White Evangelical Racism

The Politics of Morality in America

Anthea Butler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469661186
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.

1

THE RACIST FOUNDATIONS OF EVANGELICALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

“We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, but we miss the blessing of slavery, that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.” These words were spoken not in the nineteenth century but in the twenty-first. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the sustained protests against racism and police violence that followed, pastor Louie Giglio of Passion City Church in Atlanta held a televised discussion with Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy and African American Christian rapper Lecrae. While discussing racism in a conversation that was a bit too rosy in tone, Giglio tried to explain how white privilege works. Instead, speaking the words that open this chapter, he inadvertently attested to a sentiment held dear by many Christians who lived in the nineteenth century.

Giglio’s “we miss the blessing of slavery” in fact, echoed the lines from George Fitzhugh’s 1857 proslavery book Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters. Though more than a century and a half divide Fitzhugh from Giglio, both men understood one bald truth: slavery was a blessing to white people and a curse to Black people. Giglio’s comments caused such an outcry that he posted a video apology on social media the very next day. His explanation was that he had been trying to get people to understand the meaning of the term “white privilege” and that—using inappropriate words—he had done a bad job of it. While Giglio dealt with the ensuing social media meltdown and public relations debacle, it was Lecrae who ended up suffering the most criticism from African American Christians, who chided him for missing the on-air moment when he could have offered a timely and potent corrective to Giglio’s statement. Black Christians saw in that minute the power of white evangelicalism to reduce Lecrae, even though he had tried to gently object, to a nodding prop for the white evangelical pastor. The discussion showed how Giglio, though attempting to talk openly about race, had nonetheless structured the whole meeting in a way that placed the Black man in a position subordinate to Giglio’s religious authority.

I begin with this painful story because it says so much about both the continuity between evangelicalism and slavery and the connection between the evangelical movements of the antebellum era and of today. It reveals that racism was structured—with the exact same words Pastor Giglio used—into American evangelicalism across the centuries.

Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism. Responses to slavery, both for and against, have fundamentally shaped the evangelical movement in a number of important ways. Many insightful works of history have been written helping to uncover and comb out this story. Drawing on them, this chapter builds out the essential foundation of the story in order to navigate the early period as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of evangelical racism that will form the rest of this book.

As a historian, I know that American evangelicals made important and substantial contributions to the abolitionist movement and to the education and uplift of African Americans during Reconstruction. I am deliberately focusing this chapter on the trajectory of evangelical history that supported slavery, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow, and lynching. My reason for shaping this book around that trajectory—which I have no doubt is extremely painful to both Black and most white evangelicals today—is that this history is the key to understanding how evangelicals used and continue to use scripture, morality, and the political power they gathered across the course of the twentieth and, now, the twenty-first centuries.

The nineteenth-century racism of American evangelicalism shored up southern cultural and racial mores through the interpretation of scriptures, theology, and belief that informed white southerners’ social and political actions. Evangelicals’ use of morality in the nineteenth century forged the pathway by which racism and white supremacy became part and parcel of evangelical history, informing how they interpreted scripture, how they constructed a public and nationalistic vision for America, and how they used morality to both convert and oppress African Americans in slavery and in freedom.

To understand how evangelicals went about this process, we must begin with the Bible, because the Bible was the defining text to which people turned to answer the question of whether slavery was or was not God’s will. Before the Civil War, the Bible was interpreted literally, and most people’s acquaintance with it came through their pastor or, if they happened to be people of means, through their own copy (most likely sold to them by an agent of the American Bible Society). Although many did not have a Bible in their own homes, they heard scripture often enough in their churches to acquire a familiarity and could quote their favorite verses by heart. Some scriptures, however, were often repeated in order to support slavery.

The two most cited biblical scriptures used to support nineteenth-century slavery in the United States were Genesis 9:18–27 and Ephesians 6:5–7. One was an admonition, the other a justification for why people of African descent were to be enslaved. Genesis 9:18–27 tells the story of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. When Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked, his son Ham saw his nakedness. He told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who entered the tent where Noah was sleeping but walked in backward so they would not see their father’s nakedness. Once there, they covered their father to preserve his dignity. When Noah awakened and realized what had happened, he cursed Ham, the father of Canaan: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.” Nineteenth-century expositors generally regarded “Canaan” as Africa and interpreted Ham as representing Black peoples. They concluded that Noah’s curse relegated Black peoples to chattel slavery. The name “Ham” was interpreted erroneously to mean “dark” or “black.” This scripture became the foundation of the biblical justification for slavery for many southern slaveholders in the United States as well as for northerners who supported slavery.

Ephesians 6:5–7 offered slaveholders an even more compelling argument. It reads: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.” This passage was interpreted to mean that slaves should remain docile and obey their masters, as God required of them. In the literal understanding of this scripture, it was God’s will that they were slaves and therefore nothing could be done about it.

