CREATING A CHRISTIAN AMERICA: 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROTESTANT NATIONALISM IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA 

by BLAKE WILLIAMS 

Bachelor of Arts, 2006 

Texas Christian University

Introduction

The United States, for the better part of its history, existed as a “Protestant Christian” nation. The creation and cultivation of this distinction began in the seventeent century with the immigration of English and Dutch Protestants to the New World. In the New World, these Protestant groups founded and administered colonies in seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, the Atlantic seaboard provided a laboratory for Protestant groups to establish “Christian states . . . informed by . . . God’scontinued guidance over his nation.”

The distinction of the United States as “Protestant” shaped many Americans’ perception of the greatness of the country, which Louis Snyder described as “messianism.” This meant, according to Snyder, that Protestants viewed their country as the pinnacle of civilization capable of transforming not only the destiny of the New World but also the destiny of the world. From the colonial era through the national era, the belief in messianism united colonial Protestants behind a strong “Protestant nationalism,” or the belief that the nation’s strength and national character stem fromembracing, promoting and protecting the Protestant Christian values of the country.Protestant nationalism derived from two interacting beliefs. The first, that thestrength of the United States stems from Protestant Christianity and the racial traits ofAnglo-Saxon race (this point would not be emphasized until immigration issues in theearly nineteenth century). The second, in order for the United States to maintain thatgreatness, Protestantism needed to be monolithic and completely ingrained in the sociocultural landscape of the country. This belief transcended denominational lines, despite differences in theological and liturgical styles, fueling Protestantism to keep America

 The English Puritan establishment, which gained prominence in the New England colonies following the transfer of Dutch and Swedish lands to England by 1664, established their territories as “holy experiments” with the goal of creating a society so faithful and a church so pure that its light would shine and transform the world. Within the colonies, the process of achieving a Godly society meant there was no room for dissention—not from other faiths and not from those within the purview of the Puritan church. In every colony, laws, customs, liturgy, social constructs and government bodies were created by religious elements to promote a unified and pure Christian society. Christian (which to them meant Protestant) and to promote its expansion into all corners of society.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant nationalism drove many endeavors, including the desire to expand the borders of the country to the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed “Manifest Destiny” in 1839 by John O’ Sullivan, the expansion westward took on mythic status in American society, thanks in large part to the writings of prominent clergy like Lyman Beecher, father of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher-Stowe, and popular Americans like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. These works articulated the importance of American expansion as early as 1835 and shaped perceptions of the region as an “empire of mind, power and wealth” that would be a “glorious benefit” for the nation.

 The appeal to both religious and nationalist themes served western expansion well as manifest destiny gained widespread support by a majority of Americans. In the end, westward expansion, coupled with the social crusades against Mormons and Catholics, show that, despite the “secular” face of American society, the United States was, according to Richard Wolf, near “monolithic in its Protestant orientation and character.”

Beginning in the 1850s, the social and economic changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution weakened the Protestant grip on the country and, conversely, the strength of nationalist Protestantism. As society became more industrial and urban, moving away from the close-knit agrarian communities, Protestant churches failed in their duty to guide this transition. Instead, they remained inert and overly hostile to voices within their religious traditions calling for change. Eventually, the lack of action towards the socio-cultural changes in the industrial era created schisms in the major Protestant denominations (Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians). From the 1870s to the mid1880s, in fact, the gulf between those wanting to confront these changes and those that wanted to ignore them grew substantially eventually splitting denominations into “liberal” churches, which emphasized temporal salvation and an active clergy, and “conservatives,” who maintained the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and spiritual salvation.

In the years immediately following the Civil War, the divisions between Protestant groups deepened. By 1870, the nationalistic Protestantism that dominated the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century vanished. Yet the disconnect between society and the Protestant church would not last. In the late nineteenth century, Ohio Congregationalist Washington Gladden and New York Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch emerged to guide Protestantism back into the hearts of American society while pushing notions of Protestant nationalism into new directions.

In the 1880s, Gladden and Raushcenbusch articulated a theology that refocused colonial messianic nationalism in a nineteenth century context. These men argued that the United States had a special destiny to fulfill as the biblical “City on a Hill,” specifically that America was destined to usher in the kingdom of God.

 Yet social unrest, stemming from political and social clashes in many southern states, threatened America’s destiny. “City upon a Hill” is a phrase that derives from the “Salt and Light” metaphor found in the Gospel of Matthew, which calls the children of God to shine on the world and glorify the word of God for all. 

