Southern History Series: Antebellum Christianity and Southern Racialism

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Here’s an excerpt from David Goldfield’s book America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation:

“Slavery had made the black man in America, in a few centuries,” Virginia jurist William C. Daniell explained in 1852, “what thousands of years had failed to accomplish for him at home, cultivating the aptitudes of the negro race for civilization and Christianity.”

As Daniell’s boast implied, it was incumbent upon White Americans, as part of their Christian duty, to rescue inferior races by offering instruction and the possibility of salvation. This was a key argument of white southerners for the institution of slavery, that it raised a downtrodden race from its primitive African origins to the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ, inculcated discipline, and fashioned a family life unburdened by the need or concern for daily subsistence.”

I have always loved the 19th century. It is a Boomer-free zone.

In the 19th century, the Jewish Question was remarkably muted in the South and the dispute over racial equality in America was being contested between Eastern and Southern Christians. In the South, Christianity was always invoked to justify racialism, slavery,and white supremacy. In parts of the East, the style of Christianity there often clashed with all of these things, most famously with the abolitionists.

While researching the origins of the Golden Circle, I learned this was also true of Cuba. In Cuba, the Catholic Church also justified racialism, slavery and white supremacy. This seems to have been true of all slave-based plantation societies with perhaps the exception of foreign born Baptist and Methodist missionaries operating in the British West Indies

Here is another excerpt on the “incompatibility” of racialism and Christianity:

“It was not coincidental that the white southerners who took back their governments from black and white Republicans were called Redeemers, nor that the process through which it occurred was called Redemption. The term “redemption” was, of course, in widespread in America prior to the Civil War, especially among evangelicals. It referred to the process by which Jesus sacrificed His life to rescue sinful mankind from God’s wrath. The term implied a new birth as those who come to Christ are cleansed of their sins and saved “unton a new life eternal.”

Confederates talked of “redeeming” their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the war, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord’s blessing on the South that He had withdrawn, as evidenced by defeat. It would remove “the yoke of Yankee and negro rule.” Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War. The process toward Redemption was clear. As an Alabama editor declared in 1871, “The road to Redemption is under the white banner.” White southerners employed evangelical Protestantism to recreate an antebellum regime cleansed of sin. White religion in the South became the handmaiden of white supremacy.”

How strange.

I’ve heard from both White Nationalists and Baby Boomer conservatives that Christianity and racialism are irreconcilable, but our own history shows us otherwise. The truth is that what the Baby Boomer generation made of Southern evangelicalism in a time in which a Jewish elite had come to dominate the mass media in the 20th century was very different from what previous generations of Southerners made of it before the War Between the States when the pro-slavery was argument was justified on the basis of Christianity and afterwards when evangelicalism fueled the Redemption movement that brought down Reconstruction.

The following excerpt comes from Colin Woodard’s book American Nations which is the source of the map of regional cultures we always use below:

“Scholars have long recognized that “the South” as a unified entity didn’t really come into existence until after the Civil War. It was the resistance to Yankee-led Reconstruction that brought this Dixie bloc together to ultimately include even Appalachian people who’d fought against the Confederacy during the war.”

True story.

Kentucky finally joined the Confederacy during Reconstruction.

Woodard continues:

Note: As we have seen, Judeo-Christianity is a Boomer religion. It did not gain traction in the South until the mid-20th century.