The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  True, a number of the activists who took up abolitionism, including Reformed Baptist minister Charles W. Denison and Universalist (later Unitarian) minister Adin Ballou, did so in the name of religion and from pulpits. But, as Frederick Douglass acidly observed at the time, these religious abolitionists tended to be a distinctly disempowered minority in their own denominations. Looking back, Douglass noted, “A few heterodox, and still fewer orthodox ministers, filling humble pulpits and living upon small salaries, have espoused the cause of the slave; but the ministers of high standing—the $5,000 divines—were almost to a man on the side of Slavery.”39 At their churches, he added, “so far from being rebuked as an offender, the slaveholder was received and welcomed as a saint.” Furthermore, by the end of the antebellum period, according to Douglass, some number of its leading abolitionists (such as the Presbyterian minister Robert Finley) were also committed to colonization schemes, which sought to “solve” the problem of slavery by “repatriating” freed Black people to the west coast of Africa.40

  Meanwhile, many of the most famous of the abolitionists—Douglass himself, along with William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, and Gerrit Smith—had moved in the direction of religious heterodoxy, for which they 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. Douglass famously supported women’s suffrage. Gerrit Smith’s letter in support for women’s rights was read aloud at the opening of the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. Theodore Parker delivered an 1853 sermon castigating the isolation of women in domestic roles. Charles Grandison Finney’s encouragement of female speakers at prayer meetings drew the condemnation of conservatives, who described his gatherings as “promiscuous assemblies.” And Adin Ballou founded a religion-based commune committed to women’s rights and spiritualism—which only added to his infamy.

  “Southern clergymen,” according to the author and historian Mitchell Snay, “emphatically countered that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible.”41 James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina, Dabney’s brother-in-arms in the Southern Presbyterian Church, summed up the wisdom of the age well: “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.”42

  Perhaps the most important aspect of the proslavery theology that Dabney so ably embodied—or at any rate the one that far outlasted its explicit support for the enslavement of human beings—was its fusion of religion with a racialized form of nationalism. Indeed, Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic. In the eyes of proslavery theologians, the United States was the “Redeemer Nation”—a “nation which God’s own hand hath planted, and on which He has, therefore, peculiar and special claims,” as one Alabama cleric put it.43 When the United States was divided by Civil War, God’s hand unmistakably settled on the Confederate States of America, which was understood to be waging a holy war on behalf of Christian civilization against the impious Union.

  In the aftermath of the war, even as the formal institution of slavery ceased to exist, the legend of the redeemer nation persisted. And Robert Lewis Dabney was right there to keep the dream alive. In hopes of sabotaging efforts at reconstructing the South as part of a universal, multiracial republic, he trained his polemical guns on “the Yankee theory of popular state education.” He asserted that public education was “pagan” and “connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie.”44 Predicting that the growing women’s rights movement would “destroy Christianity and civilization,” he thundered, “women are here consigned to a social subordination, and expressly excluded from ruling offices, on grounds of their sex, and a divine ordination based by God upon a transaction that happened nearly six thousand years ago!”45 The woman was “ ‘first in her transgression,’ ” he helpfully explained, for which God rightly laid upon her “subordination to her husband and the sorrows peculiar to motherhood.”46 And he just couldn’t give up on slavery. As late as 1888 Dabney published an article in the Presbyterian Quarterly titled “Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights,” in which he explained that “the relation of master and bondman was sanctified by the administration of a divine sacrament.”47 God himself “predicted the rise of the institution of domestic bondage as the penalty and remedy for the bad morals of those subjected to it,” he said, and “God protects property in slaves, exactly as any other kind of property, in the sacred Decalogue itself.” To argue otherwise, he said, is a “hurricane of anti-Christian attack.”48

  It seems unlikely that the typical American today would regard Robert Lewis Dabney as an inspirational leader. But R. J. Rushdoony was far from a typical American. Indeed, Rushdoony drew on his reading of Dabney (as well as Dabney’s admirer A. A. Hodge) and his fellow proslavery theologians as he shaped the ideas that supplied an ideological cornerstone of Christian nationalism today.

  Perhaps the most important thing to know about Rushdoony is that he was born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had narrowly escaped the genocide, in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Rushdoony’s father, who founded the Armenian Martyrs Presbyterian Church in Kingsburg, California, ministered to a community of fellow Armenian refugees, who agonized and grieved as letters from relatives back home came to a standstill. As R. J. Rushdoony’s son Mark Rushdoony commented, “My father grew up with a very keen awareness that the Armenian people had been massacred, their culture extinguished, and their history rewritten because they were Christians in a non-Christian culture.”49

  As Mark Rushdoony tells the story, his father overheard a conversation among a group of older Armenian men in the late 1950s. “They were lamenting the course they saw America was on and issued a condemnation, which given their experiences was stronger than any vulgarity. They said America was becoming like Turkey,” Mark said. Amid the ever-present awareness of genocide, Rushdoony developed the conviction that only absolute submission to the word of God could save the human world from chaos.

