Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 22: The Last Judgment, the Lost Cause, and "Southern [white] historical consciousness"

Oran Smith in his book on the Southern Baptist Convention and movement conservatism in the US, The Rise of Baptist Republicanism (1997), makes an intriguing observation about the mutual relationship between what we now call Christian fundamentalism and Lost Cause ideology in the years after the Civil War in what Smith calls "Southern historical consciousness," by which he means the understanding of history among the white majority.

His analysis involves the End Times theology embraced by many conservative Christians (fundamentalist and Pentecostal) in the United States called "dispensationalism." This is a theory originated and popularized by A British minister named John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a leader in the Protestant sect, The Plymouth Brethren, who later led a split-off sect called the Exclusive Brethren. He began propagating a theory of the End Times that is known as "premillenial dispensationalism," which involved the Rapture that has become familiar in American popular culture in recent decades. In this view, true Christians will be "raptured" by being suddenly taken into Heaven, while on earth a thousand years of conflict and suffering will follow on Earth until Christ returns and puts an end to worldly history and conducts the Last Judgment.

Darby propagated his idea in the 1830s and 1840s in Europe. His Rapture notion of the End Times became a one of the two major doctrinal elements of what came to be known as Christian fundamentalism in the early 20th century, the other one being the notion of "Biblical literalism." Oran Smith describes how Southern Christians in the US had worked out a vision of the End Times that expected a millennium of progress based on their understanding of Southern slave society:

In the years before the American Civil War, a millennialist myth had already begun to develop, as theologians looked to the scriptures for lessons about the end of the world. With cotton the reigning king, evangelical ministers along with political leaders convinced many Southern elites in an upbeat, positive, “postmillennial” phase that, with its economic and spiritual prosperity, Southern society was so idyllic that this earthly perfection indicated that the thousand-year or “millennial” rein of Christ promised in the scriptures would be ushered in without judgment. Christ would return to earth at the end of a millennial reign of peace already begun.

Obviously the human property of the Southern planter elite weren't experiencing an idyllic life. But this religious propaganda support for the slave system was a triumphalist one, with a kind of Panglossian satisfaction in the society of the South, destined to civilize ever-larger portions of the world with its Christian institution of slavery.

But after the godly slave society was transformed by the Civil War that ended its Peculiar Institution of slavery, a more Darby-like vision of the End Times became popular, one that resonated more with white despair but also contained a more obvious angry and aggressive vision:

Then came the war. In the postwar phase, as the region lay in ruin, the positive postmillennialism gave way to dour premillennialism. A devastated South took Confederate defeat as a sign that Christ would soon rapture His church safely out of a world that was getting progressively hostile to His kingdom so that He might judge the sinful world before His thousand-year rein. In some sense, the [Southern Baptist denomination] remains in ... this latter phase, as deep within Southern Baptist religion and politics lies the notion that the South is separate from the rest of the nation: a little more righteous, a little more virtuous; believers in the absolutes of scripture surrounded by relativists, a Christian nation-state snuffed out by barbarians. [my emphasis in bold]

The Southern Baptists are still the largest Protestant denomination in the US, and is particularly strong in the states of the former Confederacy. It got the "Southern" part of its name in 1845 when it split off from its Northern wing in the lead-up to the Civil War, i.e., they split off because of their own support for slavery. Oran Smith poses the questions for the world of 1997, "Why does the Lost Cause myth remain important? Why is it important for political analysis?"

Simple. Because the myth lives. According to one cultural critic, “Southern Baptists have been the largest identifiable group of victims of [the Lost Cause] myth.” Southern Baptist religion scholar and moderate-faction activist Bill Leonard agrees that the myth is not a dusty fable. He writes that “the way in which Southern Baptist leaders sought to explain the defeat of the South’s righteous cause provides insight into their continuing response to divisive theological and cultural issues. The formula seems to be: When in doubt, spiritualize. That tendency remains a significant element of SBC life” (emphasis [from Smith]).

By "victims" in that quote, Leonard clearly means that white Southern Baptists were the biggest suckers for swallowing the Lost Cause ideology.

Christian Zionism from John Nelson Darby to John Hagee

This is a surprisingly good overview of contemporary "Christian Zionism"" the set of conservative Protestant religious and political ideas that lead to often very uncritical support for the hard-right parties in Israel. And it's from MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) which itself is known for its less-than-critical support for Israeli policies: Mimi Kirk, Countering Christian Zionism in the Age of Trump 08/09/2019.

It focuses in particular on the approach of "the main US Christian Zionist organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI)" founded and led by John Hagee. It also highlights the role of the 19th-century British evangelist John Nelson Darby [1800-1882] in elaborating Christian Zionism as we know it today, and the role of the 1909 Scofield Bible in popularizing it in the US. Somehow Christianity managed to go for 18 1/2 centuries without understanding the Christian Bible as prophesying what today's Christian Zionists see as the End Times and the particularly ghastly fate of Jews in it. Although, as Kirk notes, some "Protestant sects in sixteenth-century Europe held proto-Zionist ideas."

