On June 1, 2020, federal troops using tear gas and flash grenades cleared Washington, D.C., streets of Black Lives Matter protesters so that President Donald Trump could walk across the street to pose with a Bible. A clearer example of Christianity as the guiding ethos for White supremacy would be hard to come by. But as most of the world knows, Christian-inspired racism did not start with the Trump Administration.
Nor did it start with the modern incarnation of the American Christian Right and its subsequent rise to significant political influence, which went into warp drive in 1973 when the IRS rescinded the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools that refused to admit Black students. This in turn grew out of White pushback against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was a response to the overwhelming Christian support for post-slavery Jim Crow, which in turn emerged as an overwhelmingly church-sanctioned racist response to the abolition of slavery. And slavery, for most of its history, was as American as church and apple pie.
Revolution and the Christian Right to Own Slaves
Indeed, if not for the Southern colonies’ fear of the possibility that the British might eventually abolish slavery, arguably there would not even be a United States.
Before addressing that, it is important to recognize that Christianity was not only the dominant religion during the Revolutionary period but in many states it was the established religion. South Carolina’s 1778 Constitution made clear the relationship between Christianity and the state government: “No person shall be eligible to a seat unless he be of the Protestant religion; the Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed the established religion of this state.”
The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which inspired Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and later became the basis for the 1788 national Bill of Rights, was also clear: “Religion, or the Duty which we owe our Creator, can be directed only by Reason, and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, Love and Charity towards each other.” The primary author, founding father George Mason, practiced Christian love and charity by enslaving at least 300 people.
In 1772, a British court granted freedom to James Somersett, an enslaved man owned by an American colonist. Somersett escaped while in England, was recaptured, and was on the verge of being sent back to the Americas when he successfully sued for his freedom. The court ruled that a slave could not be removed from England against his will. While complicated, the case was widely and somewhat inaccurately viewed as abolishing slavery in Great Britain and in turn as the first enormous step toward emancipation for its slave-owning colonies. This decision helped galvanize the South in support of independence and the freedom to own without constraints an estimated 450,000 fellow human beings.
The crucial role this court decision played in driving the American rebellion has been brought to light by the exacting scholarship of A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.’s In the Matter of Color (1978), Slave Nation by Alfred W. and Ruth Gerber Blumrosen (2006), and more recently by Philip Goodrich’s Somersett (2020). As Goodrich put it in a June 22, 2020, Time article, “The Southern colonies had no reason to put their lives, their families’ lives, their property and their legacy on the line until a single decision at the Court of King’s Bench in London on June 22, 1772, Somersett v. Steuart, often seen written as Somerset v. Stewart.”
In the Revolutionary War, a war allegedly fought for liberty, it was the British rather than the Americans who offered freedom to enslaved people. British Lord Dunmore’s 1775 Proclamation stated, “I do hereby … declare all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops … .” Scholars estimate that as many as 80,000 to 100,000 enslaved people escaped to or behind the British lines.
The Proclamation further cemented the South’s fear that abolition was inevitable under British rule, and prominent Virginians and future presidents George Washington, James Madison, and James Monroe joined Mason and Jefferson in practicing their own version of Christian forbearance for the right to own slaves. Virginia was hardly alone; in 1776, slavery was legal in all thirteen newly declared independent states.
Slavery in what would become the United States hardly originated in the 1770s. The first slaves arrived at the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Slavery initially was defined not by skin color but by religion: “All servants imported and brought into this country who were not Christian in their native land shall be counted and be slaves.” So declared the Virginia General Assembly in 1680. Of the many incentives for slaves to be become devout Christians, this certainly was one of the strongest. But conversion did not equal freedom; in 1667, Virginia had already decided that Christian baptism did not grant freedom to slaves.
As brutal as slavery was, it was far more so in colonial times when slaves were literally worked to death, as owners could with relative ease replace them with new slaves from Africa. And because they were not Christians, there was little if any guilt.
Christianity, Slavery, and the New Republic
The importation of human beings from Africa to be enslaved was formally ended in the United States in 1808. That hardly ended slavery; instead, it created a lucrative domestic slave market via the inducement of new births. And with enslaved people being exclusively born as slaves, raised as slaves, and dying as enslaved people, Christianity became an important tool for indoctrinating the proper relationship between master and slave.
