As I wrote in a previous post, many of the ideological battles we are having today were conceived in the war of words between abolitionists and apologists for the “peculiar institution” of slavery which raged in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Though they may be centuries apart, Republicans today share not only a similar world view but routinely employ polemics strangely similar to those of antebellum apologists for slavery.
Take, at random this Republican Party assessment of now-confirmed Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: “she will act as a Far-Left activist judge and a rubber stamp for Biden’s woke agenda if confirmed.”
If anything, this sounds more like typical snark from right-wing members of Congress. But if you dive a little deeper into the choice of words it’s not just McCarthyite or Bircher vocabulary that the GOP is using. It’s a way of communicating a certain world view.
Whether Ketanji Brown Jackson grew up a red diaper baby devouring the works of Marx and Lenin (which she didn’t) or began her career as a corporate lawyer (which she did) is immaterial. When Republicans say “far-left” Liberals hear the word and want to confront its literal meaning. When Evangelicals hear the word they know it’s code for “un-Christian.” Likewise, when Republicans use the words “woke” or “activist” they also know that Evangelicals will infer certain meanings from them.
The fact is, anyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Green and her Proud Boyfriends is considered “far-left” (ie., infidel, atheist, socialist, communist) by today’s Republicans. And nobody in their right mind would deny that Republicans themselves are effective activists. But as the GOP increasingly adopts white Christian Nationalist language, their rhetoric increasingly mirrors arguments and phrases found in pro-slavery apologetics. One of the most often-cited examples of the latter is James Henley Thornwell’s sermon entitled “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”
Thornwell was a South Carolina Presbyterian minister, slave owner, and prolific slavery apologist. Disgusted with smug abolitionists calling slavery immoral, on May 26, 1850 he preached “The Rights and Duties of Masters” at the dedication of a church for slaves. Thornwell prefaced his remarks with a line from Colossians IV:1. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven. He was reminding each member of the audience, Black and white, that the Confederate social order had been ordained by God.
Thornwell began by accusing abolitionists of “woke” hypocrisy and persecution:
The slave-holding States of this confederacy [this was 11 years before the Confederacy was actually created] have been placed under the ban of the publick opinion of the civilized world. The philanthropy of Christendom seems to have concentrated its sympathies upon us. We have been denounced with every epithet of vituperation and abuse, as conspirators against the dignity of man — traitors to our race, and rebels against God. Overlooking, with a rare expansion of benevolence, the evils which press around their own doors, the vices and crimes of their own neighbors and countrymen…
Then he accused the abolitionists of creating “divisiveness” and insurrection:
This insane fury of philanthropy has not been content with speculating upon our degradation and wretchedness at a distance. It has aimed at stirring up insurrection in our midst.
Thornwell implied that a smug little group of abolitionists actually presented an existential threat to the Confederate order established by God:
A spurious charity for a comparatively small class in the community, is dictating the subversion of the cherished institutions of our father, and the hopes of the human race — the utter ruin of this vast imperial Republick, is to be achieved as a trophy to the progress of human development.
Then he slammed Northern and European “liberal” values for the excesses of “unchecked democracy” and mad secular social scientist tinkerers. In fact, you can practically hear Thornwell railing against the “lawless” Black Lives Matter movement and its allies:
The agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms of Europe — the mad speculations of philosophers — the excesses of unchecked democracy, are working out some of the most difficult problems of political and social science; and when the tumult shall have subsided and reason resumed her ascendancy, it will be found that the very principles upon which we have been accustomed to justify Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty — that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interests of mankind — resisting alike the social anarchy of licentiousness — that we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses on the one hand, and the supremacy of a single will on the other.
Ignoring the issue of slavery, Thornwell instead portrayed the conflict between Northern and Southern modernities as a “clash of civilizations.”
But that the world is now the theatre of an extraordinary conflict of great principles — that the foundations of society are about to be explored to their depths — and the sources of social and political prosperity laid bare; that the questions in dispute involve all this is dear and precious to man on earth — the most superficial observer cannot fail to perceive.
Then Thornwell named names of his enemies — leftists and atheists — again offering “regulated freedom” as the alternative. Thornwell predates right-wing critics of Critical Race Theory who object to an “oppressor-victim” dynamic and deplore secular tinkering with the order God has created:
The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake. One party seems to regard society, with all its complicated interests, its divisions and subdivisions, as the machinery of man, which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and skill, may be taken to pieces, reconstructed, altered or repaired, as experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates ‘this little scene of human life’ as placed in the middle of a scheme, whose beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and whose development and completion must be sought in the still more unfathomable depths of the future – a scheme, as Butler expresses it, ‘not fixed, but progressive, in every way incomprehensible;’ in which, consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance, disorder the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to tamper as to sport with the name of God.
