Some Standard Wisdom for Converting Blacks

Less than a month into this series, I already feel the need to sound the reminder that in quoting some of these articles, my intent is not to endorse or make light of or even to stand in judgment of some of the darker sides of late nineteenth century thought. This warrants particular restatement with the following article by J. W. Crenshaw. It would be easy to read the below and assume either that my intent is racist or callous or anarchonistically judgmental. It is none of these. Instead, the following article sounds, among other things, a pair of themes that I have tried to reiterate here in various ways. The first is the need to complicate the narrative of the Civil War that we all learned in school: the North invaded the South to free the slaves and give blacks their rights. Historians have almost entirely abandoned this carefully constructed fiction, but the public still casts the Civil War in these terms, failing to see the stark racism and paternalism that dominated in the North no less than the South. The other is the sinister overtones that education often takes on in the hands of progressives. It's a message that has ongoing merit.

Even if neither of these themes were present, however, the following is important to read both for those in the Stone-Campbell Movement because it is part of our collective history the consequences of which we continue to live with in the de facto racial segregation of our churches and for Americans in general who need to be forced to read chapters of our history which serve neither to glorify US nationalism or to provide the starting point in a narrative of national redemption. What follows in "Difficulties in Christianizing the Colored Race" is precisely the shades of grey that we all need to grapple with in the formation of our historical consciousness.

As to what the future of the colored race of America is to be, socially, politically or religiously, we do not believe any one can conjecture with any degree of accuracy. Naturally superstitious and with their race prejudices to contend with, we approach them more from a sense of Christian duty than from any hope of achieving grand results. To succeed in our mission work among them we must agree upon some decided policy. If properly approached, we do not believe that there is a better missionary field in the world.

Experience has proven that we can not reach them through the preaching of white men. The colored leaders now, excepting a few, are ignorant and superstitious. In what direction, then, does hope lie? Certainly not in this shouting generation. The hope and the only hope, speaking from experience, is in the children. And when we educate a few colored men, as we have been doing for this work, we must not measure their success by converts made. The children, who are just learning to read, are the ones most benefited. Those whom we send out must be impressed with the importance of continuing to sound into the ears of the auditors that Christianity is something more than shouting the clothes off in the first part of the night, and serving Satan the balance of the night. We need to select young men of good character to educate them for this work. There are brethren among us who have the means to help build such a school as we need for this purpose. With the plain gospel plea that we have, if loving liberal hearts, could be interested in this work, in the next generation many of the difficulties that now so hinder our progress could be surmounted, and thousands of this unfortunate race could be Christianized.

Brethren, this is a question worthy of the attention of every Christian.

An Unreconstructed Prayer

I came across this little prayer in Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood and kept coming back to it.

Lord we acknowledge Thee as the all-wise author of every good and perfect gift. We recognize Thy presence and wisdom in the healing shower. We acknowledge Thou had a divine plan when Thou made the rattle-snake, as well as the song bird, and this was without help from Charles Darwin. But we believe Thou will admit the grave mistake in giving the decision to the wrong side in eighteen hundred and sixty-five.

J. William Jones' thoroughly Confederate prayer is an easy object for scornful derision or amused mockery, but I imagine at the time it seemed a powerful expression of the mind not only of the speaker but of the audience. If it was met with any reaction at all, I suspect it was hearty assent from the North Carolina audience.

Meanwhile, are we any more careful in the way we address ourselves to God. With the level-heads of calmer thinkers or the benefit of the perspective of history, how will people evaluate the all too often modern prayer that God will ensure that our soldiers be the ones to kill their soldiers and not the other way around. Do we suppose God receives those prayers any better than the informed criticisms of Jones? They certainly are no less self-interested or self-involved, no less tribalist than the Lost Cause musings of the rebel veteran.

Damn the Torpedos, the Country, Etc.

