American Evangelicals, Civil Rights, and Republic Politics

Today we will learn and reflect on history of American
evangelicals, civil rights, and Republican politics using the two
recent books by Robert P Jones as sources.

Robert Jones grew up in the Baptist Church in Georgia and
Mississippi, he holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University,
and a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary.

Jones remembers that as a youth, in his words,
“I memorized Scripture, agonized episodically over
whether I was truly saved, kept daily prayer
journals, and read the Bible cover to cover over
the course of a year in high school,” and worked
for Billy Graham for a time.
There was not any emphasis on pondering the
history of the churches during and after the Civil
War. He remembers, “I generally knew that there
had been a split between northern and Southern
Baptists, but the narrative was vague.” His high
school education at the time taught that “the true
causes of the Civil War were complicated.” Jones
also says he was taught that “slavery was not the
central issue but merely one of many North-South
conflicts precipitating the split.”
https://www.prri.org/staff/robert-p-jones-ph-d/

His subsequent studies on American religion during the Civil War, Reconstruction,
and Civil Rights periods, while he was working on his PhD and afterwards, explored
this complicated history. From this history Jones has written these two books that
we will review.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video, and my blogs
that also cover this topic. Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments, sometimes these will generate short videos of their own. Let us learn
and reflect together!

YouTube Video:
American Evangelicals, Civil Rights, and Republic Politics
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When we study the history of the Christian Church in America, we must ask
ourselves, What role should the Christian Church play in our society, in our
culture, in the making of the values of our nation? There is always a spiritual
contest between the church and our culture, this contest is summed up in the
eternal question: Who is going to influence whom? Will the Church succeed in
influencing our culture? Or will our culture instead influence the Church?
Quite often our culture has influenced the Church more than the Church has
influenced the culture, both for the modern church and the ancient
church. Just as a small amount of leaven causes the whole loaf of bread to rise,
so we must not confuse the greater portion of Christians whose faith is as tepid
as dishwater with the small remnant of truly devout Christians who are always
the true future of the Church. Public opinion polls of those who identify as
Christians often do not reflect the convictions of the small number of Christians
who truly believe.

Robert Jones in his books concentrates on the history of the Southern Baptist
Church, and this emphasis is valuable since so many of the Protestant and Catholic
Churches often follow the lead of the Southern Baptist in their racial policies,
stated and unstated. For example, before the Civil Rights movement many Catholic
parishes in New York City and other big cities segregated blacks in their own
parishes often far away from their neighborhoods.
We can see this Catholic history in the life of Father Augustine Tolton, the first slave
who became a priest during the Reconstruction Era, leading a black parish first in
Quincy, Illinois, then in Chicago. His efforts in Quincy were doomed when a priest
convinced the bishop to forbid whites from attending or supporting his parish. He
received less resistance when he founded a black segregated parish in Chicago, but
during his lifetime he did not ever receive sufficient tithes to properly finish the
church that was barely sufficient to hold services.

The loaf and the leaven metaphor definitely applies to the Southern Baptist
Church. The last national 2021 meeting narrowly elected as head of the Baptist
Convention a candidate that is compassionate towards social justice and Black
Lives Matter issues. Also, the Southern Baptists have enrolled many majority black
churches in their denomination, and these black preachers have been able to sway
some convention votes to move the Church in the direction of greater social
justice. In many denominations the national leadership were ahead of the local
leadership and parishioners in civil rights issues.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/june/southern-baptist-president-sbc-ed-litton-alabama-nashville.html
First two paragraphs:
Pastor Ed Litton, championed by
supporters as a force for gospel unity
and racial reconciliation, was elected
the next president of the Southern
Baptist Convention (SBC), overtaking
the candidate backed by a passionate
faction of conservatives.
Litton’s election is seen as a signal of
the direction of the nation’s largest
Protestant denomination, where
infighting has broken out over
approaches to race, abuse, and other
issues while the Conservative Baptist
Network raises alarms about liberal
drift and “woke” theology. The close
race also reveals how much ground the
vocal group has come to hold in the
SBC.

