I have one more quote from Stetson Kennedy's Southern Exposure (1946). He stresses in his book the similarity of white-supremacist Southern racial ideology and practice to the ideologies of the defeated fascist nations in the very recently concluded Second World War. And he writes about the importance of ending white racist political and social practices everywhere in the country in order to secure democracy for the US as a whole:
Because of its afore-mentioned poverty, prejudice, poor health, poor education, poll tax, white primary, and the relative weakness of its unions, the South is American democracy's Achilles' heel - its soft spot. Not only the Southern enemies of democracy are aware of this - many of the nation's most powerful antidemocratic elements are also concentrating their big guns on the South. Already they have succeeded in blasting into office a pack of prostitute Southern congressmen and senators who for decades have virtually controlled Congress and subverted democracy throughout America. Not satisfied with this, some among them are plotting to build up a reservoir of fascism in the South with which to flood the whole nation.
There is no intent here to oversimplify the problem of the South in terms of democracy versus fascism; on the contrary, this has been an attempt to sketch something of the complexity of the problem. Nevertheless, the struggle against fascism in the South is basic, just as the War Against Fascism was basic. A total democratic victory over fascism, inside and outside the South, is prerequisite to any and all forms of permanent Southern progress. [my emphasis]
And there is an echo of today's Republican anti-public-education rhetoric in this comment of Kennedy's from 1946: "Inasmuch as a racial educational differential is essential to the socio-politico-economic system of white supremacy, the system's opposition to federal aid to education has dated from Reconstruction."
Dishonest history and science are something that white supremacists have always considered important to promote.
And Kennedy almost seems to have had a premonition of Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene: "As was only to be expected, a cult of witch doctors has arisen to administer the poison and conduct the rites of white supremacy. No diagnosis of the problem of the South would be complete without close scrutiny of these pathological symptoms."
To be fair, I've never come across evidence of the old Jim Crow white supremacy advocates advocating white supremacist math. So Gov. DeSantis deserves some credit for innovation.
Stephen Kantrowitz writes about how White Supremacy Has Always Been Mainstream 07/23/2018. Among other things, he says this about the origin of the term "white supremacy":
White supremacy connotes many grim and terrifying things, including inequality, exclusion, injustice, and state and vigilante violence. Like whiteness itself, white supremacy arose from the world of Atlantic slavery but survived its demise. Yet while the structures are old, the term “white supremacy” is not. Although it first appeared in British abolitionist critiques and U.S. proslavery defenses in the first half of the nineteenth century, it only became commonplace — and notably not as a pejorative—in U.S. whites’ post-emancipation calls for a racial order that would reinstitute slavery’s political and economic guarantees. [my emphasis]
And he notes how the more recent version has been facilitated by the laziness of the corporate media - and even PBS:
Consider how long Pat "Blood and Soil" Buchanan served as a respectable voice of the political and journalistic right, winning four states in the 1996 Republican primaries and later playing Rachel Maddow’s curmudgeonly uncle on MSNBC — all in spite of his longstanding support for white ethnonationalism. Or remember the PBS NewsHour profile of Trump supporter Grace Tilly that failed to note her neo-Nazi tattoos. The network’s post-backlash editor’s note treated Tilly’s claim that her tattoos were religious, not racist, as worthy of debate, as though an enormous “88” — code for “Heil Hitler”—paired with a bullseye cross, another white supremacy symbol, left room for uncertainty. The myth that white supremacy is a marginal political phenomenon has proved so durable that many people find it easier to deny its overt expression than confront a more troubling reality: “very fine people” — and not just fathers, husbands, and sons, but mothers, wives, and daughters as well — have always been central to the work of advancing white supremacist causes. [my emphasis]
Robert P. Jones makes an important observation about how the internal, individualistic emphasis of Protestant fundamentalism can be exploited by political demagogues to mobilize their support for social policies that in some cases are the opposite of what any remotely honest Christian attitude toward others would be. On the other hand, that particular aspect of Protestant fundamentalism doesn't necessarily in itself make its adherents more receptive to white racist attitudes.
In an interview for the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal with Regina Munch, Baptizing White Supremacy, Jones observes:
One of the consequences of the emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus is that it is so hyper-individualistic - an internal, psychological, and emotional kind of connection to God. When the beginning and the end of religion is seen in that kind of relationship, what gets screened out are social injustices and systemic injustices, particularly around race. It becomes a way for white Evangelicals in particular to feel very comfortable with their own personal religion in a way that’s very disconnected from any claims about inequality or injustice by their African-American brothers and sisters. It falls on deaf ears because it’s considered outside the realm of what’s most central to being Christian. [my emphasis]
He continues with this point:
This idea of purity and innocence I think is the biggest stumbling block. It’s personal, right? If some of the best parts about ourselves have been formed by the church, how can it also be true that some of these awful things in our history are true? I just think those two things can be true at the same time. If we white Christians want to hold on to and pass down the good to our children and grandchildren, I think there’s no way to do that without seriously wrestling with the bad and doing everything we can to put a sharp and bright light on it so that we can excise it, so that we’re handing less of a muddled mess down to the next generation. [my emphasis]
Jones certainly isn't the first person with a Southern Baptist background to make such an observation. The singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, who is the daughter a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, dramatized the point in a song inspired by an actual case of a snake-hanling Pentecostal minister who attempted to murder his wife by rattlesnake bite. Signs Following (Snake Song) 08/05/2014:
The closing lines of the last verse:
And somewhere on Sand Mountain
A woman needs no proof
That evil can lie so close to truth
Such sects have someetimes been called Snakebite Baptists, but Pentecostals are not Baptist. Although Pentecostal religion can often promote extreme individualism of the kind Jones desribes, too.
But as Jones also explains in the interview, Christian white supremacy is not exclusive to Protestant fundamentalism. He cities a study in which white American Catholics and white non-fundam,entalist Protestant shows similar levels of anti-black prejudice. Mainstream Protestantism and the Catholic Church generally place less reliance on subjective, mystical experience of the kind Protestant fundamentalism stresses. It has always been a major different between Protestant and Catholic theology that Catholicism postulates a number of mediations between God and humanity: priests, bishops, cardinals, saints, angels. But that study suggests that the degree of mystical thinking involved doesn't necessarily directly affect how susceptible American Christians are to white racist ideas.
Jones notes that "the people who aren’t shocked about these numbers are African-American Christians."
Obviously, American Christians, including whites, have also drawn more left-leaning social-activist and antiwar lessons. William Jennings Bryan is a fmous example: a radical social reformer, antiwar - but also (sadly) notorious for his fundamentalist anti-evolution stance.
Still, since respect for empirical facts in the world is also a personal and social skill that has political relevance. So the degree of otherworldly thinking a person indulges can have a significant effect on their views of political issues. So when a Christian fundamentalist religious position leads someone to an ideologically anti-science outlook - a position common to fundamentalists but not to mainstream Protestants or Catholics - that also undermines the kind of critical thinking skills that make people less easily susceptible to political demagoguery.
And since demagoguery depends heavily on exploiting fear and on polarizing good in-groups against threatening out-groups - or, more specifically, narrative constructions of such groups - presumably Christians who are committed to versions of the faith that stress a punishing God and the exclusive virtue of their denomination or sect would be more vulnerable to rightwing political demagoguery.