Karl Rove recently--in real terms, not in time measured by how quickly the news media chews, swallows, regurgitates, and masticates its stories before finally letting them pass--suggested that Mitt Romney, if elected, would be a president like Polk. James K. Polk is something of an obscure figure, as far as the general public is concerned, and undoubtedly no small number of "news" anchors needed rapidly to resort to Wikipedia to get up to speed. For my part, the initial thought that crossed my mind was "Oh? What does he intend to annex?" A colleague of mine playfully suggested that the Republicans have had their sights set on Iran for some time now. In turn, I wondered if--given Romney's family roots there--whether or not he would scoop up the rest of Mexico and finish what Polk started. It would certainly be a novel way to solve the illegal immigration problem.

With a more serious tone, the same colleague expressed confusion about why anyone would want to associate themselves with a president for whom a simple and direct causal link could be drawn between his actions and the American Civil War. He asked whether or not we were supposed to interpret the comparison to mean that Romney presidency foreshadowed another civil war. Certainly that was not the intent on Rove's part, but it is a dangerous line of inquiry to invite.

Meanwhile, with a Lubbock County Judge speculating that an Obama reelection might prompt another civil war, should Americans be left wondering whether they're damned if they do, damned if they don't?

John Lathrop on Peace and War

Here are some thoughts from John Lathrop's sermon "Peace and War," which, all in all, was intriguing from a historical standpoint and dreadful from a moral one. It starts out promising (provided you ignore the full title):

The principal happiness which we are made capable of enjoying, will be found in a state of peace with God, and peace with all mankind. It ought therefore to be the principal business of our life, to cultivate peace; that peace which Jesus preached, which his disciples preached, and which is inseparable from the religion we profess. Blessed, said he, who is in a peculiar sense, the author of peace--"Blessed are the peace makers for they shall be called the children of God."

It should be the business of the ministers of religion, in all possible ways, to promote peace. The Holy Bible is full of exhortations to this purpose. "If it be possible," saith the apostle Paul, "as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men!"

If only he didn't go on to reduce peace to a political objective, confusing it with the mere state of mutual non-aggression between the militarizes of respective bodies politic.

Our particular attention is called to the blessings which are to be found in a state of peace in the nation to which we belong; and peace with the other nations of the earth. Nothing is more to be deprecated than civil dissension.

As a side note, he spent a curious amount of time in 1811 decrying civil wars and ensuring his listeners that such a spectacle is unlikely to ever happen in the United States. "We hope...that the opposite parties [in our country] will not wantonly provoke and irritate each other." Oops.

The Wisdom of James Cruickshanks

These thoughts on the sacralization of the American military were offered by Worcester, MA preacher James Cruickshanks on a Union fast day during the Civil War. They offer not only a relevant critique of an ongoing trend in American culture, but also a strong implied censure for those Christians who believe that they can be both patriots and politicians without having any blood on their hands:

If indeed God be a God of peace, and he is Almighty, we ask, why is war, with its untold evils, permitted to brood over this fair land?...In a word, the army is the people’s God. They idolize it—they worship it...We are then as a people a nation of idolaters. We are at once, the most religious, and the most idolatrous people on the globe.

The quote is taken from Harry S. Stout's Upon the Altar of a Nation.

Compelling Morality: Our Redundant History

It is in no sense an overstatement to say that Gaines M. Foster's Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 is a near perfect blend of historical insight and timeliness. Foster's simple book has simple scope: the examination of the rise of the Christian lobby in late nineteenth century America and the moral legislation it pursued. He makes clear, however, from the first sentence of the introduction that this is not intended to be a purely academic exercise. The rise of the Christian right in the late 1970s has made matters of the origins and precedents of religious lobbying and moral legislation issues of extreme importance for contemporary American moral polity. Foster convincingly suggests that the strongest, most germane parallel to the modern movement for moral reform is the late nineteenth century campaign to revise the moral character of the nation. The rise of the Christian lobby was more than merely a political shift or, as the lobbyists undoubtedly believed, an awakening of the American moral conscious in the face of some novel evil. It was a dramatic cultural and philosophical shift away from antebellum theories of states' rights, personal liberty, and moral suasion into new concepts of nationalism and corporate social responsibility. In this, and countless other nuances of Foster's book, there are striking ideological parallels to more recent impulses in American politics. In the interest of brevity, however, there are two points from Foster's work which stand out as especially noteworthy for reflection.