We want to emphasize that the evangelical movement is not
monolithic, and that there are evangelicals concerned with racial
justice. We remember the elder Billy Graham who did the
unthinkable and tore down the segregation rope during his
revival crusade in Jackson, Mississippi in 1952, in the middle of
the Jim Crow era. Also, he was a supporter of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s civil rights movement.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/february/billy-graham-martin-luther-king-jr-friendship-civil-rights.html
First few paragraphs: Many tributes to Billy
Graham after his death this week at age 99 cite
the famous evangelist’s stance on racial issues—
tensions that much of the white evangelical
church had long sidelined or even perpetuated by
the time the civil rights movement took place in
America.
Graham invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at
a crusade in 1957 and to speak at a later ministry
retreat to help his team “understand the racial
situation in America more fully,” according to the
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). The
relationship between the two legendary
American preachers continued as King’s
prominence rose.
Several accounts of their interactions mention
Graham even posting bail for King when he was
imprisoned in the 1960s, though different
sources site different dates and locations for the
anecdote.

We would also like to draw your attention to Promise Keepers, a
protestant evangelical retreat ministry that has struggled over
the years, in part because they include racial reconciliation as
one of their central messages in spite of considerable push-back
over the years. This video reviews the biography and testimony
of the founder, Coach McCartney, and an update on the current
status of the ministry and its revival meetings. Coach McCartney
became aware of the griding poverty and discrimination many
blacks faced when he was recruiting black athletes for his
championship winning college football team, this deeply
influenced his ministry.

America is a religious nation. Why are Americans are far more likely to attend
services and self-identify as Christians or Catholics than Europeans? Many
historians believe that the American separation of church and state create a
healthy environment for religion to thrive. In many European countries the clergy
are paid a state salary, which means both clergy and laymen both can become
complacent. Also, Professor Allitt, professor who has lectures on American
Religious History in the Great Courses, observed that in the past many Catholic
immigrants who attended mass in America had been agnostic before when they
lived in countries like Italy and Spain, because this agnosticism was seen as a
protest against the government.

CHRISTIANITY AND SLAVERY
Another puzzle is why so many Southern white Christians supported slavery before
and during the Civil War, and why so many white evangelicals and white Catholics
were opposed, or at least did not support, the civil rights movement in the years
after the Civil War and the modern era.
Slavery was deeply embedded into the society and culture of the Deep South. Just
prior to the Civil War, the total value of slaves exceeded even the total value of
land in the most agricultural areas of the Deep South. Even those few masters, like
Thomas Jefferson a century older, who may have wanted to free their slaves in
their wills found it just impossible, these slaves were often pledged as collateral for
bank loans that financed the plantations. A slave was as valuable in the
antebellum South as an automobile is today. Many schools and churches owned
slaves, in historical account a church sold two young slave boys to fund the pastor’s
salary and the building fund.

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884

Lefevre James Cranstone - Slave Auction, Virginia, 1862

Family fortunes were ruined when too many of their slaves fled in the years before
the Civil War. We see this story in the Harriet Tubman movie, her masters had a
small farm with only a few dozen slaves that was heavily in debt, struggling to
compete with the much larger plantations nearby. We see the matron having a
nervous breakdown subjected to the mental stress as Harriet Tubman returned
time and time again to deliver from bondage more and more of her enslaved
relatives. Harriet Tubman had a price on her head, she would have likely been
tortured and lynched if she had been caught.

At the time of the Civil War slavery had existed for all of recorded human
history, and the slave trade had only recently been abolished by the
British Empire. Indeed, the Bible itself does not condemn slavery, but
rather exhorts slaves to obey their masters. However, American slavery
was far more cruel than most prior systems of slavery in many
ways. Slaves in the Deep South were not seen as truly human, they were
treated like talking cattle, they were denied the right to legally marry, their
families could be broken up at any time, as many black women were
forced to breed young slaves for sale at the auction block. Not only were
slaves denied the right to an education, teaching a slave to read was
illegal in many parts of the South. Although earlier it was possible for a
slave to earn wages and eventually purchase his freedom, and although
some masters did free some of their treasured household slaves in their
wills, freedom was impossible for most slaves in the decades leading up
to the Civil War.

