Chapter review: Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism

Context

Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism, is chapter 5 in Katherine Stewart's 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise if Religious Nationalism. 

The content of this chapter should be mandatory reading for all American school children, especially children in religious schools. Without this knowledge, most modern conservative Christians probably hold major false beliefs and historical misunderstandings. That is due to the intense, ruthless bombardment of people with deceit and false propaganda by the CN movement. The point is to create misinformed minds to help advance the CN's religious, social and economic agenda. I suspect most Americans (~95% ?) are mostly or completely unaware of this important slice of American history. I was on of them. 

Stewart traces the sources of modern Christian nationalism (CN) from its origins. A key early figure was Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898). Dabney was an American Christian theologian, Southern Presbyterian pastor, Confederate States Army Chaplain, an architect and chief of staff and biographer to confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Although bits and pieces of CN ideology were present at and before the founding of the republic, Dabney was probably the single most influential figure in crystallizing the thinking and rigid theological reasoning[1] that underpins the overall CN ideology today.

The next main influencer after Dabney was Rousas John Rushdooney (1916-2001). Rushdooney was an American Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian. He is credited as the father of Christian Reconstructionism and a key inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. He was born to Armenian immigrants who fled the 1915-1917 Armenian genocide, which was a key influence on his life. The genocide was always in his mind and it influenced a key part of his rigid religious belief. Specifically, the lesson he learned was that, as he wrote in 1997, “In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity. And I came to realize there is no neutral ground anywhere.” Rushdooney came to believe that, as Stewart puts it, “only absolute submission to the word of God could save the human world from chaos.”

Review

Before Dabney: An antecedent to CN ideology -- the founding of the secular Republic: An early source of CN complaint arose with the founding of the Republic, a period of Christian anti-fundamentalism. Founders such as Jefferson and Paine were enlightenment thinkers who asserted that in time, all Americans would become unitarian or maybe even reason-based deists. The fundamentalist Christian backlash led to two outcomes. One was the establishment, mostly in the Northeast, of a “hard core theological establishment .... radically opposed to both religious liberalism and political liberalism,” which bitterly criticized “the godless nature of American democracy.” The other was coalescence of support for the institution of slavery, which was rationalized as promoting “the values of biblical literalism and absolute submission to authority,” presumably meaning the Christian God’s absolute authority. Stewart elaborates:

“.... the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination, always of men over women, and frequently of white people over Black people, too. .... many of the most famous abolitionists .... were routinely denounced as heretics; leading orthodox ministers in the North and South repeatedly condemned abolitionism as a breeding ground for ‘infidelity’ and -- just as bad -- feminism.” 

It is worth remembering at this point that the main big lie that underpins modern CN is its false claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, not a secular one. Stewart repeatedly makes that point clear throughout her book, e.g., discussed in this post and this post. Evidence that the claim of a Christian founding is a CN lie is that the early American Christian fundamentalists themselves understood that America was founded as a secular nation, not a Christian nation. The fundamentalists bitterly criticized American democracy and secularism for that reason.

Oppressed White people: One of the key beliefs that Dabney held was that White Americans were oppressed in various ways. One of the most important sources of brutal White oppression was White people being forced to support public education for Blacks. Dabney was clear that it was oppression to support the “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” Stewart continues:

“These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with ‘the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.’ he had two sciences in mind -- geology and evolutionary biology -- ‘the one attacking the recent origin of man, the flood etc., the other presuming to construct a creation without a creator.’ The malevolent tormentors of the wholesome white taxpayers were the secular, liberal elites who dominated national political life. .... before the civil war, he sermonized loudly about the ‘righteousness’ of slavery and argued that opposing slavery was ‘tantamount to rejecting Christianity. In this respect, he was an unexceptional figure in his time.’”

Dabney called democracy “mobocracy.” He wanted all Christian voters to turn out to win every election for the CN cause of imposing a fundamentalist Christian biblical worldview on American government and society. That belief among modern CN adherents is alive and well today. According to the modern CN narrative, Whites are being horribly persecuted in America by secular education, civil liberties and voting rights (both are now crumbling under CN attack), inconvenient science, secular public education, women’s rights and other unspeakable anti-Christian horrors.

Regarding public education, Dabney’s animosity was clear and intense. He wrote: “.... the ‘government school’ has ‘leveled its guns at God and family. Liberal education is inevitably pluralistic.”

Propaganda: the tactics stay the same over time: Persuasive propaganda usually relies mostly on some combination of lies, distortions, slanders, exaggerations, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. That was true in Dabney’s time. Dabney and his contemporaries did not hesitate to do their best to persuade, reality and reason be damned. Stewart writes:

“[A Dabney contemporary minister wrote] ‘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 the eyes of proslavery theologians, the United States was a ‘Redeemer Nation’ .... Perhaps the most aspect of proslavery theology .... was its fusion of religion with a radicalized form of nationalism.’”