One of the most striking features of the Christian lobby, which Foster deliberately emphasizes in his narrative, was that even in its successes it understood and respected (or at least conceded to accept) the Constitutional limits of the federal government. There is little debate any longer about whether or not the federal government has some role in structuring national morality. As Foster will admit in his conclusion, few people object to the federal government having a hand in, for example, protecting children from the sexual advances of adults. In truth, most Americans probably do not even think of this in terms of the government legislating morality, though that is certainly what is occurring. As desensitized to the concept as modern Americans are, the idea that the government should make any universal laws regarding any morality was entirely foreign to early Americans. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment represented something of a strange and wonderful novelty to nineteenth century Americans. They accepted that slavery was wrong (though some, only after being compelled by force of arms to accept that opinion), but that the government could seize the right to make that qualitative judgment was unusual. The Thirteenth Amendment would prove to be the justifying precedent cited most frequently by moral reformers.

Even with this powerful antecedent, the Christian lobby was forced to respect that most Americans understood the federal government to be restricted to a very small number of jurisdictions: interstate commerce, international treaties, administration of the military, and direct governance of the District of Columbia and the territories. In view of these limitations, the moral reformers were forced to pursue their agenda of national moral legislation within the confines of a traditional view of a limited federal government. They focused their efforts initially on enacting Sunday laws in DC, stricter divorce rules in the territories, prohibition in the military, and the restriction of interstate distribution of obscene materials (e.g. information on birth control). They understood that they could not make adultery illegal, but they did eventually convince the government that it had the power to make transporting a woman across state lines for the purpose of adultery should be. Even when the moral reformers did make their final push to outlaw the production and sale of all intoxicating beverages, Prohibition came with two important concessions to the limits of federal power. First, reformers readily admitted and accepted that Congress could not simply pass a law to achieve prohibition. A constitutional amendment would be necessary, as the Constitution did not give Congress the kind of sweeping moral power to outlaw behavior that the Christian lobby required. Second, in spite of initial attempts to include it, the provision which made possessing and consuming alcohol in one's home was removed from the wording of the amendment. The country was not ready to accept the idea that the government had the right to regulate moral behavior within one's own home. What authority it had, stopped at the domestic threshold. The home was a fortress, even if it was a den of wicked vice.

In addition to recognizing and working within the constitutional limits of the federal government, the history of the moral reformers teaches contemporary reformers and important lesson about the impermanence of moral reform. When the Volstead Act finally took effect, enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, the reform periodical American Issue triumphantly declared, "The future historian will accord to January 16, 1920 a place second only to that of the advent of the Redeemer." Historians have a funny way of defying predictions. No one would today suggest that the onset of Prohibition in the United States was an event of permanent and global magnitude. Few school children know anything more than a passing quick fact about the Eighteenth Amendment and even less about the myriad moral reforms which preceded it. Even to the most conservative modern critic, the goals of the Christian lobby in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seem antiquated if not comic. While many still oppose, largely futilely, ready access to abortion, on the most marginal members of society think it ought to be illegal to distribute information about birth control. Boxing, while not America's proudest past time, is legal to stage, promote, record, and distribute. (Imagine what the moral reformers would have thought of the mixed martial arts craze which has gripped the popular imagination.) The film industry not only escaped government content controls, but modern technology has made it possible for anyone and everyone to pipe any number of genuinely obscene pictures onto their computers, televisions, and telephones. Perhaps most notoriously at all, Prohibition was a miserable failure and social drinking (unlike boxing) is among the great American past times. From a historical perspective, efforts at national moral reform appear to have been the most dismal failure. Only a select few reforms from the period persist in any recognizable form: higher age of consent laws, laws against selling cigarettes to minors, and the end of mail delivery on Sundays. In his conclusion, Foster suggests that "the story of moral reconstruction provides no sure lessons to be applied to the renewed debate over legislating morality...but it does provide a historical context." Yet this historical context may in fact be the sure lesson which moral reformers need to learn; history has proved that it will be infinitely easier to repeal moral legislation than it was to pass it. It took the reformers nearly sixty years to enact prohibition through a constitutional amendment and only thirteen years for Americans to collectively regret and reject prohibition through another amendment.