  “In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity,” Rushdoony wrote in 1997. “And I came to realize there is no neutral ground anywhere.”50

  Rushdoony left his family home in Kingsburg, California, and made his way to college at the University of California, Berkeley. He did not fit in. Advised to further his education by reading the classics, Rushdoony recoiled in horror as he perused Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the canon. He later called this “the ugliest experience of my life.” The books he read were “humanistic garbage,” devoid of wisdom. The ancient classics were, as he later said, “classics of depravity. Classics of degenerate cultures. What they offer at their best is evil.”51

  Rushdoony emerged from Berkeley with all the distinctive features of his intellectual persona in place: a resolutely binary form of thought that classified all things into one of two absolutes; a craving for order; and a loathing for the secular world and secular education in particular—all of which explains much of his attraction to the works of Robert Lewis Dabney. While the rest of the world may have seen in the proslavery ideologue a racist, a sexist, and a partisan of enslavement, Rushdoony “applauded Dabney’s defense of slavery.”52 Indeed, he and many of his fellow Reconstructionists regarded Dabney as prophetic. Rushdoony reprinted and disseminated some of Dabney’s works through Chalcedon Foundation newsletters and lectures, as well as through his publishing company, Ross House Books.53 He found himself agreeing with Dabney that the Union victory was “a defeat for Christian orthodoxy.”54 In Rushdoony’s mind, Dabney’s great adversaries, the abolitionists, were the archetypes of the anti-Christian rebels—the liberals, the communists, the secularists, the advocates of women’s rights—who continued to wreak havoc on the modern world. As his fellow Reconstructionist C. Gregg
Singer put it, proslavery theologians including Dabney, Thornwell, and their contemporaries “properly read abolitionism as a revolt against the biblical conception of society and a revolt against divine sovereignty in human affairs.”55 Rushdoony himself concluded, “Abolitionist leaders showed more hate than love on the whole.”56

  Rushdoony’s vision of a civic order rooted in hierarchy and deriving its legitimacy from its claim to represent an authentically Christian nation forms a central part of an extraordinary revisionist account of American history—an account that would soon insert itself into the heart of the modern Christian nationalist movement. In Rushdoony’s telling, it was not the intention of America’s founders to establish a nonsectarian representative democracy. He characterized the American political system as “a development of Christian feudalism.”57 The First Amendment, he argues, aimed to establish freedom “not from religion but for religion”58—a phrase widely parroted by Christian nationalists today. “The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order,” he said.59 For Rushdoony, 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.”60 Now the job was to redeem America from its commitment to godless humanism.

  Rushdoony’s admiration for southern Christian orthodoxy was such that he adopted a forgiving attitude toward certain forms of slavery. In books such as Politics of Guilt and Pity and The Institutes of Biblical Law, which is essentially an 890-page disquisition on “the heresy of democracy” and the first of a three-volume series under the same title, he makes the case that “the move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually as well as personally.”61

  “Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so,” Rushdoony muses, and the law requires that a slave “recognize his position and accept it with grace.”62

  Rushdoony seemed to believe that involuntary slavery is justified in certain instances. “A man who abuses his freedom to steal can be sold into slavery,” he continues, then adds, “State supported and controlled education is theft.” And he calls “the claim of ownership to the lives of citizens” by a “humanist state” slavery, too. “In a century’s time, the Negro exchanged slavery to an individual for slavery to the State,” he writes. “In both conditions there are advantages, but both constitute slavery.”63

  Rushdoony did not agitate for the literal enslavement of Black Americans in his time. But as with his fellow travelers in the dominionist movement, his fascination with proslavery theology was no passing fancy. The idea that the United States is a Redeemer Nation, chosen by God; that it is tasked with becoming an orthodox Christian republic in which women are subordinate to men, education is in the hands of conservative Christians, and no one pays taxes to support Black people; that at some point in the past the nation deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of atheist, communist, and/or liberal elites—the stuff of proslavery theology was the life of Rushdoony’s political thought. And it remained a cornerstone of Christian nationalism even while Rushdoony’s successors disavowed or simply forgot about the origins of their interpretation of the creed, and long after they had erased their earlier hostility to abolitionism from history and convinced themselves that they were the heroes in the story of emancipation.

  Some of Rushdoony’s successors, as a matter of fact, did not feel the need to disguise their debt to him and his ruminations on “biblical” slavery. One is Douglas (“Doug”) Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, preacher, slavery apologist, and a founder of New Saint Andrews College. “On its Web site, the college treats Rushdoony and Dabney as foundational thinkers on the order of Plato and Aristotle,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.64 Doug Phillips, Howard Phillips’s son and former president of the now-defunct Vision Forum Ministries, openly embraced Dabney’s work and called him a “prophet,” too.65

  Perhaps the most telling example comes from David Barton, whose efforts to reframe our constitutional republic as a Christian nationalist enterprise are at the center of so many of the movement’s cultural and legislative initiatives today. Though perhaps not in a formal sense a Reconstructionist, Barton echoes or dances around many of Rushdoony’s defining ideas, even on the question of slavery. When it came time to edify his followers on the topic of slavery in the Bible, Barton could have chosen to cite any number of secondary sources. He chose to cite Rushdoony extensively.

