During the Civil War, pastors and theologians supported the Confederacy by providing theological ballast and biblical backing for the continuation of slavery. They prayed over the troops, penned treatises on the inferiority of black people, and divided denominations such as the Methodists, the Baptists and the Presbyterians over the issue of enslavement.
In the South after the Civil War, the Christian-Confederate connection was visible in public spaces and in houses of worship in their monuments, memorials, and ceremonies. The Ku Klux Klan emerged, fusing Christianity, nationalism and white supremacy into a toxic ideology of hate. Jim Crow laws, ...
Christians of the North have often been characterized as abolitionists, integrationists, and open-minded citizens who want all people to have a chance at equality. Christians of the South, on the other hand, have been portrayed as uniformly racist, segregationist, and antidemocratic. The truth is...
As with other periods in America’s sordid racial history, the Christian church of the mid-twentieth century often served to reinforce racism rather than oppose it. In response to government efforts to desegregate, moderate Christians organized to oppose racial integration of neighborhoods, starte...
