Today I direct your attention to a piece by John Fea on white evangelical racism and how it has paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Fea is professor of American history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. His current book is entitled “Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump“.
The piece is entitled: “How the history of white evangelical racism has led to Donald Trump’s election and continues to shape support for his presidency“.
Fea walks us through some history: White evangelicalism as we know it today arose out of the slave rebellions of the 1830s, chiefly Nat Turner’s Rebellion. These revolts led whites at that time to push for slavery to be expanded to the western states; if slaves could be dispersed over a wider area then future slave revolts would be less likely. Theologically, white ministers developed a biblical defense of slavery, arguing that anyone reading the Bible in a literal, word-for-word fashion (as God intended it to be read) would come to the conclusion that God ordained slavery and approved of it. Commonsense interpretations of passages on slavery such as Paul’s exhortations to servants to obey their masters or for the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his master Philemon were difficult to argue with.
That evangelical insistence upon inerrancy and a literal reading of the Bible–it didn’t just come up out of thin air, people.
The Confederacy came to see itself as a Christian society worthy of God’s blessing because they had a proper understanding of the Bible–which was all tied up with slavery and their view of how the Bible upheld slavery. Abolitionist arguments against slavery were viewed as heretical because they went against the plain teaching of Scripture (in their view) and also because they jeopardized the US’s character as a Christian nation worthy of God’s blessing because they upheld the plain teaching of the Bible which upheld slavery. The notion that slaves–or any Africans, for that matter–were human beings deserving of rights and freedom was viewed as godless liberal Enlightenment modernist hokum and contrary to sound Biblical teaching. James Henley Thornwell, a white theologian who staunchly supported slavery, characterized the essential conflict in the Civil War thusly: “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders–they are atheists, socialists, communist, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”
Any God who ordains a system where some humans are subject to others simply because their skin is a few shades darker, deserves atheists.
Southern evangelicals feared the mixing of the white and black races and thus staunchly opposed racial intermarriage. Check out these choice words from South Carolina governor George McDuffie, who stated that “no human institution…is more manifestly consistent with the will of God, then domestic slavery,” and that abolitionists were on a “fiend-like errand of mingling the blood of master and slave.” Of course this mixing of races was already happening via the practice of masters raping slaves, but that was beside the point.
Racial fears did not fade away with the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction. If anything, these racial fears were reinforced. A prime example was Rev. Robert Dabney’s opposition to the ordination of black freedmen in the Southern Presbyterian Church. In an 1867 speech, Dabney stated that ordaining black ministers would “threaten the very existence of civil society”. Because God created racial difference, in Dabney’s view, it was “plainly impossible for a black man to teach and rule white Christians to edification”. Dabney predicted a sort of theological “white flight” from Presbyterian churches if blacks were ordained it would “bring a mischievous element into our church, at the expense of driving a multitude of valuable members and ministers out.” Dabney was not about to sit back and let “the race of Washington, and Lee, and Jackson” to be mixed “with this base herd which they brought from the pens of Africa”.
Yep, this stereotype of blacks as troublemakers and “a mischievous element” has been around for awhile.
Northern Protestant fundamentalists were aware of the evils of racism, yet did precious little about it. If anything their views about a literal understanding of Scripture only served to perpetuate and exacerbate systemic racism. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist terror groups saw them as natural allies. In the wake of the 1921 Greenwood race massacre, white church leaders were eager to lay the blame at the feet of “black agitators” while stating that blacks were clearly unfit for life together with whites in our American society.
Fast forward to the 1950s and 1960s and we see that white evangelicalism has at best a mixed record on race relations during that period. Billy Graham did desegregate his crusades and many evangelical leaders and publications came out in support of Brown v Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other such reforms. But very few Northern evangelicals participated in the civil rights movement, and strong pockets of resistance formed in the South. White evangelicals pushed back on what they saw as federal encroachment on state and local authority as the federal government moved to enforce desegregation and oppose Jim Crow laws.
When the Moral Majority got going in the 1970s and 1980s, the driving issue was not abortion, it was resistance to federal attempts to desegregate evangelical institutions such as Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Academy (now Liberty University). In light of this, I am now at least somewhat distrustful of the evangelical fixation with anti-abortion as an attempt to steer the conversation away from the issue of race relations.
This brings us to present day. In August 2017, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, VA, to protest the proposed removal of Confederate monuments. When violence broke out, Donald Trump drew moral equivalency between the white supremacists and those who opposed them. Many leading evangelicals, including FBC Dallas pastor and Trump supporter extraordinaire Robert Jeffress, who warned of an “axis of evil” threatening to take Donald Trump down and reaffirmed America’s Judeo-Christian roots with nary a mention of how intimately those roots are entangled with violence against the black race.
All of this to say: It’s time for a reckoning, my fellow evangelicals.
Our movement is intimately tied up with violence and oppression directed toward the black race, and has been, virtually since its inception. Inerrancy and a literal reading of the Bible, some of our dearest and most deeply held evangelical presuppositions–those didn’t just come up out of thin air. They came about because evangelicals early on perceived that the Bible, when read in a certain way, could be weaponized against the black race to keep them in a place of subjugation.
In the Kraalogies series that I linked in my prior post, one of the key movements was the use of apartheid as a political/theological defense against godless, atheistic communists who were backing those in South Africa who were agitating for its removal. This movement ties in with that of the Southern evangelicals who opposed anti-slavery arguments on the basis that they were a product of godless, liberal, atheistic modernism.
If that’s godless liberal modernism, then give me godless liberal modernism any day of the week.
Evangelicals: If our God is one who approves of the subjugation of millions of human beings created in His image just because their skin happens to be a few shades darker than your own, then that God deserves atheists.
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