  In a paper titled “The Bible, Slavery, and America’s Founders,” posted on the WallBuilders website, Barton argues that “in light of the Scriptures, we cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general sense, is sin. But this brief look at the Biblical slave laws does reveal how fallen man’s example of slavery has violated God’s laws.”66

  In order to make the case, he relies heavily on Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law. He quotes Rushdoony to point out that “Deuteronomy 23:15.16 makes very clear. Biblical law permits voluntary slavery because it recognizes that some people are not able to maintain a position of independence.” He draws on Rushdoony to make the further claim that slavery is something of a lifestyle choice: “To attach themselves voluntarily to a capable man and to serve him, protected by the law, is thus a legitimate way of life, although a lesser one.” Barton also borrows from Rushdoony in enumerating the freedoms that biblical slaves relinquished in making their lifestyle decisions: “ ‘If his master gives him a wife, and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master, and he shall go out alone.’ (Ex. 21:3–4).”

  Perhaps recognizing that all this sounds rather unpleasant for the enslaved person, Barton once again turns to his preferred guide to explain why it all makes sense: “Rushdoony comments: ‘The bondservant, however, could not have the best of both worlds, the world of freedom and the world of servitude … If he married while a bondservant, or a slave, he knew that in doing so he was abandoning either freedom or his family. He either remained permanently a slave with his family and had his ear pierced as a sign of subordination (like a woman), or he left his family. If he walked out and left his family, he could, if he earned enough, redeem his family from bondage. The law here is humane and also unsentimental.’ ”

  Where Barton strikes out on his own, it is to take a swipe at modern, liberal government as a form of slavery, a gesture that Rushdoony surely would have endorsed. “Since sinful man tends to live in bondage, different forms of slavery have replaced the more obvious system of past centuries,” Barton explains. “The state has assumed the role of master for many, providing aid and assistance, and with it more and more control, to those unable to protect themselves.”

  Among apologists for Christian nationalism today, the favored myth is that the movement represents an extension of the abolitionism of the nineteenth century and perhaps of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, too. Many antiabortion activists self-consciously identify themselves as the new abolitionists. Mainstream conservatives who lament that the evangelicals who form Trump’s most fervent supporters have “lost their way” suggest that they have betrayed their roots in the movements that fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of discrimination. But the truth is that today’s Christian nationalism did not emerge out of the religious movement that opposed such rigid hierarchies. It came from the one that promoted them—with the Bible in one hand and a whip in the other.

  In Rushdoony’s debt to proslavery theology, it is also possible to glimpse the outlines of another cornerstone of the Christian nationalist project he helped create. The defeat of the orthodox side in the Civil War, Rushdoony realized, “paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel.”67 The “Social Gospel,” as Rushdoony understood it, is the mistaken belief that Christianity would have us use the power of government to reform society along lines that conform with Jesus’s teachings about loving thy neighbor. This unwanted fruit of defeat in the Civ
il War, Rushdoony came to think, blossomed into the next great enemy of Christian civilization. The enemy was, in a word, the New Deal. And so it was to the defeat of this poisonous heresy that Rushdoony now turned his attention.

  It wasn’t easy being a conservative in the 1930s and 1940s. The Great Depression and the New Deal, following so closely upon seeming triumphs of the 1920s, seemed like a direct refutation of the conservative vision. Everywhere government seemed to have the upper hand, and socialism or worse loomed on the horizon. Those who remained faithful to the cause of freedom and private property now faced the onus of explaining why history had strayed so far from the correct course. A small but determined number accepted a still greater challenge: How could they, now a scorned minority, regain control and steer the ship of history back to conservative principles?

  Fortunately, the times brought forth some extraordinary role models to serve as guides. One such figure was James W. Fifield Jr., an energetic Congregational minister who thought he had the answer to the problem of the age. To combat the horrors of the New Deal, Fifield proposed to energize the nation’s Protestant pastors. In 1935 he cofounded and led the Mobilization for Spiritual Ideals, also known as Spiritual Mobilization. His ambition was to broadcast from pulpits and radio stations a simple message: business has a friend in Jesus, and government is the enemy of God and man. He had a theology to back it up, but it was uncomplicated. The welfare state violated several of the Ten Commandments, but especially the Eighth. When New Dealers used the power of government to restrain business and take from the rich to give to the poor, he argued, this was a clear violation of God’s word: Thou shalt not steal.