Not willing to give up on seeing the creation of a Christian America and the kingdom of God, Rauschenbusch, Gladden and their contemporaries articulated a national reform campaign based on “Christian obligations,” which emphasized that every Protestant had the duty to make the country more Godly and to emulate the good works of Jesus Christ to do so.

 In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Charles Sheldon popularized Christian obligation with the motto “What would Jesus do?” helping fuel the “Social Gospel” movement, which combined Christ emulation with a program of social reform and reconstruction aimed at Christianizing the country.

This new dynamic between faith and society and the programs of reform it would spawn proved popular amongst Americans as social reform swept from coast to coast.

 In fact, liberalism would supplant conservatism and its doctrines of predestination as the primary theological doctrine well into the twentieth century. In the end, the push for social reform and the establishment of the Kingdom of God reignited a nationalistic commitment to the Protestant faith that would last through World War I.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant nationalism became an influential part in shaping the American experience at almost every level of society. Despite the appearance of a nationalistic Protestantism in everything from nineteenth and twentieth century Matt. 5.13-15 KJV (King James Version). In the American context, John Winthrop, governor and leader of the Massachusetts Bay Company, referenced the biblical term in a 1630 sermon he gave on route to their new home in the New World. In his famous invocation he pronounced that the new colony would be “a City upon a Hill” watched by world. Since Winthrop’s time, the term “City on a Hill” defined a special meaning for the birth, growth, and success of America as the preeminent country on earth. In the nineteenth century, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch used the term to give an eschatological meaning to their vision of social reform. social reform to early twentieth century internationalism, scholarship defining and discussing, explicitly, Protestant nationalism is lacking. In fact, with the exception of Warren L. Vinz’s Pulpit Politics: Faces American Protestant Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (1997), Louis Snyder’s Varieties of Nationalism (1976), and Russell B. Nye’s The Almost Chosen People (1966), few works even give a name to Protestant nationalism.

What does exist and what ultimately influences the study of American Protestantism, are works that examine the broad concepts of Protestantism in America. In general, this type of scholarship populates the field of American Protestant history and holds many luminaries as Martin E. Marty, Sidney E. Mead, H. Richard Niebuhr, Robert T. Handy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Randall Balmer and Lauren F. Winner.

 Each one of these historians offers insightful looks into Protestantism including theology social relevance, political significance and general histories on the development of Protestantism in the United States.

Scholarship on American Protestantism also exists in the form of regional studies. Works on Northern and Eastern Protestantism represent the most oft-studied areas of Protestantism in America with Willem A. Visser ‘T Hooft, Charles Howard Hopkins and Martin E. Marty devoting countless pages describing the emergence and importance of the various socio-religious movements, including liberal theology and Social Gospel. Charles Howard Hopkins’ The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism,1865-1915 (1940) in particular offers insightful looks at society in the northeast and, in great detail, explains the path of the social gospel from a placid ideology to a dynamic source of social reform. 

Scholars of Southern and Western Protestantism, likewise, offer detailed insights into the dynamics of Protestantism. Works by Southern religious historians C. Vann Woodward, Glenn Feldman, Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald Mathews offer excellent insights into the relationship between faith and society and how that dynamic defined the social and racial structure in the South. Similarly, Ferenc Morton Szasz, Sarah Barringer Gordon, and other Western historians examine how Protestantism shaped and defined relationships between non-Protestant groups, like Mormons, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants and Catholics. More importantly though, these historians analyze how eastern Protestantism shaped and influenced development of the West, ultimately bringing the region into line with the rest of the country.

Combining these various approaches to studying American Protestantism, this work will show that behind the movements of reform, expansion, exclusion and discrimination lays a very specific goal of nineteenth century Protestants—the creation of a Christian America. More importantly, it will show that driving the Protestant quest for a Christian America is a salient and potent Protestant nationalism that united the mainline (and dominant) Protestant groups in a common desire to protect and promote that idea. In order to accomplish this task, it is important to trace the development of nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant nationalism, including the environment in which it developed and the various forms it took after the Civil War. 

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https://repository.tcu.edu/bitstream/handle/116099117/4115/williams_blake.pdf?sequence=1

Bored with Sunday Service? Maybe Nudist Church Is Your Thing
Or even mass from the comfort of your driver's seat. No matter your lifestyle, there’s a way for you to convene with God in America.