These scriptures, along with others, were used by both preachers and slaveholders to reinforce the right to hold slaves. There was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom, which was used in the Caribbean by slaves who could read. Since reading was prohibited for slaves in the United States, preachers simply omitted talking about scriptures that emphasized freedom. Enslaved Africans were often told that Genesis 9:18–27 and Ephesians 6:5–7, along with other biblical scriptures, justified and explained their status as slaves. They were reminded to be obedient and in return were promised heaven, where they would be able to “serve” their eternal masters.

The Bible gave southern evangelical slaveholders a code for personal behavior that was steeped in moral practices that allowed them to define themselves as moral actors. The rationale went like this: slavery was a sin, but if a Christian owner held slaves, the Christian was not sinful, because God had ordained slavery in the Bible. Thomas R. Dew, slaveholder and president of the College of William and Mary, made his proslavery arguments to the Virginia legislature in the wake of the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia along these same lines: “With regard to the assertion, that slavery is against the spirit of Christianity, we are ready to admit the general assertion, but deny most positively that there is anything in the Old or New Testament, which would go to show that slavery, when once introduced, ought at all events to be abrogated, or that the master commits any offence in holding slaves. The children of Israel themselves were slave holders, and were not condemned for it.” This line of thinking was common to slaveholders. Yes, slavery was generally condemned in the scriptures, but it was allowed; no one in scripture put a stop to it, and therefore it definitely was permissible. Dew also challenged Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that slaves hated their masters and described a benevolent relationship between master and slave that was to be admired: “We have no hesitation in affirming, that throughout the whole slave holding country, the slaves of a good master, are his warmest, most constant, and most devoted friends; they have been accustomed to look up to him as their supporter, director and defender.”

In reality, of course, the master-slave relationship was nothing like what Dew described. Slaveholders committed atrocities, splitting up families, raping women, and torturing men. Slave insurrections frequently occurred. Yet Dew’s views and others like them persisted. In his 1857 book Cannibals All, George Fitzhugh describes slaves as “the happiest” and “the freest people in the world” because, as he put it, “all have the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them.” Southern slavery was, he wrote, “a benign and protective institution,” and the enslaved were “confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world.”

This idea of slavery being benign and protective speaks not only to the moral construction of religion and slavery but also to the idea that slaves did not have the mental or moral capacity to exist without white masters. That was far from true. Slaves developed their own understandings of Christianity. Scholar Albert Raboteau refers to the religion of the slaves as the “invisible institution”; slaves would meet in closed spaces in the woods, referred to as “hush arbors,” to preach and practice Christianity, as well as traditional African religions, away from their masters and overseers. Interpreting stories of the Israelites fleeing Egypt and of Moses as the deliverer in terms of their own lives and stories, slaves sang songs and engaged in coded practices that turned the meaning of scriptures into cloaked messages of hope. No matter what was preached to them, slaves’ religion was about freedom, both here on earth and in the hereafter. The enslaved knew that the Christianity taught to them was not the only version, and they expressed their secret knowledge through songs, signals, and words that whites did not understand, which held hidden meanings about freedom.

Slaves and free Black Americans brought this understanding of the Christian message to explicitly criticize southern evangelicalism as well. One of the strongest critiques of slaveholding Christianity in the nineteenth century is in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. For Douglass, slaveholding Christianity had no relationship to true Christianity. “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ,” he wrote, “I recognize the widest possible difference.” Douglass told the story of a Reverend Weeden who lived near his master and who beat a female slave mercilessly, keeping her back raw for weeks. Of Weeden, Douglass said, “For all the slaveholders I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them to be the meanest, and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” In a poem that closed his biography, Douglass described Christian slaveholders as hypocrites:

We wonder how such saints can sing,

Or praise the Lord upon the wing,

Who roar, and scold, and whip, and sting,

And to their slaves and mammon cling,

In guilty conscience union.

Douglass, of course, provided fuel for the abolitionist movement, in which white evangelicals also participated. Abolitionists’ critiques of slavery in broadsides, newspapers like the North Star and the Liberator, and books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin became touch points in the antislavery movement, challenging the moral structure of religious slaveholding.

Moreover, debates over scripture and slavery among evangelicals divided denominations. The Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists all split over slavery before the Civil War. The Methodist Episcopal Church split in 1844 because one of its bishops, J. O. Andrew, acquired slaves through marriage. When Andrew was asked to step down from his post, southern delegates drafted a plan of separation. The next year, they left and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The American Baptist denomination split the following year over opposition to appointing slaveholders as missionaries and created what we now know as the Southern Baptist Convention. Presbyterians endured several splits, the third of which, in 1861, was primarily about slavery. These differences over slavery would last into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century: the American Baptists and the Southern Baptist Convention still exist as separate entities.

Churches remained true to the social structures of the regions they lived in, and their leaders found scriptures to buttress those social structures. Biblical mandates were found to support the system of slavery, including the economics of the practice, and to be a repository for a morality constructed on the dubious value of slaveholding and southern morals as a marker of “true civilization.” That civilization would be upheld after the Civil War through violence and allegiance to what historian Charles Reagan Wilson called the “Religion of the Lost Cause.”