There can be few complaints about Foster's work. Admittedly, it is dry, deeply encyclopedic reading which at times carries with it the uneasy feeling that one is actually just reading the congressional record. This impression is reenforced by the final eighty pages (or one quarter) of the book which is consumed by extensive appendices, notes, and other scholarly apparatus. At the same time, this exhaustive treatment reassures the reader that Moral Reconstruction is among the most well researched treatments of the period and subject that has yet been written. Though not a page turner for the average reader, the book is worth a second glance and more for professionals or dedicated hobbyists interested in grasping the historical context of ongoing movements among Christian especially to legislate a better moral polity for America.

Review of Upon the Altar of a Nation

Yale professor of history, Harry S. Stout, in the introduction of his recent book, Upon the Altar of a Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, proposes to offer the reader two things: to apply broadly accepted jus in bello standards to the conduct of both sides of the internecine conflict and to chart the role the Civil War played in the rise of American civil religion. In fact, it was reading a free sample of the introduction--with its audacious and compelling claims--that prompted me to purchase the book. Would that I had received instead a sample of the conclusion, I might have realized in advance was a self-indulgent, belabored, pell-mell work this would be. It is in his conclusion that Stout makes the ultimate, predictable judgment that the Civil War did not live up to any known standards of just war and then immediately exonerates both the Civil War--on the senseless grounds that "winners and losers alike would concede almost anything, it seemed, except the idea that their internecine war was ultimately meaningless or unjust"--and war in general--with the claim that "Judging the Civil War is not a brief for pacifism. Rather it is an endorsement of the idea of a just war. There are no ideal wars." It is also in the conclusion where Stout, rather than examining critically the rise of civil religion, is most concerned with label himself a devoted adherent (and eventually explaining, at length, what that means to him): "...they believed in Lincoln's characterization of America as the world's last best hope. And, further, I can only conclude that for reasons Americans don't deserve or understand, we are." Here, his critical history becomes subsumed under his civil faith, and this faith keeps him from too hard (or too accurate) a judgment of the justness of the Civil War. It is no wonder then that his book--all 576 pages of it--leaves the reader with the overwhelming sense of meaninglessness that Stout fails to attribute to any aspect of the war itself.

The first and greatest weakness of Stout's work is not the quality of his theses--which one inevitably walks away feeling are correct, if only Stout had bothered to prove them--but the way in which he goes about demonstrating them, or rather fails to do so. After introducing the common criteria of discrimination and proportionality at length in the introduction he neglects them for the rest of the work. In fact, the term proportionality won't appear after the introduction until the thirteenth chapter. After the fourteenth chapter, the subject will not be addressed again until Chapter 28. That sort of sporadic treatment of the supposed purpose of the book is characteristic of Stout's entire approach. Rather than approaching the problem with surgical precision, Stout undertakes to write a history of the Civil War which takes up his moral questions on convenient occasions, his issues of civil religion on convenient occasions, but otherwise is content to wallow in florid prose totally unconcerned with the fact that, rather than making an original contribution, Stout is merely regurgitating McPherson under the guise of contextualization.