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM IS A HOME GROWN RELIGION WITH NO LINK TO EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITY
AND IT IS BASED ON THE BARNUM AND BAILEY AMERICANISM; THERE IS A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE 

PHOTOGRAPH: CYRIL ABAD
Visitors take a photo with an actor dressed as Jesus at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida.

A nudist church in Virginia where the pastor delivers sermons in his birthday suit. A drive-in church in Florida where parishioners can attend services from the comfort of their cars. A 500-foot-long, “Biblically accurate” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. These wild and woolly corners of American Christianity are the focal points of French photographer Cyril Abad’s series In God We Trust.


While some two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as Christians, a declining number identify with any specific sect. In 2000, half of Americans belonged to a Protestant denomination; today, that number is down to 30 percent. Many of the rest—one in six Americans—consider themselves nondenominational. These unaffiliated worshippers are the ones targeted by the proliferating number of alternative churches and Christian recreational sites captured by Abad.

“Churches have adopted free-market principles to open up new niches in spiritual beliefs,” Abad says. “If you’re a surfer, there’s a church for Christian surfers. If you’re a biker, there’s a church for bikers. I’m less interested in big megachurches and more interested in these small churches designed to appeal to specific tribes.”

Abad sees these churches as a distinctly American phenomenon; there is no comparable phenomenon in France, he says. He spent almost a year researching churches and Christian-themed attractions all over America before settling on the seven included in the series, which he visited over the course of three visits to the US in 2017 and 2018. The most difficult to get permission to photograph was the Virginia nudist church; to make the parishioners more comfortable, Abad took off his own clothes while taking the photographs.

The series can certainly be funny, particularly the images of the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, a Biblical amusement park featuring a re-creation of ancient Jerusalem and daily reenactments of Jesus’s crucifixion. But Abad insists he doesn’t intend to ridicule the people who visit such attractions. “That’s why I don’t show people crying in the Holy Land Experience—I always show them from the back,” he says.

For Abad, the photographs are part of a longstanding interest in the sociology of religion. “I want people to be amused, but after that to be challenged and start asking deeper questions,” he says. Mocking is easy. Empathy—and understanding—are the hard part.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NUDIST

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAKED

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CHRISTIANITY


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AMERICAN+PROTESTANTISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NOAHS+ARK

 AMERIKA

In 1844, Nativist Protestants Burned Churches in

 the Name of Religious Liberty

News at Home
tags: immigration, political violence, religious history, Nativism, American Religion, `


by Zachary M. Schrag

Zachary M. Schrag is Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of the forthcoming books The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press) and The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation (Pegasus Books).

A mob burns St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Philadelphia, 1844, from John B. Perry A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia

 

 

Former U.S. senator Rick Santorum has deservedly lost his position at CNN for his April speech in which he described all of Native American culture as “nothing.” But he made that remark in service to an equally suspect claim: that America “was born of the people who came here pursuing religious liberty to practice their faith, to live as they ought to live and have the freedom to do so. Religious liberty.” Contrary to Santorum’s rosy picture, many of the English settlers of what is now the east coast of the United States were as devoted to denying religious liberty to others as they were to securing their own ability to worship as they pleased. And as a committed Catholic, Santorum should know that for many Protestants, “religious liberty” meant attacking the Catholic Church.

 

The first English monarchs to back colonization hoped to contain Catholic expansion with what historian Carla Gardina Pestana calls “a Protestant empire.” While some colonies persecuted dissenters—whipping Baptists and Quakers—most tolerated varieties of Protestantism. But the settlers often drew the line at Catholicism. Each November, colonists celebrated “Pope’s Day” by lighting bonfires, firing cannon, and marching effigies of the pontiff through the streets, all to celebrate their common Protestant identity. Colonial governments outlawed Catholic priests, threatening them with life imprisonment or death. Even Maryland, founded in part as a Catholic haven, eventually restricted Catholic worship.

 

The Revolution—secured with the help of Catholic Spain and France, as well as that of many American Catholics—toned down some of the most vicious anti-Catholicism. Most American Protestants learned to respect and live with their Catholic neighbors. But while the United States Constitution forbade the establishment of religion or religious tests for office, individual states continued to privilege Protestantism. Some limited office holding to Protestants, declared Protestantism the official religion, and, most commonly, assigned the King James Bible in public schools, over the objections of Catholics.