Slaves Waiting for Sale - Richmond, VA, Eyre Crowe, Painted 1861

ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT
In the Northern states, the religious evangelism awakened by the Second
Great Awakening inspired the abolitionist movement.
We were struggling with what image would be an appropriate thumbnail,
and we selected a camp meeting painting from the Second Great
Awakening, since there were revival meetings in both the Northern and
Southern sections of the country. The Thirds Great Awakening revivals
occurred during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and indeed there
were revival meetings in both Union and Confederate army camps, which
reflects the religious tensions that last up to the present day.

Methodist revival in
USA 1839, J. Maze
Burbank,
watercolor 1839
First Great Awakening: 1730’s – 1740’s
Initiated by George Whitfield
Second Great Awakening: 1800’s – 1840’s
In North, provided seeds for abolitionism
Also active in Southern States
Third Great Awakening: 1850’s – 1900’s
Both North and South

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that helped turn many
Northern readers against the cruelty of slavery by describing the sufferings of
individual slaves whom the white readers could sympathize. But in the South
ministers defended slavery by the many friendly references in both the Old and New
Testaments, and the Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists split into northern and
southern churches over the issue of slavery. Though most denominations reunited
after the war, the Southern and Northern Baptists are separate denominations even
today.
The belief that the negro race was forever inferior to the white race by many whites
in both the North and the South, even some of Lincoln’s early speeches conceded
the inherent inferiority of negroes. These hateful attitudes were slowly improving
during the Civil War and Reconstruction, only to regress under Jim Crow. Many
whites cited as Biblical proof the supposition that blacks were descendants of Cain,
who God physically marked after he murdered his brother Abel.

The Christianity the slave owners wanted preached to their slaves and
the Christian preaching the slaves were eager to hear were very
different. The slave owners wanted the preachers to preach the message
of Ephesians to their slaves, for slaves to submit to their masters, for
slaves to work as faithfully for their masters as they would work for
Jesus. The preaching the slaves were eager to hear was the hopeful
message when Moses relayed God’s message to old Pharaoh, Let my
people go!
And we picked the image of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea as
Moses for our video on slavery in the early Jewish and Christian
traditions, since in the Old Testament the Lord often preceded his
messages to Israel, Remember, you were slaves in the land of Egypt, so be
compassionate to sojourners and the poor and the laborers you
encounter.

Our dear author Jones also quotes one of the leading
abolitionist orators, Frederick Douglas, a former slave, from
his Appendix to his autobiography, that he wrote when he
was challenged for his criticisms of the hypocrisy of many
white Christians:

.
Frederick Douglass proclaims:
“I mean strictly to apply (my criticisms) to
the slave-holding religion of this land, and
with no possible reference to Christianity
proper; for, between the Christianity of this
land, and the Christianity of Christ, I
recognize the widest, possible difference, so
wide, that to receive the one as good, pure,
and holy, is of necessity to reject the other
as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend
of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy
of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and
impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore
hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-
whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and
hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
Camp Meeting and Revival, 1829

.
Frederick Douglas continues: “I am filled with
unutterable loathing when I contemplate
the religious pomp and show, together
with the horrible inconsistencies, which
everywhere surround me. . . We have
men-stealers for ministers, women-
whippers for missionaries, and cradle-
plunderers for church members. The man
who robs me of my earnings at the end of
each week meets me as a class-leader on
Sunday morning, to show me the way of
life, and the path of salvation. He who
sells my sister, for purposes of
prostitution, stands forth as the pious
advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a
religious duty to read the Bible denies me
the right of learning to read the name of
the God who made me.”