Even those rare occasions when the subjects of civil religion or jus in bello do appear, Stout does not make his case so much as assume it. In his depiction of the rise of civil religion in particular, the reader discovers not the gradual unveiling of a more and more obvious religious sentiment toward the nation so much as a gradually freer and freer use of rhetoric by Stout. Arriving at Chapter 34, the reader is suddenly presented with this sentence: "Still the fighting pressed on as the warrior priests prepared for new sacrifices." Without any substantial or systematic examination of any possible language of generals as "warrior priests" or of deaths as "sacrifices," Stout flourishes the terms as if their appropriateness is self-evident. Before the book concludes, there will be some evidence that some thinkers thought some generals functioned as "warrior priests" but never any comprehensive argument that culture as a whole viewed them that way. While the case for an understanding of military deaths as martyrs sacrifices will be more convincingly demonstrated, what is not shown is that the Civil War in some way manifested this peculiarly or that it developed gradually over the course of the war as a result of an evolving American psyche.

In addition to his unsubstantiated assumption from the outset that his theses are incontestable, Stout makes rather unrealistic, fundamentally anachronistic assumptions about the nature of ethical discourse in war times generally and in the Civil War in particular. As early as the fourth chapter, Stout feigns surprise that the Northern intellectuals and press met the fall of Fort Sumter with patriotism rather than "sober moral reflection," as if the unprecedented outbreak of civil strife was the obvious occasion for ethical tomes rather than visceral, emotional response. Stout will continue on to find an appalling lack of moral commentary in the performing arts, painting, and popular music, expecting instead (I can only assume) a contemporary Bob Dylan to rise up and provide moral, cultural commentary for soldiers to hum as they marched into battle. Stout is everywhere disturbed to find that newspapers were more interested in sensationalism than moral reflection, politicians more interested in rhetoric than restraint, and preachers more interested in invoking the "God of Battles" than the "Lord of mercy." It is almost as if Stout had never read a paper, experienced an election, or heard a sermon. Perhaps most curious of all, Stout wonders in his conclusion at the fact that, "Privates may have been executed for rape, but no commanding officer was ever executed for creating the...culture in which rape could easily take place."

What the reader is left with is a history of the Civil War which ironically strives to make everyone look as morally reprehensible as possible--Stout eagerly injects "[white]" into many quotes (e.g. "[white] freedom," "[white] citizens," "[white] civilization") in an effort to read racism into every possible contemporary sentiment even where it is not indicated by context--and then absolves them or their moral fault in the end, explicitly preferring a "personal" response to the question of justice rather than an analytical one. In other words, the moral of Stout's moral story is that we should never fight another war again in the way the Civil War was fought, but that isn't to say that, given the opportunity, we shouldn't fight the Civil War again, even as it was fought. Convoluted? Apparently. Self-contradictory? Perhaps. Worth the price of the paper its printed on? Certainly not.

A War Weary People

In my recent readings, a quote from General Philip Sheridan in his memoirs has struck me as both appalling and relevant. Sheridan is describing the autumn campaigns of 1864 in which he, under the orders of President Lincoln and General Grant, was pursuing an extreme scorched earth policy in the Shenandoah Valley. In retrospect, he offered this as his justification:

Reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.

It nauseates me--and I use that term only because I cannot think of any stronger or more visceral image--just how true this continues to be. For nearly a decade, America has been at war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. For ten years, a substantial amount of the population cried eagerly for more, even as the combined multinational body count (civilian and military) is estimated to have exceeded 200,000. In the past two years, the political rhetoric and the popular mood has undergone a profound shift toward withdrawal. The motive, as Sheridan's prescient quote indicates, is not disgust with the carnage, the wanton loss of human life. Our blood lust, God help us, has not been satisfied. No, instead the calls to finally end the mindless violence spring from the dire state of the American economy.

If poverty really is the herald of peace, I hope this recession never ends.

The Psychology of Unity

B. J. Humble’s article “The Influence of the Civil War” examines the role the Civil War played in precipitating the eventual division of the Stone-Campbell Movement into the Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ. Traditional historiography with its hagiographical bent painted the movement’s post-war unity as an anomaly on the American religious landscape. Humble, however, probes beneath the surface in line with more recent revisions in the traditional approach. He examines the rhetoric of the anti-society Disciples before the outbreak of the war and after. Tolbert Fanning is a noteworthy example, as a prominent even the premier voice of the Disciples in the South. Before the war he was opposed to the missionary society but professed spiritual unity with its members nonetheless. What changed after the war for Fanning, and for many of the anti-society Disciples in the South, was not the stance toward American Christian Missionary Society itself but a subtler shift in the way that opposition manifested itself. Fanning wrote later of the pro-society Disciples in the North: “Should we ever meet them in the flesh, can we fraternize with them as brethren?” He shifted from calling the members of the Society “brothers” to referring to them as “monsters in intention, if not in very deed.”