The Religion of the Lost Cause blended Christian and southern values of slaveholding. Ministers in the South believed that their former way of life, and their former society, was key to Christian civilization. The end of the Civil War did not mark the end of this particular belief. Pushing back against the destruction of their way of life, minsters deployed various methods to maintain the religious and cultural values of the slaveholding South during the Reconstruction period. Wilson notes that ministers promoted the link to these values by creating ritualistic forms that celebrated regional and mythological beliefs. By creating a history where the brutality and suffering of Black people was ignored in favor of promoting southern life and chivalry, the Lost Cause essentially turned the states of the former Confederacy into defenders of a noble ideal rather than just violent secessionists that had defied the Union.

Ministers used the mythology of the Lost Cause to promote moral reform, conversion to Christianity, and the education of the young in southern traditions. In the process, they recast the Confederacy as a defense not of slavery but of the South, its traditions, and the superiority of the southern way of life as a moral exemplar against the North. This Lost Cause aesthetic, according to historian W. Scott Poole, was steeped in romanticism and evangelicalism, and it replaced slavery as the cohesive narrative of the South. It also maintained the most important element of slavery: the idea that Black people were inferior to whites and therefore unable to take an equal place economically or socially in the Reconstruction South. All of this reinforced the boundaries of racial identity, reaffirmed antebellum attitudes regarding gender, and fueled a revivified Confederate nationalism.

The Lost Cause was buttressed by cultural behaviors steeped in religious practices and moral beliefs. Mourning the Confederate dead, erecting public statuary to Confederate generals, and creating holidays all turned the Lost Cause into a civil religion that was supported by the clergy. The birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, for example, was used as the date for the establishment of Confederate Memorial Day, begun in 1866 by the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia. In preserving the rituals and customs of the South and the Confederacy through the Daughters of the Confederacy and other societies, white women played an important role in cementing the structures of morality and civility that were also part of evangelical belief.

White southern women were not mere bystanders. They came to serve as an important cornerstone of Lost Cause religion. The purity, innocence, and respectability that southern womanhood evoked for white men were an essential part of the social apparatus and logic that kept Black men and women in subjection and fear. As a symbol of the racist South, white southern women provided order through their domestic lives and their bodies. The practices of religiosity, respectability, and homemaking that they cultivated reflected genteel morality and emphasized the sacredness of a particular type of family life and structure. These women, existing virtually on a pedestal, were seen as the virginal ideal of home and hearth. This image was juxtaposed with stereotypes of freed Black women, who were considered sexually promiscuous, impure, and not in need of protection. Black men were understood to be dangerous brutes and rapists, essentially uncontrollable. These racist tropes were used not only to continue to subject the newly freed to danger and ridicule but also to promote violence as a way to maintain order and protect white womanhood.

In this Reconstruction and Redemption southern society, order and purity were maintained through violence. Just after the close of the Civil War, in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan formed in Pulaski, Tennessee. In its earliest days, the purpose of the Klan was to defend white rights, oppose liberty for freed Blacks, and eliminate the Republican Party (at that time the party of emancipation and the Union). The first grand wizard was the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The men (and the women who supported them) in the earliest iteration of the KKK burned crosses and terrorized Republican leaders and voters in the South. They also burned Black churches and schools and made it a point to terrorize northern missionaries who traveled to the South to assist with Reconstruction and education. Ulysses S. Grant pushed the Enforcement Acts through Congress in order to break up this first iteration of the organization.

The KKK returned in 1915 under the aegis of a former Methodist minister, William J. Simmons. Kicking off this second iteration of the organization, Simmons and sixteen other men lit a cross on top of Stone Mountain in Georgia on November 25, 1915, pledging allegiance to the Constitution, American ideals, and the tenets of the Christian religion. As Kelly Baker, a scholar of religion and the KKK, has written, “The Klan wanted a homogenous, Protestant white America, free from the corrupting influences of diversity, whether political, religious or social.” This reboot of the Klan, steeped in evangelical religion, proved popular not only in the South but across the United States. The new Klan, reinvigorated by racism and anti-immigration sentiment, staged pageants and parades across the country. Notably, the Klan staged a large march in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1925, that drew 30,000 members to march down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the end of the march, with rain threatening, district dragon L. A. Mueller proclaimed to the assembled Klansmen and audience, “I have faith enough in the Lord that he is with every Klansman. You ought to have as much faith in him as I have. We have never had a drop of rain in Washington when we got down on our knees.” Almost immediately, a downpour began. The crowd dispersed quickly.

Historically, it was nothing out of the ordinary for such a violent group as the KKK to center its rhetoric and actions around God and nation. The White League, formed on March 1, 1874, as a paramilitary group of southern Democrats, many of them former Confederate soldiers, adopted similar tactics. The league’s platform was clear: “Disregarding all minor questions of principle or policy, and having solely in view the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization, we appeal to men of our race, of whatever language or nationality, to unite with us against that supreme danger.” In other words, the league existed to protect Christianity and civilization against freed Black people and the whites who assisted them. The league spread through...