Do we detect some bitterness in Frederick Douglas’ scathing
condemnations? Or is this rather justifiable anger and frustration at white
hypocrisy? Frederick Douglas tells us how his master who acted cruelly
towards his slaves, starving them though he had food plenty in his larders,
acted with greater cruelty after his so-called religious conversion.
This slide is from our video on Frederick Douglass:

Frederick Douglass remembers,
“I have said my master found
religious sanction for his cruelty.
As an example, I will state one
of many facts going to prove the
charge. I have seen him tie up
this lame young woman, and
whip her with a heavy cowskin
upon her naked shoulders,
causing the warm red blood to
drip; and, in justification of the
bloody deed, he would quote
this passage of Scripture: ‘He
that knoweth his master’s will,
and doeth it not, shall be
beaten with many stripes.’
Whipping Old Barney

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Bibles were found in the knapsacks of both Confederate and Union
soldiers killed on the battlefields, both sides were convicted that God was
on their side. After the war, many Southern preachers were forced to
conclude that military victory was not connected to their righteousness

Robert Jones quotes a Southern preacher,
“Christ’s enemies could nail Him to the cross,
but they could not quench the ideals He
embodied. Christ’s cause seemed to be a
LOST CAUSE as the darkness fell on the great
tragedy at Calvary, but out of what seemed
Golgotha’s irretrievable defeat has come the
cause whose mission is to save that which is
lost.”
How did the history books in the Deep South
describe reconstruction? Robert Jones says,
“Reconstruction was presented as a time
when white Southerners were victimized by
vengeful occupying federal Union forces who
supported black politicians primarily to
humiliate their defeated enemies.”

During Reconstruction and after the Ku Klux Klan and other similar
terrorist groups often murdered and lynched and raped blacks,
sometimes burning down their houses, crops and churches. Since white
supremacists controlled the police forces and courts, blacks were
powerless, totally unable to seek justice, and often if blacks sought
justice, they were the ones who were jailed for causing a
disturbance. Researchers have documented over 4,400 cases of
lynching of black men, women, and children who were hung, shot,
buried alive, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between
Reconstruction and the 1950’s, there are likely thousands of instances
that have been lost in the sands of time.

The front and back of a postcard
showing the charred corpse of Will
Stanley in Temple, Texas, in 1915

A memorial summarized the event: “They hanged the
blacks. They threw kerosene on them. They burned
them to a crisp. And then they went to church.”
One example is the lynching of three
black men lynched by a mob of a
thousand whites in Missouri in the
early hours of Easter Sunday, 1906.

THE MYTH OF THE LOST CAUSE AND CONFEDERATE STATUES
Historians often observe that history is written by the winning side of the war. The
American Civil War was an exception, the Civil War was the rare conflict where the
Confederacy, whose armies were defeated, stubbornly insisted on writing the
history of the rebellion not as a struggle to defend slavery, but as a great Lost
Cause, a chivalric struggle for states’ rights.
The post-war public relations war was fought on many front, including sanitizing
the textbooks our school children read and erecting public statues honoring
Confederate generals and soldiers, which has been documented in many articles:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-dixies-history-got-whitewashed
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/the-lost-causes-long-legacy/613288/

The UDC, or United Daughters of the Confederacy, was a leading
force in promoting the myth of the Lost Cause, with over
100,000 members during World War I. The UDC placed
thousands of portraits of General Robert E Lee and Jefferson
Davis, president of the Confederacy, in public schools across the
South, lobbied for making the Confederate Memorial Day a
school holiday in many states, and wrote white supremacist
primers for school children on the Ku Klux Klan.

The UDC even issued a Confederate Catechism
in a Q&A format so children could memorize the
proper answers. These included:
“Q: How were slaves treated?
A: With great kindness and care in nearly all
cases, a cruel master being rare, and lost the
respect of his neighbors if he treated his slaves
badly.”
“Q: What was the feeling of the slaves toward
their masters?
A: The slaves were faithful and devoted and
were always ready and willing to serve their
masters.”
“Q: What causes led to the war between the
States?
A: The disregard, on the part of the States of the
North, for the rights of the Southern or slave-
holding States.”

The UDC drive to remember the Confederate Lost Cause was
successful, there are over 1,700 Confederate statues and
monuments in the South and bordering states, most of them
erected during the Jim Crow years to intimidate blacks into
submission. There were even stain-glassed windows honoring
Confederate Generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the
National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and other national
churches.

Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Washington National Cathedral

INTIMIDATION AND VIOLENCE IN THE SIXTIES CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Though churches were never forced legally to integrate as schools and
restaurants were, some blacks sought to break the color barrier in Deep
South evangelical churches, efforts which were sometimes met by
intimidation and violence. For example, in Jackson, Mississippi city
council passed an ordinance in 1963 defending segregation by
criminalizing segregated church attendance, making “disturbing divine
worship” a crime. This was enforced aggressively. Both the blacks who
dared sit in the white pews as well as the white people who invited
them were literally dragged from the pews during the church service,
fined, and thrown in prison.

16th Street Baptist
Church, Birmingham,
Alabama.
The KKK fire-
bombed this church
during the Civil
Rights protests in
1963, killing three
young black girls
while they were
attending Sunday
school.

Violence doomed Medgar Evers, who with a white chaplain attempted
to cross the color line at the home congregations of the white governor
and white mayor. In one church the pastor threatened to resign if blacks
were barred from sitting in their white pews, but the church council of
the other church unanimously voted to block blacks from attending their
white church. This protest was cut short.
That night Medgar Evers was working late at his church before driving
home to be with his wife and three young children. But Medgar did not
make it into his house. Someone was waiting, someone had been
waiting for quite some time. At midnight, Medgar Evers opened the
door of his car, and while walking up the driveway of his home, some
distance away, Byron Beckwith, a well-known local white supremacist,
identified by his fingerprint on the rifle scope, carefully aimed, and shot
Medgar Evers stone-cold dead.

WASHINGTON (Oct. 9, 2009) The Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus,
former governor of Mississippi, announced that the Navy will name a dry
cargo ammunition ship after the civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Byron, Medgar Ever’s assassin,
had earlier had this letter to the
editor accepted by local
newspaper:
“I shall oppose any person,
place, or thing that opposes
segregation. And further, when I
die, I will be buried in a
segregated cemetery.”
“When you get to heaven, you will find me in the “whites
only” section, and I go to Hades, I’m going to raise hell all
over Hades until I get to the white section. We here in
Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to
protect our wives, children, and ourselves from bad niggers.”

The fact a local newspaper would print a letter like this reveals how resolutely the
great majority of whites in the Deep South opposed any kind of integration.
Nobody disputed the identity of the killer. The killer was twice tried, and twice the
jury was hung. A third trial finally convicted Byron Beckwith, the murderer, thirty
years later.

Faced with violent white opposition and yawns
by white evangelical pastors, Martin Luther
King, in his letter from his Birmingham jail cell,
wrote this:
“On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn
mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful
churches with their lofty spires pointing
heavenward. . . Over and over, I have found
myself asking: “What kind of people worship
here? Who is their God? . . . Where were they
when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for
defiance and hatred? Where were their voices
of support when bruised and weary Negro men
and women decided to rise from the dark
dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of
creative protest?”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, was the only President elected for
four terms during the Depression and World War II based on a fragile
Democratic coalition of Southern racist segregationists and New Deal
reformers, including Civil Right activists encouraged by his activist wife
Eleanor Roosevelt. This was a fragile coalition that was shattered when
the next President Harry Truman issued an Executive Order forcibly
integrating the military services.
For the 1948 election the Deep South segregationists bolted and formed
the short-lived Dixiecrat Party. The party’s main plank, written by
Senator Strom Thurmond, included many issues which resonate in
Republican Party politics today.

Dixiecrat party plank:
“We stand for the segregation
of the races and the racial
integrity of each race.” “We
oppose the elimination of
segregation, the repeal of
miscegenation (black-white
marriage) statutes, the control
of private employment by
Federal bureaucrats called for
by the misnamed civil rights
program. We favor home-rule,
local self-government and a
minimum interference with
individual rights.”

Like most critical elections in history, this was a close election, a
really close election, so close that many newspapers had as their
headlines, “DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN.” But in the morning the
late counted ballots swung the election to Harry Truman in a
squeaker of an election, leading to Truman’s famous grinning
told-you-so photograph holding the paper with the prior night’s
headlines. His stand on civil rights nearly cost Truman the
election.