In Black Theology and Black Power, African American theologian James Cone highlights that
the manner in which Christianity was communicated to [slaves] tended to degrade him. The … [Black] was taught that his enslavement was due to the fact that he had been cursed by God. … Parts of the Bible were carefully selected to prove that God had intended that the … [Black] should be the servant of the white man … .
Most prominent of these was “The Curse of Ham.” Genesis 9:20–27 tells the story of what Noah did after exiting the Ark. In a nutshell, he got drunk and passed out without any clothes on and then became enraged when he realized that his son Ham had seen him naked. Noah then cursed Ham’s son Canaan and Canaan’s descendants to be slaves to the descendants of Ham’s two brothers, Noah’s other sons. In the American Christian interpretation, Canaan ended up in Africa, where his black skin marked him as the forever slave to White humanity—hence “The Curse of Ham.”
Like so many Bible stories, this one makes little sense. Even if seeing one’s father naked is considered sinful, does it really warrant all future generations to be cursed? And why curse the grandson Canaan, who had nothing to do with it, and not Ham, the, er, sinner? Not to mention the question of how Noah, his wife, and three sons repopulated the entire planet after the flood. Or that the holiest man the Christian god could find to preserve humanity after the flood got blind drunk just as soon as he could grow the grapes.
More straightforward is the New Testament, where Paul writes in Ephesians 6:5–6: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”
As Yolanda Pierce, the dean of the Divinity School at Howard University, told the Washington Post in 2019:
Christianity was proslavery. So much of early American Christian identity is predicated on a proslavery theology. From the naming of the slave ships, to who sponsored some of these journeys including some churches, to the fact that so much of early American religious rhetoric is deeply intertwined … with slaveholding: It is proslavery.
Harry Stout, Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, said in an interview with the Huffington Post in 2015 that the Southern church was the actual backbone of slavery. “If you pull the church out of the whole equation, it’s highly likely that there never would have been a Civil War. Southern clergy had no doubt that slavery was not a sin.”
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, certainly had no doubt: “[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God … it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation … it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.”
Was it really established by decree of Almighty God? The Bible is very clear, as per Leviticus 25:44–45: “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.”
Not only did Bible patriarchs Joshua, David, and Solomon take slaves captured in battle, they were commanded to do so by God (Joshua 9:23; 1 Kings 8:2–6; 9:20–21). In Genesis 24:35, God blessed Abraham by multiplying his slaves. Job was also a slaveowner; the Bible describes him as “blameless and upright” (Job 1:8, 15–17). The Fourth Commandment prohibits slaves from working on the Sabbath, and the Tenth says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave” (Exodus chapter 20), but there is no commandment suggesting that slavery itself is sinful or even problematic. Perhaps most damning, so to speak, is that nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus Christ mention slavery, let alone condemn it, despite its widespread prominence in the Roman Empire.
As well as the Curse of Ham, slavery-supporting Christians also argued that by kidnapping and enslaving people from Africa, they and their offspring were brought to salvation. Commented Episcopal Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia:
[A] few natives [in Africa] have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery!
These statements were key to the insistence that Africans and their descendants were “different” and that American slavery was a system of paternalism, that slave owners were taking care of a people cursed by God and who clearly could not take care of themselves.
And lest we dismiss this as simply a southern issue, manifest destiny was the Christian god-driven right for America to sweep all the lesser inferior races out of her way as she marched, indomitable, across the continent, as succinctly put by Senator Thomas Hart Benton in 1846: “It would seem that the white race alone received the divine command to subdue and replenish the earth! For it is the only race that has obeyed it—the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a new world, to subdue and replenish.”
What Would J. C. (Jim Crow) Do?
