An Emancipation of the Mind Quotes

“The rise of a Christian slave republic in North America, they understood, was the work of a counterrevolutionary movement that originated in the northern states after independence and consciously set itself against the ideals and achievements of the first American Revolution.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The ideal to which Americans hold the republic accountable today dates not from the year that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence but from the year that Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The proslavery theology that supplied the intellectual scaffolding for America’s first iteration of fascism never went away; it was the spiritual face of the second counterrevolution, and it is the direct ancestor of Christian nationalism today.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“They concocted the myth that the same abolitionists whom the churches of the time hounded as infidels and atheists were the heart and soul of early American Christianity,”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“One day it will be thought not less heroic for a Negro to fight for his personal liberty, than for a white man to fight for political independence, and against a tax of three pence on a pound of”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“If the Bible sanctions slavery … the Bible … ought to be … regarded as the enemy of Nature and Nature’s God, and the progress of the human race in liberty, justice, and goodness.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“But the laws of nature come from the deity in the same way as the laws of physics do. They are valid insofar as they follow from the nature of things, not insofar as they express the supposed will of a superior being.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“According to the logic of the Radical Enlightenment, the “unalienable rights” of man follow from the laws of nature.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“THE timeless truth that debates about the nature of the lord in heaven are, at bottom, debates about who is entitled to rule on Earth.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The “Right Hegelians” took up the side of God and country; the “Left Hegelians” put their chips on freedom and progress.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“Garrisonianism was not unlike those modern views holding that slavery (or at least white supremacy) was stamped into the American project from the beginning, and that the logical thing to do is therefore to demolish the whole system.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“America’s Bible-based version of the Christian religion had fashioned itself into the cornerstone of the counterrevolutionary American slave republic.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“As counterrevolutionary elites in America came to understand, intuitively at first and then explicitly, the key to perpetuating privilege in an emerging democracy is to deprive the people not of their notional political power but of their faculty of reason.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“THERE WAS NOTHING NEW in an alliance between men of property and men of the cloth at the power nexus of the American slave republic.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The convergence between the antislavery movement and the nascent women’s rights movement confirmed in the eyes of the faithful that abolitionism was simply Satanic.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“As one scholar has suggested, many evangelicals thought slavery was a sin for the same reason that beating your dog is a sin: because it reflects badly on the master, not because the slave is an equal.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The final solution, Stowe makes clear in her last chapter, is to thank America’s enslaved Black population for playing Jesus by shipping it off to Africa.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“the church-based wing of the movement therefore broke away in search of a form of abolitionism consistent with its belief in the literal truth of the scriptures, the subordination of women, and the sanctity of property. In the end, it committed itself to a form of abolitionism that stood little chance of abolishing anything.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“the slavery debate tended to divide the political world along almost the same lines as the women’s movement.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The Christian nationalist vision that emerged from the battle of the Bible was future minded, not backward looking. It was self-consciously illiberal and authoritarian in a way that clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The Episcopal bishop of Georgia declares that God himself had called upon “the heroic race” of southern white Christian men “to drive away the infidel and rationalist principles sweeping the land.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“the proslavery aspects of the Bible “cannot be got rid of without resorting to methods of interpretation which will get rid of everything.”62”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“Inequality was, as it always has been in human history, the enemy of reason.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The rebellion of 1861 was a rebellion of the richer classes in America against the rule of the middle classes.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“America’s slaveholders resolved for war against American democracy not to defend the past but to claim the future.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“In the decades immediately after the American Revolution, the slaveholding elite of the South commandeered a counterrevolutionary movement—one that began with northern elites, set itself against the ideals of the first American Revolution, and continued in different forms through the present.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“In the prevailing narratives of American history, an often-unexamined assumption is that slavery was the same thing in 1860 as it was in 1776 and even in 1619.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“An excess of reading is rarely good for the orthodox mind,”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America