The history of Nazi Germany is a warning that if white supremacists succeed in grabbing control
of our government for a decade or more, many civil rights achievements could be rolled back.
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-coping-under-fascism-in-wwii-warnings-
for-christians-under-trump/

The Great White Switch began in the 1964 Presidential
campaign where the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater
explicitly opposed civil rights legislation. Although he lost
heavily to LBJ, for the first time since the Civil War more whites
voted for the Republican than the Democratic candidate.

Ronald Reagan speaks for presidential
candidate Barry Goldwater in LA in 1964.

For the 1968 Presidential campaign, Richard Nixon adopted his
Southern strategy, assuring Southern support by promising
Strom Thurmond that the Republicans would oppose busing to
integrate schools, name a Southerner to the Supreme Court, and
pick a Vice-President acceptable to the South.

The unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal
tarnished the image of the Republican Party. Furthermore,
Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate for the 1976 election,
was a small-town born-again Southern Baptist. Initially white
evangelical voters in the South were enthusiastic about this
born-again President, but they soured when Carter was on the
wrong side of many policies dear to the white evangelical
voter. Carter refused to roll back civil rights and support the
women-rights ERA amendment, and did not push back on the
Supreme Court decision opposing prayer in schools.

Jerry Falwell, Baptist preacher and founder of the Moral
Majority, launched in 1976 the “I Love America” rallies linking
his faith to a political agenda, opposing feminism,
homosexuality, and pornography. In the next Presidential
election of 1980 Falwell supported the non-religious divorcee
Republican candidate, Ronald Ragan, spurning Jimmy
Carter. The Moral Majority ran ten million dollars of political ads
supporting Reagan, encouraging many white evangelicals to
change their party affiliation to Republican. By the time of the
Bush campaign of 2004, eighty percent of white evangelicals
voted Republican.

Jerry Falwell at an "I Love America" rally in 1980

RISE OF THE TEA PARTY
In reaction to President Obama’s win in the 2008 election and the bank bailouts
rushed through to prevent a second economic depression, the Tea Party
movement rose up in protest, and was quickly dominated by white supremacist
elements. Ugly racist T-shirts were hawked at Tea Party rallies showing Obama as a
witch doctor or as a mugger strangling Uncle Sam. Many Tea Party supporters
were white evangelicals who opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. Egged on
by enthusiastic support by the opinionators at Fox News they opposed
ObamaCare, though polls revealed many supported the Affordable Care Plan,
suggesting they opposed the black president rather than the policy. Polling
showed that three-quarters of Tea Party members agreed with the statement,
“Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as
discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

Tea Party Protest, Washington D.C. September 12, 2009

The Tea Party activists had high hopes when Mitt Romney ran for President in the
2012 election, they were in a state of shock on election night. Romney exceeded
most of his electoral targets, he increased his margins among white voters to an
impressive twenty points, nearly double the margin McCain won in the previous
election, and won a remarkable eighty percent of the white Protestant vote, and
Republican voter turnout was as high as usual.
Why did Romney lose the election? The traditional Republican coalition, heavily
dependent on white Christians, were simply no longer majority of Americans. Black
voter turnout jumped between 2008 and 2012, and for the first time the black
turnout percentage was greater than the white turnout percentage. Also, about
three-quarters of the growing Hispanic electorate voted Democratic. The GOP
post-mortem report concluded that the Republican Party needed to be more
inclusive if it wanted a long-term future in American politics, but activists rejected
this inclusivity, saying this was unwanted advice from the party elites.

Barack Obama, his family, and his cabinet officials

TURNING POINT? EMANUEL AME CHURCH IN CHARLESTON
In 2015 Dylann Roof sought to start a race war, wrapping himself
up in the Confederate flag, but instead sparked a movement
condemning white supremacy, seeking to remove Confederate
symbols from state flags and state capitols and speeding up the
removal of Confederate statues and monuments. Dylann walked
into a black church during a Bible study, listening for about an
hour.

