by Bruce T. Gourley
Published October 2010
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)
Election day 2010 in America draws nigh, and Christians are angry and politicized. Representing 11% of Americans, the Tea Party movement, according to a recent survey by Public Religion Research Institute, is comprised primarily of Christians, most of whom self-identity with the “conservative Christian movement” and most of whom are Christian nationalists. This largely Christian political movement is comprised of persons who are mostly white males, while the coalition itself draws far more support from the South than any other region of the nation. Tea Partiers love Sarah Palin and are Republicans. Conversely, they despise Barack Obama and the Democratic party, and trust Fox News to tell them the truth. The Tea Party movement decries the federal government and voices allegiance to states’ rights. Bankrolled by billionaires, Tea Party participants are largely wealthy and affluent individuals.
Will Bunch, author of the newly-released The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, summarizes the Tea Party movement as “mainly rooted in a cultural revolution, whipped by winds of anxiety and fear — not just about the loss of so many middle-class jobs in America, but also about sweeping demographic and cultural change in America.” After spending a year interviewing Tea Party participants, Bunch concludes that the movement is about “preventing government by Barack Obama” and “preserving a culture.”
Are there any historical parallels to the twenty-first century Tea Party movement?
From 2002 to 2008, prior to the beginning of the Tea Party, I researched and wrote my dissertation focused on the subject of Baptists in Middle Georgia during the American Civil War (the dissertation is slated to be published in book form in 2011). As the Tea Party movement took root and unfolded in the spring of 2009, initially voiced in complaints of over-taxation, I soon could not help but note the striking parallels between the movement’s language and antebellum and Civil War-era discourse in the American South.
The rise of the Confederate States of America (CSA) was preceded by growing anger among white southerners who insisted they were bearing a greater tax burden than Americans in the North. Southern politicians in turn blamed the federal government for the unjust tax policies, and publicly argued that “states’ rights” took precedence over the federal government, a claim disputed by northern states. Amidst cries of unfair taxation and claims of states’ rights, the South’s white politicians and slaveholders (with much overlapping between the two) took an increasingly hard line stance on the right to own slaves (the southern economy, almost exclusively agricultural, was dependent upon slave labor) in the face of growing opposition to slavery in the North.
The trigger came in 1860, as the Republican Party, committed to restricting (but not, at that time, eliminating) slavery, won the presidency in the person of Abraham Lincoln. Southern white politicians derided Lincoln as the enemy who would free black slaves to wreck havoc upon the South. Following Lincoln’s election, many slaveholders in the South began agitating for secession from the United States of America. In February 1861 the Union dissolved, in the minds of white southerners, with the formation of the Confederate States of America. For the next four years, white southerners fought valiantly to defend their social, cultural, and racial identity, and preserve their “honor” – while claiming the moral mantle of America’s Revolutionary-era spirit.
By the time the Civil War began, white southern Christian leaders (Baptists not excepted) were firm (with some notable exceptions) advocates of black slavery and states’ rights. Indeed, the antebellum splintering of Christians North and South, including the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 (formed from a gathering of principally large, wealthy slaveholders), was in no small part the public positioning of white Christians in the South as firmly pro-slavery. From pulpits, many Christian ministers in the South echoed political calls for secession following Lincoln’s presidential victory. During the Civil War years, white southern Christian leaders often voiced support of slavery, framed freedom and religious liberty in terms of the rights of whites, and spoke of the CSA as God’s chosen nation to bring about His will for the human race on earth.
My research into Baptists in middle Georgia during the Civil War, however, revealed some interesting nuances. Many congregations did not respond to Baptist leaders’ calls to engage in Christian nationalist rhetoric. Some congregations, throughout the duration of the war, chose to offer no comment upon the conflict, while others routinely expressed support of the Confederacy. No two associations responded to the Confederacy in the same manner. Individual white Baptists often claimed freedom for themselves, not for blacks. And the Baptist commitment to religious liberty and separation of church and state suffered as many Baptist leaders strained their faith heritage to accommodate Christian nationalism.
In the end, southern white Christians (and the South at large) lost their war with the North, although for another century they used politics and violence to ensure that white supremacy retained control of southern culture and society.
Are there lessons to be learned from the antebellum and Civil War South? Perhaps. One might argue that the Tea Party movement is fighting the same political, cultural, and social battles that southerners of old fought. If so, however, the battleground is much different today. America over the years has become what our Baptist forefathers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought: a pluralistic nation founded upon a secular government that seeks to treat all citizens as equals and keeps religion and state apart. White, southern Christian nationalists may (yet) have one of the loudest voices in the current political, cultural, and social climate, but the future of America is ultimately rooted in the ethnic, racial, and religious diversity that is America of the twenty-first century.