In the Confederate world any threat to the established order (one with plantation owners at the top, white sharecroppers in the middle, and slaves a the bottom) was an abomination. For Thornwell, any sort of “activist” was an enemy of “order and regulated freedom” — and that included not only Communists and Jacobins but “red” Republicans (the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collinses of their day).
The remainder of Thornwell’s long sermon is well worth reading. Highlights include: denying that slavery is the physical ownership of a person; that only a slave’s labor is property; that Paul of the Gospels was less concerned with slavery than a slave’s reverence toward his master, a reverence that reflects God’s order; that, far from denying a slave his humanity, slavery makes him an equal partner in God’s plan; … and the like. The sermon is so long, in fact, that Thornwell seems to have employed every pro-slavery argument he could think of and, in the process, made it a perfect exemplar for future study.
Because of its growing economic and political isolation, and because of the need to defend slavery from liberal criticism, the South slowly developed an alternative view of modernity that turned its back on liberal values that were at least given lip service in Europe and the North. And while one may be tempted to conflate the “Lost Cause” with slavery alone, the “Lost Cause” was the South’s alternative modernity, one that featured agrarian Capitalism based on chattel (not wage) slavery, “regulated freedom” (a high and very selective level of repression), a rigid hierarchical social order, a highly porous separation of church and state, and an ideologically and racially homogeneous citizenry.
Southern Christianity was also diverging from the North’s. For preachers and other apologists of slavery, their sermons increasingly focused exclusively on the life of the spirit rather than the temporal lives of slavers and their “property.” Working for social justice or calling for change to social structures defied the Southern social order established by God (in actuality the C.S.A.) and was therefore “un-Christian.”
Anthea Butler points out in “White Evangelical Racism” that many of these world views still exist in white American Evangelism — including in some cases the refusal to condemn slavery. One such apologist is John MacArthur, pastor of the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. While acknowledging the horrors of Roman slavery, MacArthur paints a rosy picture of biblical slavery and refuses to condemn the Southern Christian version, explaining that:
New Testament teaching does not focus on reforming and re structuring human systems, which are never the root cause of human problems. The issue is always the heart of man–which when wicked will corrupt the best of systems and when righteous will improve the worst. If men’s sinful hearts are not changed, they will find ways to oppress others regardless of whether or not there is actual slavery. On the other hand, Spirit-filled believers will have just and harmonious relationships with each other, no matter what system they live under. Man’s basic problems and needs are not political, social, or economic but spiritual ….
After Emancipation and well into the present day, this same religious justification continues to be used to wave away state and collective responsibility for current or historical racist oppression. The same religious justification has more recently become a convenient rationale for banning even the mention of racist systems of oppression or teaching about them. While we may be irked to hear Critical Race Theory reviled as a leftist plot, what is really jaw-dropping is to understand that, for Evangelicals, racism does not actually exist in society but instead exists only in the heart.
Using another pro-slavery argument based on the Southern Christian slave / master / God power structure, MacArthur reduces slavery to simply working for a living:
Throughout history, including in our own day, working people have been oppressed and abused by economic intimidation that amounts to virtual slavery–regardless of the particular economic, social, or political system.
For MacArthur resisting the oppression of slavery is “un-Christian” because it violates the power structure. Seen from the same perspective, any opposition to oppression must therefore be “un-Christian”:
Nowhere in Scripture is rebellion or revolution justified in order to gain freedom, opportunity, or economic, social, or political rights. The emphasis is rather on the responsibility of slaves to serve their human masters faithfully and fully, in order to reflect the transforming power of God in their lives. […] In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote unambiguously, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (Eph. 6:5–6).
Note that MacArthur uses precisely the same citation from Paul of the Gospels that Thornwell did in 1850. Note also that the Evangelical rejection of injustice in the real world is completely at odds with most of Judaism, mainstream Christianity, Catholic Liberation Theology, and the Black Church. In other words, for all their talk about so-called “Judeo-Christian” values, they don’t actually share critical understanding with Jews and other Christians.
It’s important to acknowledge that while some Evangelicals are white Christian Nationalists, not all are. A perfect illustration is the bitter fight that erupted within the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) when that organization recognized it had a racism problem and brought in diversity trainers. As you might imagine, the Christian Nationalists within Cru pushed back. Similarly, there are currently two different battles going on within the Southern Baptist Conference: one about Critical Race Theory and another about the Disney Corporation. And SBC nationalists use the same insulting rhetoric against their religious brethren that they use on their outside enemies.
The 179-page document that the SBC nationalists created provides an excellent overview of what white Christian Nationalists believe about subjects as far-ranging as the role of the church, social justice, race, sexuality, gender issues, and Critical Race Theory. It also contains well-organized tables listing think tanks and individuals who manufacture objections to Critical Race Theory, and each of their talking points.
If you want to understand how Christian Nationalists see race — at least within the Evangelical world — read Seeking Clarity and Unity.
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