 

Political anti-Catholicism gained new adherents in the 1830s, in response to both Catholic Emancipation in the British Empire and increased Irish Catholic immigration to the United States. In 1835, New York’s Protestant Association debated the question, “Is Popery compatible with civil liberty?” In 1840, a popular Protestant pastor warned that “It has been the favourite policy of popish priests to represent Romanism as a harmless thing.” “If they ever succeed in making this impression general,” he continued, “we may well tremble for the liberties of our country. It is a startling truth that popery and civil and religious liberty cannot flourish on the same soil; popery is death to both!”

 

Such beliefs led anti-Catholics to attack Catholic institutions as alien intruders. In August 1834, a mob burned down the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, acting in the conviction the they were protecting American liberty against an institution that “‘ought not to be allow[e]d in a free country.’’ Five years later, a Baltimore mob threatened a convent there with a similar fate. As Irish immigrants filled both the pews and pulpits of American Catholic churches, such anti-Catholicism merged with a nativist movement that hoped to restrict immigration and make naturalization difficult.

 

The most sustained attack against Catholics came in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1844. Inspired by the success of a third-party nativist candidate in New York City’s mayoral election, Philadelphia nativists staged their own rallies throughout the city and its surrounding districts. In May, rallies in the largely Irish Catholic Third Ward of Kensington sparked three days of rioting. On the third day, nativist mobs burned two Catholic churches, along with the adjacent rectories and a seminary. Outside of one church, they built a bonfire of Bibles and other sacred texts, and cheered when the cross atop the church’s steeple collapsed in flame. In a nearby Catholic orphan asylum, the superioress wondered how she could evacuate nearly a hundred children if the mob attacked. “They have sworn vengeance against all the churches and their institutions,” she wrote. “We have every reason to expect the same fate.”

 

In the aftermath of the May riots, a priest in the heavily nativist district of Southwark resolved to prepare his church against future attacks. Along with his brother, he organized parishioners into a security force, armed with a collection of weapons ranging from surplus military muskets to bayonets stuck on brush handles. When, in July, the church’s neighbors realized the extent of his preparations, they concluded that the Catholics were planning to murder their Protestant neighbors in their sleep. Mobbing the church, they launched a second wave of riots, and even bombarded the church with a stolen cannon. Eventually, the county’s militia arrived in force and fired into the crowd. By the time the fighting was over, two dozen Americans were dead, and the nation was in shock.

 

Throughout all of this, leading nativists insisted that they tolerated all religions. “We do not interfere with any man’s religious creed or religious liberty,” asserted one. “A man may be a Turk, a Jew or a Christian, a Catholic, Methodist or a Presbyterian, and we say nothing against it, but accord to all a liberty of conscience.” He then immediately revealed the limits of his tolerance: “When we remember that our Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth rock, to establish the Protestant religion, free from persecution, we must contend that this was and always will be a Protestant country!” That second sentiment—the insistence that the country truly belonged to members of one creed—explains the fury of the mob.

 

The same cramped view of religious liberty echoes in Santorum’s speech. As a Catholic, Santorum unsurprisingly identifies America with “the morals and teachings of Jesus Christ,” rather than only Protestantism. He also calls the United States “a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles,” letting Jews halfway into his club. But any effort to privilege some religions over others reminds us that purported advocates of tolerance may be religious supremacists under the skin. Pursuing religious liberty for one’s own kind is only the beginning of freedom. Securing liberty to all is the true achievement.

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
Poll: Religious Americans less worried about climate change
By LUIS ANDRES HENAO

Storm clouds approach a church in Mequon, Wis., on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020. A new Pew Research Center report published Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022 explores how religion in the U.S. intersects with views on the environment and climate change. 

(AP Photo/Morry Gash)


NEW YORK (AP) — Most adults in the United States – including a large majority of Christians and people who identify with other religions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it.

AMERICAN PROTESTANT CHRISTIANS

But highly religious Americans – those who pray daily, regularly attend religious services and consider religion crucial in their lives -- are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about global warming.

Those are among the key findings in a comprehensive report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 10,156 U.S. adults from April 11 to April 17. It’s margin of error for the full sample of respondents is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.

The survey says religious Americans tend to be less concerned about climate change for several reasons.

“First and foremost is politics: The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion,” the report says.

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
“Highly religious Americans are more inclined than others to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and Republicans tend to be much less likely than Democrats to believe human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) is warming the Earth or to consider climate change a serious problem.”