John Nelson Darby

Darby is mainly remembered today for his influence on millennialist End Times thinking among Protestant fundamentalists, George Marsden writes that the term fundamentalism came into usage in the 1920s in the United States to describe "broad united front of the kind of opposition to modernism that characterized" a series of Christian booklets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth by the American Bible League in 1910–15. They advocated a very conservtive reading of the Bible which was very suspicious of 19th century science (Darwinian theories) and critical academic Biblical scholarship. (Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd Edition, 2006)

A focus on End Times theories like Darby's "premillenial dispensationalism" were very much a part of this current of thinking in the 19th century. Marsden explains:

... the millenarian (or dispensational premillennial) movement had strong Calvinistic ties in its American origins. The movement's immediate progenitor was John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who broke with the Church of Ireland and became the leader of the separatist Plymouth Brethren group. During his later career Darby spent a great deal of time proselytizing in North America. He found relatively little interest there in the new Brethren sect, but remarkable willingness to accept his views and methods of prophetic interpretation.

It's also worth remembering that Darby's influential tendency of Protestant theology was part of an ascetic, fractious Christian religious view. A 19th century sketch of him by George Stokes, "John Nelson Darby Stokes," The Contemporary Review; 07/01/1885, stresses this aspect. Darby was part of the Church of Ireland and was attracted to conservative ecclesiastical and theological "Separatist" ideas of the first quarter of that century that was highly critical of official state church positions, which they saw as too compromised by their need to conform to state requirements." Stokes describes the official Evangelical Church of that time as characterized by an "intense secularism. He writes, "The High Churchmen ... of that generation were simply ultra-Protestants of a political type."

The Brethren group was founded in 1831 and Darby soon became it's main leader. Darby also became "intensely ascetic" and focused on what he took to be the imminent end of the world as prophesied in the Bible:

The overstrained expectation of Christ's speedy personal Advent worked in 1830 the same practical results as they did in the second century with the Montanists, and again about the year 1000 A.n., when men thought the end of the world was surely at hand. ... Darby lived on Calary Bog - a lofty upland a thousand feet over the sea, just beyond the Sugar Loaf mountain-in a peasant's hut. He lived the life of an ancient anchorite, like an Anthony of Egypt, or a St. Kevin of Glendalough, in his own immediate neighbourhood. His raiment was of the meanest kind, his personal appearance neglected; so neglected, indeed, that a gentleman is said to have once flung bim a penny in the streets of Limerick, mistaking him for a beggar; while as regards food, his body seemed almost independent of such a casual consideration. Day and night were devoted to his pastoral work, striving to rouse his highland flock to a sense of the impending Advent. So ascetic, indeed, was his life, so rigorous his self-denial, so unceasing his labours, that his Roman Catholic parishioners concluded that one of the real old saints had risen up again in his person. This asceticism was not confined to Darby. It was a common feature of the movement. [my emphasis]

Stokes also gives a vivid description of the kind of intense sectarianism which characterized the Brethren and its theological milieu:

The year 1848 was marked by a division, which has never since been healed [1885], but has been the cause of as much heartburning and bitterness as any religious feud that ever existed. It has been, indeed, an illustration of the oft-made remark that theological quarrels increase in bitterness in the inverse ratio of the difference between the combatants. ... The Brethren to an outsider appear one in doctrine, yet the hostility between an Ulster Orangeman and the most devoted Ultramontane is nothing as compared to the feeling with which an Exclusive or pure Darbyite now regards a Müllerite or Bethesda adherent of the same party. [my emphasis]

And this description of Darby's later years describe a pretty authoritarian approach:

Those who disagreed with him on any point of doctrine or of discipline, he excommunicated at once, and regarded as outside the covenanted mercies of God. During the later years of his life he lived at the Priory, Islington, which, during the decade between 1870 and 1880, was regarded by his followers as a kind of local Vatican, Thence issued decrees on all topics, demanding instant and unmurmuring obedience. Why, even the very change of a meeting from one locality to another without permission was regarded as an act of carnal self-pleasing and rebellion, and punished as such. And the end of a movement for spiritual independence and in defence of the rights of the individual Christian conscience was a very disappointing one, for it only terminated in the establishment of a crushing and intrusive spiritual tyranny, embracing all the pretensions, but carrying with it none of the antiquity and historic glory which cast a halo round Papal Supremacy. [my emphasis]

One of Darby's Brethren associates and later rivals, that Francis William Newman, went to Iraq as a missionary to Muslims. Like most Christian missionary efforts toward Muslims, it didn't have a great deal of success. He wound up being very impressed with the Islamic faith, which apparently influenced him in reading the Gospel of John in a way that led him to reject the divinity of Christ.