Protestors and statue of Robert E Lee at Charlottesville

Then Dylann got into an argument,
ranting about black Americans, and
then pulled out his gun, threatening
them. Robert Jones writes, “One of
the members pleaded with him not to
hurt anyone, saying, ‘You don’t have to
do this.’ The twenty-one year-old
replied coolly, ‘Yes I do. You are raping
our women and taking over the
country.’ Roof then opened fire, killing
nine church members, including the
pastor. . . Roof deliberately spared one
woman, telling her the he was going to
let her live so she could tell the story
of what happened.”
Charleston church memorial after attack, 2015

What was especially troubling about this incident was Dylann
was an active member of a mainstream Church; and had drawn
several icons of Jesus in a jail-cell journal. But, he was not
radicalized at church, he was radicalized by Christian nationalist
websites on the internet.

Soon after this tragedy,
Governor Nikki Haley had the
legislature remove the
Confederate flag from the state
capitol grounds, arguing that it
should only be displayed inside
a museum. She said, “No one
should drive by the statehouse,
(see the Confederate flag
waving), and feel pain. No one
should drive by the statehouse
and feel like the do not belong.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/06/politics/nikki-haley-confederate-flag/index.html

The effort to remove four Confederate statues in Baton Rouge, Louisiana turned
into a two-year ordeal. Governor Landrieu had to fight legal challenges in multiple
courts and appeals, he received many hate letters and death threats, and lost half
of his white support during the struggle. The state could only find one African
American contractor willing to take down the statues, his car was torched, sand
was poured into the gas tanks of his cranes. A security firm with experience
guarding construction sites in war-zones was hired, police SWAT teams with
sharpshooters guarded the construction crews, construction workers wore bullet-
proof vests and masks, and license plate numbers of the crew were covered.

ARE THERE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE ABORTION AND CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT? Many White Protestants felt threatened by both the Civil Right
movement and by Catholicism, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized both Catholics and Jews
as well as blacks. But JFK’s election as the first Catholic President in 1960 and his
popularity helped secure a place for Catholicism in the American culture. While
many liberal Protestants and Catholic clergy and laymen marched with the civil
rights protesters, white evangelical Protestants were either hostile towards the civil
rights movement or counseled infinite patience. White evangelical Protestants
prefer to emphasize personal salvation in preparation for the end-times. If the end-
times are soon, why do we need to worry about civil rights and social justice?
Evangelical Protestants and Catholics would not start cooperating until the
1970s. They would eventually find common cause in the emerging culture war
issues, abortion, gay rights, and prayer in public schools. Before this time abortion
was not a big issue for Protestants, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a
resolution in 1971 that permitted abortion in case of rape, incest, and “damage to
the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

Announcement of the of "End of the World" on May 2011, as predicted by Harold Camping.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2013/03/27/58058/the-religious-right-wasnt-created-to-battle-abortion/

(REPEAT) Robert P Jones writes, “The earliest phase of the
Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-
Catholic divide. But when Protestant Christian Right
leaders such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the advice of
Catholic activists to include opposition to abortion as a
leading issue for the Christian Right, as white Protestants
were fleeing the Democratic Party over its support for civil
rights, old hostilities quickly gave way to new political
alliances.”

Robert P Jones writes, “The earliest
phase of the Christian Right
movement didn’t bridge the
Protestant-Catholic divide. But when
Protestant Christian Right leaders
such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the
advice of Catholic political activist
Paul Wyrich to include opposition to
abortion as a leading issue for the
nascent Christian Right movement in
the late 1970’s, as white Protestants
were increasingly fleeing the
Democratic Party over its support for
civil rights, old antipathies quickly
gave way to the promise of new
political alliances.”

The major logical fallacy regarding the abortion debate is that
pro-life and pro-choice are opposing positions. This makes no
sense, the true opposite of pro-life is pro-death, and nobody is
eager to kill babies. This blog and video demonstrates that you
can be both pro-life and pro-compassion.

EVANGELICAL CHURCH AND TRUMP
For the past few decades, most white Christians continue to vote Republican,
while most black and mixed Christians vote Democratic, often by wide margins.
Polls taken by Robert
Jones shows that:
• White Evangelicals:
81% voted for Trump
in 2016.
• White Catholics:
64% voted
Republican.
• White Mainline
Protestants:
57% of voted for
Trump.