Responding to the findings, the Rev. Richenda Fairhurst, steward of climate at the non-profit Circle Faith Future, said the siloed culture in America sows further division instead of inspiring teamwork.

“I don’t know who that serves,” she said. “But it’s not serving the community — and it’s certainly not serving the planet.”

The poll found that about three-quarters (74%) of religiously affiliated Americans say the Earth is sacred. A larger share, (80%), feel a sense of stewardship -- and fully or mostly agree with the idea that “God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, including the plants and animals.”

Religious Americans who show little or no concern about climate change also say “there are much bigger problems in the world, that God is in control of the climate, and that they do not believe the climate is actually changing.”

Many religious Americans are also concerned about the potential consequences of environmental regulations, including the loss of individual freedoms, fewer jobs or increased energy prices, the report says.

The survey also found that two-thirds of U.S. adults who are religiously affiliated say their faith’s scriptures include lessons about the environment, and about four-in-ten say they’ve prayed for the environment in the past year.

The views, the report says, are common across a range of religious traditions.

CHRISTIANITY IS ONE RELIGION REGARDLESS OF THE NUMBER OF SECTS

Three-quarters of both evangelical Protestants and members of historically Black Protestant churches say the Bible includes lessons about the environment. Eight in ten U.S. Catholics and mainline Protestants say the Earth is sacred and so do 77% of non-Christian religions, according to the poll.

But Christians, and more broadly, religiously affiliated Americans, are divided in their views about climate change, the report says.

Those who consider climate change “an extremely or very serious problem” range from 68% of adults who identify with the historically Black Protestant tradition, to 34% of evangelical Protestants.

In none of the major Protestant traditions did a majority say the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity; only 32% of evangelicals felt that way.

The report says the religiously unaffiliated -- the fastest-growing group in surveys asking Americans about their religious identity – are much more likely to say that climate change is an extreme or very serious problem (70%) than religiously affiliated Americans (52%).

Commonly known as the “nones,” they describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.” The report says they are far more likely to say the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human-induced activity (66%) than those who are religiously affiliated (47%).

The survey offers clues as to why religious Americans are less likely to care about climate change than those with no religion despite seeing a link between their beliefs and caring for the environment:

• For U.S. congregations, climate change doesn’t seem to be a major focus. The report says that among all U.S. adults who attend religious services at least once or twice per month, only 8% say they “hear a great deal or quite a bit about climate change in sermons.”

• One in five say they hear some discussion of the topic from the pulpit.

• And just 6% of American congregants say they talk about climate change with other people at their congregation a great deal or quite a bit.

Highly religious Americans are also less likely to view inefficient energy practices as morally wrong, the report says. This same pattern is also seen when asked about eating food that takes a lot of energy to produce.

The Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest, and executive director of GreenFaith, a global multi-faith environmental organization based in New York, said he was not surprised by the findings since he doesn’t see culturally and politically conservative Americans prioritizing climate action.

“What this study doesn’t tell us, though, is the role that religion, when utilized effectively, can play in moving people who are concerned but inactive into public action on the climate’s behalf,” Harper said. “This warrants further research so that we can all understand better what positive role religion can play in the fight against climate change.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

OPINION

Bishop Budde went viral because she showed us what's wrong with American religion

(RNS) — The sermon reminded many Americans what public religious faith looked like in the not-so-distant past, when the Episcopal Church was the de facto faith of the American ruling class.

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, center, passes President Donald Trump while processing into a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Katherine Kelaidis
January 31, 2025


(RNS) — In the week since Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., delivered a sermon at the National Prayer Service the day following President Trump’s inauguration (Jan. 21), the impact of Budde’s plea to the president to show mercy to immigrants and LGBTQ+ Americans continues to make news.

Pastors across the country read the bishop’s words from the pulpit last Sunday, even nonreligious Americans (and Orthodox Christian like me) have been praising Budde and the Episcopal Church has reported an uptick in curious newcomers and returning members. Meanwhile, a House resolution condemning Budde’s sermon has been gathering support among Republican members of Congress.

Few have asked, however, why Budde’s sermon made such an impression. For Christians, it held up an alternative to the one hawked by the Christian nationalists now holding the levers of power. But it also reminded many Americans what public religious faith looked like in America’s not-so-distant past, when the Episcopal Church — once known as “the Republican Party at prayer” — was the de facto faith of the American ruling class.