The Thirteenth (abolishment of slavery, 1865), Fourteenth (guarantee of citizenship to freed slaves, 1868), and Fifteenth (right to vote, 1870) Amendments took a sledgehammer to Christian-blessed slavery and White supremacy. Alas, a wrecking ball was required. After the promise of Reconstruction, which ended in 1877 with the removal of Union troops from the defeated South, states were free to relegate their Black citizens to second-class status and institute the long reign of Jim Crow. This was done via voter suppression, private and state terror, and rigidly legislated and enforced segregation. It lasted roughly from the end of Reconstruction until its more formal dismantlement with the end of legal segregation in the 1960s.
Ferris University’s Jim Crow Museum describes it as a way of life, of daily humiliation and servility for blacks, including when it came to religion. “Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.”
In 1892, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer declared from the highest court in the land that the United States is a “Christian nation.” Four years later, Brewer would vote with the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that segregation was legal as long as it was “separate but equal.” Jim Crow was thus entrenched throughout the nation.
And so it was in this Christian nation that Southern states changed their constitutions in the late 1800s to legalize Jim Crow. This Christian nation tolerated lynchings, just as it allowed what author Douglas Blackmon’s 2008 book rightfully calls Slavery by Another Name, where Blacks arrested for vagrancy and other minor charges were assigned to chain gangs. These chain gangs were then rented out to corporations and private citizens, incentivizing a for-profit prison system that continues today. It continues because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.”
One of the last “spectacle” lynchings of a Black man—one attended by a large crowd—was not in the deep South but in my home state of Indiana. On August 7, 1930, an estimated crowd of over 5,000, including women and children, gathered at the Marion, Indiana, courthouse square to watch the lynchings of Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith. This followed a decade of Ku Klux Klan political dominance of the state; at its peak of influence in the 1920s, Indiana’s governor, more than half of the state legislature, and at least a quarter of a million White men—30 percent of all White males—were members of the God-fearing cross-burning Protestant Klan.
They Want to Get Jesus
It is generally accepted that the Christian Right in its modern political incarnation was launched as a direct response to Roe v. Wade in 1973. But it was not the legalization of abortion that changed conservative Christians from voters for conservative political candidates to conservative political activists. It was the same thing that had animated them since before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence: racism.
In response to the Civil Rights Movement, White parents throughout America pulled their children out of newly integrated public schools and put them in all-White Christian schools. Because these institutions did not take any public money, they viewed themselves as legally, morally, and politically separate from the corrupt public schools where prayer was banned, evolution was taught, and the federal government forced their children to go to school with Black kids.
But in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally that any institution, including nonprofit Christian schools, that practiced segregation was not a charitable organization and therefore not eligible for tax-exempt status. As meticulously researched in Thy Kingdom Come by Columbia University professor Randall Balmer, the revocation of tax-exempt status for Christian schools thoroughly enraged the Christian community.
In 1975, the IRS revoked Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status for prohibiting interracial dating and refusing admission to unmarried African Americans. Located in Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University is a liberal arts university focused on educating students to reflect and serve Christ. Until 1971, the university served Christ by denying admission to Blacks altogether.
The university’s litigation to retain its tax status took eight years before ending in defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983. During this time, organizations such as the Moral Majority, led by the ultra-conservative Evangelical Jerry Falwell, used the issue to spur a national Christian-led and extremely active conservative political movement.
This brings us back to Trump posing with that Bible after “napalming” Black Lives Matter protesters. Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity a few weeks later that protesters who had toppled statues celebrating the Confederacy and/or slavery had “destroyed very important things. I mean, you’re also talking about statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. They’d like to get Jesus—you know that, right? They said, ‘We want to get Jesus.’”
Perhaps no one had told him that, like Frederick Douglass, Jesus was already dead. Not to worry. In an early July Facebook ad, Trump said “WE WILL PROTECT THIS” beneath a photo of a statue of Jesus Christ. This was especially peculiar, as it the photo of was of the famous Christ statue on a mountaintop above Rio de Janeiro.
While funny, there is nothing humorous about Trump’s actions, which are clearly intended to increase support among his base: hard-core evangelical Christians. Trump, the most openly racist and divisive president of modern times, whose 2016 campaign featured doubts over the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate and who called Mexicans rapists and murderers, was supported by evangelicals by more than four to one. Their continuing support, while appalling, has deep roots that are both exceedingly Christian and, alas, very American.