keystone of slavery in its new guise was the system of convict labor, which entrapped hundreds of thousands of black men in a permanent state of terror and involuntary servitude, and which kept the entire black community in a state of quiet, fearful resignation.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Slavery in law had been abolished, but slavery in fact continued until after World War II, and was accomplished and supported through violence, brutality, imprisonment, torture, denial of civil and human rights, and enforced poverty.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Moreover, although the Thirteenth Amendment had declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States,” the Congress took a hands-off attitude toward actually enforcing the Amendment. The Southern states responded by creating a host of laws and practices effectively designed to outlaw life in freedom for black people. As historian Douglas Blackmon wrote: “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.”[178] Slavery in law”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“By contrast, Rice said, “Negro ministers, unfortunately have...very often had a bad influence. The Negro minister [Martin Luther King Jr.] in Montgomery, Alabama, who led in the organization of a Negro boycott of the buses, led that fight, unfortunately, not as a Christian trying to make good Christians and to lead in Christian understanding between the races. He led that boycott as a modernist and a socialist who was more concerned about racism than he was about Christianity, I fear.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“However, Rice went on to say that while Jim Crow laws ought to be abolished, “many things are worse than these, and most intelligent people would prefer to have Jim Crow laws than to have unrestrained intermarriage between the races.” The problems with integration were practical, Rice believed. Negroes were “not inherently inferior”; however, Negroes were unfortunately “not morally advanced” compared to white people. For example, Rice said, “Some years ago in Atlanta, Georgia…a check proved that venereal disease was 10 times as frequent among Negroes as among white people…Now suppose that the question of whether white people and Negro people should use the same swimming pools in the parks of Atlanta comes up.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“From Rice’s point of view, he was sincerely taking a moderate and even-handed position, calling to task “extremists” on both sides of the civil rights struggle. “Race hatred is wrong,” he concluded. “It is just as wrong when stirred up by Negro newspapers against white people as it is when stirred up by white people against Negroes…It is just as wrong when stirred up in a church by a modernist infidel preacher as it is when it is stirred up in the South by an over-zealous defender of southern white womanhood and the status quo.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Rather than calling for the white citizens of Little Rock to show Christian love toward the black students, Rice mocked “the wholly selfish and political attitude of the NAACP radical leaders, by socialists and communists, by modernist ‘do-gooders’ who have no other gospel but questions of race and pacifism and labor unions.” He continued:   The nine Negro children were selected by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and on their instructions and to make a public issue.. wholly for political and propaganda purposes…and not for the good of the students themselves, attempted to transfer to Central High School…The Negroes already had a high school equally as good, newer and less crowded…To force integration, President Eisenhower called out units of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, who took over somewhat as “occupation troops.” Citizens were barred from certain streets. Some [whites] were clubbed in the head by soldiers. The nine Negro students went to Central High School.[176]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The supreme being of the Deists could be apprehended by practical investigation and the use of reason to understand natural laws. Religious faith was not needed, nor were miracles, divine inspiration, or personal revelations of God’s spirit.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“ Enlightenment, Kant suggested, required the courage to think for ourselves, to use God-given powers of reason, intellect, and wisdom to understand our world and chart our actions. Kant attacked the view that any religious synod or presbytery should be able to “commit itself by oath to a certain unalterable set of doctrines,” because such a contract would prevent “all further enlightenment of mankind forever.” For humankind to gain wisdom and maturity, human individuals must be free to use their powers of reason to question and critique any religious doctrine.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family