The Anglican tradition came to American shores with the English colonists (the Church of England’s first American church was built in Jamestown in 1607), as the state church of the British crown, which proved a serious liability after the American Revolution. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade the establishment of any religion and government interference in religious life, a radical step both then and now.

RELATED: After eyebrow-raising sermon to Trump, Bishop Budde beset with criticism and praise

The results were radical indeed: In the Second Great Awakening (1795-1835) the newly christened Episcopal Protestant Church struggled to adapt to America’s democratic and entrepreneurial religious landscape. The Holiness, Restoration and Adventist movements all took shape in this period, as did the uniquely political character of American evangelicalism, which began to enlist the power of the state to control public morality.

Amid this fruitful chaos, the Episcopal Church slowly found its way by the middle of the 19th century. Though Methodists and Baptists were more numerous and preachers of other traditions more famous, the Episcopal Church secured its position as the faith of America’s ruling class and the public face of America’s civic Christianity.


President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, left, attend a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, Jan. 21, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Flexible, moderate and reformable, it was a faith for a democratic nation, defined by progress and change, and not incidentally it presented a theological and liturgical “via media” between Protestant rulers and an increasingly Catholic populace. Though America would never have an established church, the fact that the nation was gathered at the Washington National Cathedral (an Episcopal cathedral) for the post-inaugural prayer service is a legacy of this history.

The emergence of the religious right beginning in the 1960s changed all that. The product of social changes of the mid-20th century, the religious right owes its existence as much to Southern evangelical rage at the Civil Rights Movement as it does to conservative Catholic anger at the Second Vatican Council. The alliance of old enemies still prospers by invoking common fears.

But the religious right was also an implicit attack on the character of America’s civil religion, seeking to conform its shape to evangelical Protestantism and its theology to Catholic integralism, an international movement that advocates for the establishment of what are in essence Catholic theocracies. The religious right’s greatest success, on which all its other success has relied, has been in replacing the moderate, adaptable and tolerant theology of mainline Christianity with this idiosyncratic version of evangelicalism, advancing, as the political right has, less on Christian love than in exploiting intolerance and bigotry.

The results have been disastrous, paving the way to a triumph of white Christian nationalism.

On the other side — the liberal, secular, Democratic side — there is a strange fantasy that the negative influence of these extreme-right religionists can be somehow pressured out of the public square through the separation of church and state promised by the establishment clause. This group seems to hope that slash-and-burn anti-religiosity will somehow guarantee that religion plays no role in the decision-making of voters.

RELATED: Empathy for immigrants sounds like Christianity 101. Here’s why some say it’s a sin.

Quite simply, this is not going to happen. France, with its tradition of “laïcité,” has come closest to achieving this model, but as France has become more multicultural, the limits of laïcité have been exposed as never before. In most European countries, secularization has been achieved not by pushing religion out, but by establishing it. As much as progressives may hate to hear it, established churches in Europe have provided a moderating check on religious belief and expression. American religion has grown so radical in part because there is no standard to which it can be held.

Of course, an established church is inconceivable in the American tradition, but this effect of established churches in Europe should be an important cue for those concerned about the American dilemma.

For a better part of American history, including America’s most prosperous and progressive period, the Episcopal Church filled this role. Extremists could not triumph as long as that standard was visible and credible. This is why after Budde’s sermon, Christian nationalists of all stripes, evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, were so vitriolic in their attacks on the Episcopal Church. An empowered, visible and public Episcopal Church is a genuine threat to their power and the means they’ve used to seize it.


(Katherine Kelaidis, a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England, is the author of “Holy Russia? Holy War?” and the forthcoming “The Fourth Reformation.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Donald J. Trump Is Not a Member of the KKK—But He Sure Sounds Like One

For Trump there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism.


Jeffrey C. Isaac
May 12, 2026

Common Dreams


“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic.” —President Donald Trump, greeting British King Charles on April 28, 2026.

“The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address are descendants of the Magna Charta— supreme symbols of Anglo-Saxon souls striving for freedom, justice, and humanity. Anglo-Saxons established this Nation, wrote its code, and sent their sons into the wilderness to gather fresh stars for the flag. . . . The making of America is fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon achievement. Anglo-Saxons brains have guided the course of the Republic. Our ideals are Anglo-Saxon, our social traditions, our standards of honor, our quality of imagination, and our indomitability.” —from “Americans Take Heed! Scum O’ The Melting Pot,” a 1921 KKK pamphlet.