As the radical agitator Saul Alinsky observed, to get people to act, one needs to wrap one’s cause in morals, patriotism, fear and whatever else there is at hand to foment emotional responses and a belief in the obvious rightness of the cause against lying, evil, barbaric opposition. Maybe there really isn’t any significant neutral ground. Modern CN’s constant resort to blatant propaganda and divisive lies has lots of precedent in American history. The war CN wages today against American democracy and civil liberty is all-out and dead serious.

Rushdooney’s education: In college, he was forced to read secular horrors like Homer and Shakespeare. He hated it. He called his experience “the ugliest experience of my life” and asserted that such education and books were just “humanistic garbage, devoid of wisdom.” He came to agree with Dabney that the Union victory was “a defeat for Christian orthodoxy” and “Abolitionist leaders showed more hate than love on the whole.” Stewart writes, and here the big CN lie and smaller lies pop up:

“In Rushdooney's telling, it was not the intention of America’s founders to establish a nonsectarian representative democracy. .... The First Amendment, he argues, aimed to establish freedom ‘not from religion but for religion’ -- a phrase widely parroted by Christian nationalists today. ‘The constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order,’ he said. For Rushdooney, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which included a guarantee that all citizens receive equal protection under the law ‘began the court’s recession from its conception of America as a Christian country.’ Now the job was to redeem America from its commitment to godless humanism.”

The lies are blatant and shameless.

Libertarianism and the plutocrats: Along the bumpy road to modern CN, plutocrats got interested because the developing ideology was inherently in favor of wealthy people’s interests in accumulating and keeping power and wealth. The libertarians, e.g., Milton Friedman, were open to CN ideology, but sometimes felt their religion was maybe a bit too intense and over reaching. By contrast, CN leaders who found libertarianism liked the autocratic economic theory, but found practitioners like Ludwig von Mieses and Friederich Hayek not religious enough for their liking. Talk about blind, siloed minds, jeez.

Anyway, CN leaders started weaseling their way into the coffers of rich and powerful people and companies. The rich people and companies, which are now people too, saw the tremendous economic and power enhancement potential in an alignment with CN ideology. For defenders of democracy and civil liberties, it was a marriage made in hell.

One focus of libertarian and CN hate was the speedbump called the New Deal. Stewart writes:

“.... a new group of libertarian economic thinkers emerged that shared their fear and loathing of government, if not necessarily their religion. [The libertarian leaders] warned that the modern welfare state would soon overwhelm the free market and put humanity on the road to serfdom. They denounced labor unions, public education, redistributive programs and other governmental interventions in the free market, which they believed would produce peace, prosperity, and the solution to all major social problems if left free to its own devices.” 

Even the libertarians jumped all over public education but embraced CN. And, as Stewart writes, “Libertarian economics came to dominate Christian nationalism.”

The rational for tyranny of the minority: Christian fundamentalism and CN have probably always had the problem of being a minority of Americans. But that’s no problem for a motivated reasoner hell-bent on defending sacred ideology and beliefs. Rushdooney articulated the doctrine of “the remnant.” According to that theological reasoning, humans are destined to be governed by a motivated minority. Stewart writes about Rushdoony’s view of the matter:

“When history takes a wrong turn, he says, God leaves behind a ‘remnant’ of true believers, tasked with guarding the light in the dark times and then retaking civilization -- or as he called it ‘the task of reconstruction’ -- thus bringing about the term Christian Reconstruction. The job of Reconstructionists, according to Rushdoony, is to remain faithful no matter what. ‘History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.’ .... Many of Rushdoony’s ideas justify the politics of today -- perhaps in ways the even he didn’t intend.”

So there it is. The CN movement is perfectly comfortable with a tyranny of their own minority. Contrary majority public opinion is a nuisance to be worked around somehow, but not something of fundamental importance to be taken seriously. The CN movement is clearly not democratic. It is autocratic, fascist and for the wealthy and powerful elites at the top, kleptocratic.

The great CN contradiction: I have pointed out here many times that obvious hypocrisy and blatant logic flaws and inconsistencies do not even mildly faze most (~99.5% ?) ideologues. The ends morally justify the means and that’s that. No moral qualms bubble up, so no second thoughts occur.

Stewart comments that, to their shock, in the late 1970s, observers of the American religious landscape saw that Christian fundamentalism was back. The cognoscenti or whoever was in charge of seeing things, falsely believed that old-fashioned Biblical literalism was fading away as society and science progressed. Boy were they wrong. 

