The Myth of the Christian Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 82-129
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Early Date ◽  
White American ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
Martin Luther King

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the Second Great Awakening. Over the course of American history, many whites have accepted the claim that America is a Christian nation. Blacks from an early date, however, have argued that Christian America is a hollow concept, informed by assumptions of white supremacy. In the nineteenth century, David Walker ridiculed the notion of Christian America, while Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells claimed that the idea of Christian America was a cover for horrendous crimes against blacks. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, blacks as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Cone unmasked the myth of a Christian America. By the twenty-first century, the collapse of Christian dominance in the United States could be traced, at least in part, to the complicity of white American Christians in the myth of White Supremacy. Many white Christians responded by attempting to restore a lost golden age, ignoring their complicity in the myth of White Supremacy that had helped bring on America’s fourth time of trial.

The Myth of Nature’s Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-81
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Early Date ◽  
David Walker ◽  
The World

The American myth of Nature’s Nation claims that the United States, and especially its founding documents, owe nothing to human history but reflect the natural order as it came from the hands of the Creator. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence speaks of “self-evident truths,” rooted in “Nature and Nature’s God.” But the founders read into the natural order the long-standing myth of White Supremacy. In this way, the myth of Nature’s Nation became a tool for exclusion and oppression of people of color. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson even argued that black inferiority was nature’s own decree. From an early date, blacks fought back. David Walker led that charge with his 1829 book, Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the twenty-first century, other black writers—especially Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates—unmasked the ways in which the myth of White Supremacy is embedded in the American myth of Nature’s Nation.

Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals War, religion, and white supremacy in comparative perspective: South Africa and the American South

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
R M
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
White American ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The American South

The southern states of the United States of America and South Africa share a number of analogous historical realities. One of these, which is the main subject of  this article,  is  the way in which the memory of a lost war had fused cultural mythology and religious symbolism to provide a foundation for the formation and maintenance of attitudes of white supremacy in both contexts.  This article seeks to achieve a historical  understanding of the complex interrelationship between the development of cultural identity and Protestant Christianity by  focusing on these issues in the histories of the Afrikaner and the white American Southerner in comparative perspective. 

History of Research in Developmental Psychology

2013 ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
W. Andrew Collins ◽  
Willard W. Hartup
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
History Of

This chapter summarizes the emergence and prominent features of a science of psychological development. Pioneering researchers established laboratories in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to examine the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time. American psychologists, many of whom had studied in the European laboratories, subsequently inaugurated similar efforts in the United States. Scientific theories and methods in the fledgling field were fostered by developments in experimental psychology, but also in physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology. Moreover, organized efforts to provide information about development to parents, educators, and public policy specialists further propagated support for developmental science. The evolution of the field in its first century has provided a substantial platform for future developmental research.

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 182-194
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.

The Persistence of White Supremacy Beyond Desegregation

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-198
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Voter Suppression

Systematic anti-Black racism did not end with the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. It simply changed shape: into debt peonage, criminalization, mass incarceration, housing segregation, sexual predation, voter suppression, and discrimination of all kinds. The same holds true for systematic anti-Black racism in white American Christianity. This chapter examines how structures of everyday white supremacy persisted in everyday Mormonism beyond the end of the priesthood and temple ban, especially through rhetorical strategies on the part of LDS Church leaders that evaded historical facts or dismissed history as insignificant and demonstrated no commitment to responsibility, reconciliation, or reparations.

Catholicism and Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Pasquier
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Historical Accounts

Historical accounts of American Catholicism are not complete without some recognition of the racial contours of life in the United States. As a people both racist and racialized, American Catholics have lived along a spectrum of racial identification, both reinforcing and confounding the black-and-white boundaries that so dominate American racial ideology. European Catholic colonizers introduced race-based notions of slavery to North America as early as the fifteenth century. Some Catholics of African descent challenged the institutionalization of white supremacy in the American Catholic Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the same time that many white Protestant Americans categorized Catholic immigrants of Europe as dark-skinned outsiders. The immigration of people from Latin America and Asia has only added to the racial diversification of American Catholicism in the twenty-first century, further reinforcing the importance of race to the study of Catholicism in American history.

Racial Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 500-522
Author(s):  
Traci C. West
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
German Immigrant ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Probing Questions

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas invite us to confront problems of racial justice. Probing questions of method that consider whiteness and white supremacy in US-American life yields guidance for identifying how Christian ethics produces useful approaches to questions of racial justice. Examples from Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century Christian ethics commentaries on white dominance and his methodological assumptions spark an exploration of how related arguments in twenty-first century Christian ethics and theology analyses of white dominance can contribute. Besides method, concrete racist attitudes and practices in need of Christian ethics disruption are revealed in the politics of immigration seen in Niebuhr’s 1920s claims about German immigrant ethnic identity struggles and addressed by current Christian ethicists on twenty-first-century opposition to welcoming impoverished, migrant brown peoples into the United States.

The Burned-Over District Reconsidered: A Portent of Evolving Religious Pluralism in the United States

1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda K. Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Charles Finney

The hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York, christened the Burned-Over District by nineteenth-century contemporaries, was a colorful and important chapter in the Second Great Awakening. The main characters—Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, Charles Finney, and the like—led a religious rejuvenation that presumably reorganized spiritual life in the Finger Lakes vicinity between 1820 and 1850.

Humanism and Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Strube
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fundamental Function ◽  
Intrinsic Connection ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
Democratic Tradition

This chapter explores multiple connections between humanism and literature in Europe and the United States. The period covered extends from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The first part of the chapter discusses the intrinsic connection between literature and humanism, the humanist program and literary form, humanism institutionalizing literature since the Renaissance, and humanist education and liberal arts. The second part turns more directly to literary works (the nineteenth-century democratic tradition, Black humanism, and ecohumanism), presenting exemplary readings from humanist scholars. These readings show, first, how literature has continuously broadened the humanist focus, especially in terms of sociopolitical and intersectional themes, and second, that literature fulfills a fundamental function in humanist scholarship across the disciplines.

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