March 2002

In America Christian fundamentalists are concentrated in the Bible-belt, which encompasses what once constituted the lands below the Mason-Dixon line along with the states immediately to the north of the Mason-Dixon line. In other words, America's Bible-belt encompasses those areas where slavery was deeply entrenched in the years before the American Civil War and the surrounding areas.

In those slave states, the Christian religion took on a very unique character among the churches that dominated religious life at the time. Of course, none of the slave states had been formed as beacons of religious freedom. Maryland was given to Lord Baltimore as a haven for Britain's Catholic population and was as religiously intolerant of non-Catholics as the mother country was intolerant of Catholics, perhaps more so. The Carolinas were populated by for-profit corporations engaged in the business of transporting people from the Old World to the New, many of them indentured in exchange for their journey. Georgia was a penal colony. Florida was a Spanish colony, while Louisiana was a French colony. The wringing of wealth out of the land was important in all of the southern colonies, and harder than it was in the northern ones.

Slave owners and others who profited from the slave trade did not want strong churches in the territory where they lived that made them feel guilty about the source of their riches. So, the churches that did well in those territories, and the ministers who were hired to service those churches, were those whom the "gentry" were willing to hear -- and they gave a message which justified the rights of slave owners to manage property as they saw fit; a message which demanded obedience from the slaves, and a message which promoted the subjugation of women, Native Americans, and other peoples.

Long before the American Civil War, an ostensibly Christian religion arose which completely neglected the strong Christian injunction for social justice. In place of a message of social justice, this new Christian religion demanded: from the elite, money; and from the rest of society, obedience to the established order. To assist the church in supporting the established powers, the church also demanded two things from the faithful. First, the true believer must have an unquestioning faith in the religious teachings of their church, usually expressed as an unquestioning adherence to the Bible as most helpfully interpreted by that particular group, even if that unquestioning faith required one to suspend the willingness to reason and the ability to accept reality and facts. Second, morality became almost solely defined as sexual fidelity, augmented with an injunction for men to support their wives and children. In exchange for their unconditionaly obedience, the rich and powerful were exempt from both of these rules, or at least protected from their ramifications.

Gone were the strictures against greed. Gone were the obligations of the elites to ameliorate the plight of the least fortunate among them. Gone were demands that humanity be wise stewards of "God's" creation. Gone were injunctions to bring justice into the world, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to tend to the sick, to assist the widow, to protect the orphan, and to shelter the homeless. Gone were the stories of God's mercy and God's love for all of creation.

Using a theology of Social Darwinism, in which it is claimed that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful as a sign of God's blessing, the rich and powerful were seen as virtuous and deserving the riches which were showered upon them by a just God. In reality, nineteenth-century slave owners and robber barons became rich because they were corrupt and ruthless. They had the money to silence their critics of course, and to reward their flatterers.

North of the Mason-Dixon line, some (though not all) churches took a much different tack regarding slavery -- and theology. Unitarian, Congregational, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Quaker and Northern Baptist churches railed against the institution of slavery and the unethical conduct of the robber barons and slave traders. Some churches became involved in the underground railroad, and some religious leaders were threatened, beaten, and in at least one case nearly hung for their convictions.

This tremendous difference related at least partially to differences in emerging theology. Textual critism of the Bible had been around for some time, and other forms of criticism were beginning to crystallize, particularly among German theolgians, as the 1800's progressed. The scholarship that had begun to question the iron clad authority of the received texts hundreds of years before, reached the pew sitters in many denominations at last; and the broad outlines of social and economic justice began, for many Christians, to outweigh the specifics of texts that were increasingly proven to be faulty, error-ridden, and inaccurate.

Not so among the slave-holders. Ministers who were retrogressive on social justice issues, and strict fundamentalists as regarded the "authority" of scripture were hired, and the southern church began a descent into literalism from which it has yet to emerge.

The defeat of Southern troops in the Civil War was not enough to convince those who had rebelled that God did not smile on their theology. Rather, the system was updated to find legal and quasi-legal methods of subjugating the former slaves. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized the Black community. Black men and women, particularly those who became relatively successful, financially, or who became leaders in the Black community, were lynched with impunity. No white man in the former Confederacy was convicted of raping a black woman for the next hundred years. Well into the 1960s, white social activists working on behalf of people of color, as well as Black people, were murdered in the deep South. When northerners came south to work on behalf of people of color, doing simple things like registering them to vote, southerners, including those good God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians, virulently denounced the interlopers as "outside agitators."

In fact, it has often been said [with some accuracy, as has been proven repeatedly], that if you remove the hoods of enough KKK members, you will find a preacher. The regressive, fundamentalist religious organization that the slave holders had created for themselves outlasted the nation that they had established in rebellion against the United States, and -- together with the smaller "Christian" organizations that were formed, regardless of theological nuance, as structural and political clones to it, endure as a danger today.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of the fundamentalist churches, indeed the largest protestant church in America, had the redeeming feature of a focus on a revelatory relationship with God... So I might believe whatever I believed, and you might believe in whatever you believed - and God might have revealed himself to each of us. That doctrine together the basic autonomy of congregations to make decisions for themselves was finally leading to a liberalization of the denomination in the latter part of the 20th century -- until the early 1980s when the Convention was taken over by arch-conservative forces who wrapped themselves in the flag, in homophobia, and in "traditional values," whatever those are actually supposed to be.

Now, having reaffirmed their basic positions, far to the Right of most Americans and many of their own communicants, the Southern Baptists lead the pack of extremists who constitute the Christian Right. It is ironic, the rich and powerful exploiters have found allies in only a few sections of the American people: among racists, the most extreme male chauvinists, the religiously intolerant, the xenophobic, and, sadly, the mostly Bible-belt fundamentalist Christians who have long been conditioned to respond to the influence of money, and to define morality in terms of sexuality, and sexuality alone, ignoring the rich patina of social and economic justice.

Contrary to all of the teachings of their ostensible spiritual leader, Jesus of Nazareth, in their lust for temporal power, fundamentalist Christians allied themselves with the rich and powerful. In doing so, they forfeited every legitimate claim they ever possessed to moral authority. They also imperiled their immortal souls according to the book they venerated, for according to their supposedly infallible Bible, Jesus of Nazareth himself said,