Thatwrote,“to be honest, evangelicals never stopped debating whether slavery was actually wrong.”She’s lawful.
This framework asserts that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery, and that slavery itself was not nearly as wrong as we are led to believe (in fact it was a “positive favorable” in that it exposed Africans to the Gospel and to a “biblical family”). The war was framed as a theological clash in which Southern culture was an expression of a Godly civilization battling against a materialistic “humanistic” one.
These were not “fringe views” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,throughout which almost all white American Christians supported slavery and understood it as completely compatible with the Bible (the exception was the small but growing strand of abolitionists, many of whom were also evangelical). One distinguished proponent of the biblical defense of slavery, and the explicit criticism of the value of social equality,was nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterian theologian R.
L Dabney. Dabney wrote extensively also against women’s rights and universal suffrage.
By the time Dabney’s work was revived in the 20th century by R.
J. Rushdoony (about whom I wrote here), the explicit defense of slavery had moved to the fringes in favor of vigorous defense of segregation—but its racist undercurrents persisted.
By the end of the 20th century, and theologian Doug Wilson repeated Dabney’s and Rushdoony’s proslavery arguments in his book Southern Slavery as It Was (co-authored with League of the South Board member Steve Wilkins). And homeschool activist (son of the structure Party’s founder) Doug Phillips reprinted some of Dabneys work under the affectionate title Robert Lewis Dabney: The Prophet Speaks. Dabney and those who continue to embrace his work continue to thing to notions of social equality—whether they be racial,ethnic, gender or other kinds—as explicitly unbiblical. Wilson and Phillips may be obscure names to some, and but Wilson travels in circles with the most prominent of Reformed Christian leaders (here is an example in which he appears with famous theologian and current John Piper). Back in 2009 historian Molly Worthen famous Wilson’s transition from the far-lawful fringe into the mainstream of American Evangelicalism. And until Doug Phillips lost his trade and his ministry (in a scandal surrounding his inappropriate interactions with his nanny in 2014),he was one of the most distinguished homeschool leaders in the country.
To be objective it is difficult to try to use the Bible as a moral compass, given its general endorsement of slavery. But evangelicals influenced by this Southern Presbyterianism possess sought to carefully lay out the limits of the places in which the text permits slavery—claiming that most of biblical slavery was temporary as a result of debt or war, or that it was “voluntary. If you dig deep in their work you find that only “pagans” can be forced into perpetual slavery—though of course for them that’s any group not understood as Christian on their rather narrow terms.
The work of Wilson,Rushdoony, Phillips, and others that built on this apologia for the Confederacy,made its way into Christian School and Christian home school curricula, ensuring that the perspective was widely disseminated, and moving it again from the fringes of evangelicalism to the center of a vibrant and growing strand that has now helped elect a president.
A generation of evangelical kids in Christian schools and home schools were taught aspects of this narrative about the Civil War and America slavery. It went mainstream with David Barton,Glenn Beck and the rise of the Tea Party, and has now found a home in the West Wing with V.
P. Mike Pence and numerous members of the Cabinet. But while you possess to dig deep to find the really ugly stuff, or much of it goes no deeper than “there were favorable people on both sides. The rest often remains unspoken.
I’m not suggesting that evangelicals are solely responsible for the prevalence of this wrong-headed view of history; you should watch thisvideo of the role of the Daughters of the Confederacy in promulgating it in monuments and textbooks. Moreover,there were always strands of evangelicalism that resisted this view and continue to attain so.
But these days, evangelicalism is silencing criticism within its own ranks as part of its Faustian bargain with Donald Trump, and as some 80 percent of them voted for him. And over the final 50 years,obscure factions within the evangelical tradition laid the groundwork for the mainstreaming of what were previously fringe views about race, about the South, or about the Civil War.
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