First paragraph:
Shortly after a poll
indicated that
conservative
Christians were
concerned that he’d
never asked God for
forgiveness, Donald
Trump announced
that he has, indeed,
asked God for
forgiveness, but in
his “own way.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/donald-trump-god-forgiveness
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-on-god-
i-dont-like-to-have-to-ask-for-forgiveness-2016-1

Robert Jones says, “Trump’s own racism
allowed him to do what other candidates
couldn’t: solidify the support of a
majority of white Christians, not
despite, but through appeals to white
supremacy. During the Presidential
debate he called for his Proud Boys to
stand back and stand by, which they did,
and they and other white supremacists
stormed the Capitol building after Trump
incited them to attempt an insurrection
and coup on his behalf. Blood was shed,
lives were lost, police were beaten, and
many congressmen and Mike Pence
cowered in fear, fearing death.”
https://sojo.net/articles/they-invaded-capitol-saying-jesus-
my-savior-trump-my-president

When posting articles on Facebook, the only white person from my church who
would like or comment positively on my posts was a elderly white lady in her
seventies. I asked her why and she responded that she still remembers the images
burned into her memory of the brutalities of the Sixties Civil Rights protests, how
the police turned the dogs and fire hoses on the protesters in Birmingham, and how
the Birmingham church was bombed on Sunday morning, killing four black girls
while they were in their Sunday School class, and how the police harassed and beat
the protestors in the Civil Rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. I
am in my sixties, and my memories from that era are that I was angry at JFK for
being assassinated because his funeral pre-empted my Saturday morning cartoons.
You have to be in your seventies to remember the images of Selma that were
beamed onto your television screen. This is now history, and now the revolt against
teaching Critical Race Theory to our children is they will be forbidden from learning
about these civil rights struggles in school.

Birmingham protests, 1963
Police turn fire hoses and dogs on
protestors, and a house bombing.
ML King, Why We Can’t Wait

Bloody Sunday - Alabama police attack Selma to Montgomery Marchers, 1965, painting by Ted Ellis
ML King and Abernathy
family march from Selma.

SOURCES:
In addition to the general history of white evangelical protestants, Robert
Jones also has many personal anecdotal stories about what it was like to
grow up in a religious Baptist household in the Deep South, we encourage
you to buy these books to read them for yourselves. The subject matter
does not overlap to a great extent, they are great reads.
The Great Courses, not Wondrium, has an older set of lectures by
Professor Arlitt on the Religious History of America. He is a believing
Catholic, but he approaches all of his topics with scholarly curiosity and is
fair to all sides. My only complaint is his coverage of the Orthodox Church
in America is cursory, but Orthodoxy admittedly is a small denomination
in this country.

Please support our channel, order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3kBXizZ

You can click on these links in either our blog or our SlideShare slides:
Many American evangelical Christians and leaders still support Trump, even after this
attempted insurrection, and indeed support the armed citizen militia insurrection:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/us/give-send-go-extremism-invs/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/how-white-evangelical-christians-fused-with-trump-
extremism.html
Christianity Today, a leading intellectual evangelical magazine, pushes back:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/january-web-only/trump-capitol-mob-election-
politics-magi-not-maga.html
Pope Francis and the leading Catholic magazine, America, the Jesuit Review, also pushes back:
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/01/09/pope-francis-us-capitol-
condemn-239686
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/01/20/biden-cupich-gomez-bishops-
239779

What puzzled many who watched the armed insurrection against the
Congress on January 6, 2021, where far-right insurgents were seeking to
kidnap and possibly assassinate members of Congress and Vice-
President Mike Pence, was how some of the insurgents saw themselves
as participating in a Christian cause, carrying crosses and signs like
“Jesus is our Savior, Trump is our Leader.” The QAnon shaman invaded
the Senate floor, sat in the presiding officer’s chair, and wrote a nasty
note to Mike Pence, and then said a group prayer out loud! This is
happening while terrified young staff members trembled in their hiding
places, fearing for their lives.
Like, what is going on here? A murderous mob that calls themselves
Christians? Have we all gone mad?

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