At that time, ultraconservative Christians were starting to vote their religion in increasing numbers. What was happening in modern times had happened in the 1800s and again in the 1700s. The main thing that changed was the technology of communications. But the message changed only a little, e.g., support for slavery was muted and driven underground. The theological reasoning going back to Dabney and Rushdooney barely changed.

In modern times, the great CN contradiction is obvious: It always preaches love and usually acts cordially and warmly in public, but it routinely practices intolerance and hate in overt and subtle ways. 

People who deviate from CN orthodoxy, secular Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBQT, and everyone else are to be punished. Where CN places people in society is to be accepted. All deviants are condemned to burn in hell forever. CN is neither loving nor caring for anyone outside the tribe. For the outsider, the CN wants to exert total economic and social domination. CN ideology demands that the heathen be controlled and punished or converted to see the light and accept the role God assigns them as told to them by self-serving CN elites.

Stewart writes about how the CN rationalizes all of this ill-will and incoherence, including that of many captive minds of low income rank and file believers, whether they even know what CN actually is or not:

“.... the movement drew its energy from the needs and anxieties of a mass of struggling Americans -- even as it allied itself with concentrations of economic power in its time. Just as in the days of proslavery theology, the contradictions were almost too obvious to be seen. Poor whites were, apart from enslaved people themselves, the system’s greatest losers, and yet, with guidance of men like Dabney, they joined with its loudest supporters. ....today’s Christian nationalists follow the logic, if not necessarily the theology, laid down by Rushdoony.

.... an astonishing number settled on one version or another of dominionism, or the fundamental idea that right-thinking Christians should assume power in all spheres of life.

Gary North put his finger on the deeper forces at work when he observed that ‘the ideas of the Reconstructionists have penetrated into Protestant circles that are for the most part unaware of the original sources of the theological ideas that are beginning to transform them.’

In the final analysis, Rushdoony and his Reconstructionists were effects of history, too, not its causes. .... the hierarchies that arose in the Gilded Age hit some roadblocks in the progressive era [the New Deal], but that hardly stopped the plutocrats from enlisting new champions of theological legitimation.

The many paradoxes and contradictions of Christian nationalism make sense when they are taken out of the artificial ‘culture war’ framing and placed within the history of the antidemocratic reaction in the United States. To any outside observer, it must seem odd that Christian nationalists loudly reject ‘government’ as a matter of principle even as they seek government power to impose their religious vision on the rest of society. .... At bottom, they agree with Rushdoony that there is no neutrality: the state either answers to God or it answers to something worse.”

Jerry Falwell and the thin veneer of CN cordiality and love: Stewart points out that CN members present as loving parents, involved in community concerns, decent and polite. The CN contradiction is strong in them. Stewart uses Falwell as an example:

“Jerry Falwell more than anyone embodied this unsettling mix of love and hate. A jovial presence with an easy manner, Falwell was often celebrated as ‘a loving man’ and ‘a big heart.’ Yet he regularly spewed toxins, as when he blamed ‘the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians’ for the September 11 attacks. .... a pastor in Falwell’s style [Carl McIntire] [commented]. ‘Separation involves hard, grueling controversy. It involves attacks, personal attacks, even violent attacks . . . Satan preaches brotherly love to hold men in apostacy. .... [aggression] is an expression of Christian love.’”

 

So there it is, the faces of CN in public and in private. None of this is a secret. But despite its importance in American society, politics and commerce, few Americans know what CN is. Probably most conservative Christians (85% ?) in the CN movement do not truly understand what they are a part of. 

Questions: Is Stewart being hyperbolic or irrationally alarmist, or does what she say seem at least plausible in view of recent history and current events? 

Does it seem reasonable to see the current fascist Republican party push to subvert elections as a reflection of CN ideology, tactics and pro-tyranny of the minority mindset? 

Essentially all people in the CN movement vehemently claim that they are not bigoted or racist, but is that strong denial persuasive in view of the movement’s dogma that assigns subservient or secondary roles to non-Whites, women and non-heterosexuals in society, religious life and commerce?

Footnote: 

1. As a concept, theological reasoning never made sense to me. Such reasoning can and does lead to many different, sometimes contradictory visions of “correct” religious dogma, belief and behavior. That is all based on human beliefs about what an unknowable supernatural deity or force asks or demands of humans. The bickering is endless. The Gods are different. Dogmas are all over the place. In my opinion, there is not, and can never be, an empirical basis for agreement or objectivity about what something supernatural wants. It is all a matter of personal faith and belief. For many or most average people, personal faith and belief often boils down to what religious leaders tell them they should be. That is the case, including when religious leaders tell people that cowboys with six shooters and dinosaurs coexisted on planet Earth.