Fanning’s behavior and Humble’s observations have interesting implications for understanding the nature of division. It is notable that an issue which existed before and after the war should be treated so radically differently over time. The doctrinal reasons for opposing missionary societies had not changed, but the issue suddenly became so divisive that it became a lightning rod for splitting a movement that had not even a generation earlier come together for the common purpose of Christianity unity. The relevant change came when an issue of doctrinal opinion took on personal overtones.

Of course that is an oversimplification. It is equally true that the issue of missionary societies had not fully come to a head until after the Civil War. Certainly the actions of the American Christian Missionary Society during the war had confirmed many of the fears of anti-society Christians that were merely theoretical prior to the war. The political endorsement of the union by the Society—which in the South amounted to a wholesale endorsement of war, tyranny, and the slaughter of Christians—could only reinforce and intensify anti-society sentiments wherever they already existed. More importantly still, the issue of missionary societies should not be isolated as the sole cause of division. The factors were multiple and complex.

It is nevertheless telling how radically the Civil War and the personal animosity it engendered altered the way doctrinal heterogeneity was treated. Gregory E. McKinzie, in his article “Barton Stone’s Unorthodox Christology,” recounts the early Christological controversy that threatened the proposed unity of Stone’s and Campbell’s movements. These two great fathers of the movement differed publicly and vocally on so basic and critical an issue as whether or not Jesus was God. Campbell published an article in response to Stone in which he stated “I fraternize with [Stone] as I do with the Calvinist. Neither of their theories are worth one hour…” Stone responded that if Campbell only called brothers those who, in Campbell’s words, “supremely venerate, and unequivocally worship the King my Lord and Master” then Stone was not his brother at all. Yet in spite of this strong rhetoric, the two men were architects of a unity between their two movements on the grounds that Bible-based unity transcended metaphysical uniformity.

Yet the same movement which united in spite of foundational theological difference split in the wake of the Civil War because significantly less dramatic doctrinal differences took on the character of personal loyalties. There a sense in which most Christian division can be reduced to this basic human flaw. I refer here not to functional division but spiritual division, since obviously a body of believers who believe it is a sin to have a kitchen in a church building cannot flourish shackled (at least architecturally) to a body of believers who meet in a building with a kitchen. The watershed, however, between this functional division and a true spiritual rupture comes when people begin to associate their doctrinal beliefs, no matter how strongly held, with their identity. Then, a dispute over personal opinions becomes a dispute between persons. It is the difference between a Tolbert Fanning who can attend a meeting of the American Christian Missionary Society and call its members his brothers and a Tolbert Fanning who calls a sectional meeting in the South and demands repentance from the “monsters” in the North.

It is interesting to note how frequently unity is sought through ever more distilled doctrinal confessions, with mixed results. From the Nicene Creed to the Restorationist “no creed but the Bible” to modern moves like paleo-orthodoxy, Christians hope desperately to achieve some semblance of Christian harmony by codifying from without what it means to be a Christian. Instead, it might be fruitful to consider that perhaps unity begins not at the level of doctrine but at the level of human psychology. The seed is planted when I identify as a Christian and only a Christian in a way that ultimately defies logical formulation because it consists in the mysterious working of Christ in me. Then, I recognize that I am a Christian definitionally and a Restorationist only incidentally. Then, recognizing that truth exists and warrants our faithful and diligent pursuit, you and I may work out our salvation with fear and trembling and tension and dispute and study and prayer and, most importantly of all, a Spirit of unity that vivifies all our collective efforts.