Donald Trump’s most recent contribution to his year-long “America 250” celebration was truly bizarre, with British King Charles somehow serving as a symbol of the heritage for which the American Revolution was fought. That Trump simultaneously posted a photo of the two leaders, under the heading “Two Kings,” only added to the weirdness. But, as Jonathan Chait has noted, along with many others, accompanying the weirdness was something dark and dangerous—the idea that the US is an “Anglo Saxon” nation, and that the idea of “freedom” announced in the Declaration of Independence is a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant idea that is “alien” to “alien” peoples and cultures.

It was thus interesting that on the same day that he feted King Charles with encomiums to their common Anglo-Saxon heritage, Trump also announced his new “America 250” commemorative passport, featuring on one side an enormous drawing of his head against the background of the Declaration, and on the other the famous John Turnbull painting of the Continental Congress. Trump’s Kim Jong Un impression notwithstanding, it is entirely fitting that he would commemorate his “America 250” vision with a passport, for the policing of borders, long with the massive campaign of immigrant kidnapping, AKA/detention, and deportation, are the hallmarks of his administration.

Trump made this commitment clear while speaking at the Republican National Convention and accepting the party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2024, reiterating what he has been saying for well over a decade:
The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I, you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.


The Trump administration’s violent and sometimes murderous assaults on Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and especially Minneapolis, began only months ago and continue still, even if in less obtrusive ways. Mass deportation is simply one element of a much broader attack on refugees and immigrants. Last November, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced a total ban on reviewing asylum applications. Common Dreams reports that “Not a single refugee who isn’t a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report.” Meanwhile, Trump continues to disparage Somalia, its people, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in viciously racist ways, recently doubling down on his vile 2018 comment:
Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.


For Trump, there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism. It sometimes seems as if he is single-handedly trying to validate the most radical versions of the “critical race theories” that he hates, personifying a past, and present, of exultant White supremacy.

Trump is hardly the first White supremacist to occupy the White House. And yet, in a sense, his every move confirms what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed back in 2017, in labeling him “The First White President.” “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power,” Coates argued. “In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”

While Trump has many ideological predecessors—George Wallace springs immediately to mind—one has to go back an entire century, and to a perhaps unexpected place, to locate a public figure who so powerfully conjoins racism and xenophobia.

Back in May of 1926, the North American Review--founded by Boston Brahmin intellectuals in 1815, and widely considered the first significant literary magazine published in the US—featured just such a figure: Hiram Wesley Evans, the Vanderbilt University-educated author of a substantial, 30-page essay entitled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” Evans was an up and coming public figure seeking to promote the restoration of American Greatness. He was also the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). And his essay, described by the editors as an “authoritative paper on the Ku Klux Klan by the foremost representative of that Order,” inaugurated a symposium featuring essays by four “writers of national authority”: Martin J. Scott, S.J.; Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple Emmanu-el, New York; W. E. Burghart Du Bois, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and William Starr Myers, Professor of Politics, Princeton University.

It may seem surprising that such an eminent journal would feature a serious symposium on the KKK centered on a substantial essay by its “Imperial Wizard and Emperor.” But indeed, the KKK—boosted by the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” whose legendary ending featured the glorious rescue of vulnerable Whites by heroic Klansmen on horseback—had just experienced a rebirth under the leadership of William J. Simmons. Simmons was a vicious racist. He was also a patriot, and he dedicated his organization to the “sublime principles of a pure Americanism,” and declaring that “[T]he Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy.”

As Linda Gordon notes in her 2017 classic, The Second Coming of the KKK, by the 1920’s the Klan was a nationally important organization whose reach extended far beyond the South and claimed between 4 to 6 million members. More important: “the 1920’s Klan’s program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920’s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries.” Over the course of the decade, it elected governors in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas., and exerted influence in a range of other states from Ohio and Michigan to New York.

The organization was particularly strong in Indiana, where in the mid-1920’s it claimed both the state’s governor and a majority of both houses of the General Assembly. Gordon indeed opens her book by describing a 1923 Fourth of July Klan celebration that attracted thousands of supporters in Kokomo, Indiana, and which featured a speech by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. The speech—entitled not “Why We Hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews” but rather “Back to the Constitution”—declared: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. . . The American Revolution was fought for principles of self-government…then embodied in a federal constitution the like of which man never seen, are sacred now as they were then.”)

By 1923, Hiram Wesley Evans had been named Imperial Wizard of the Klan, supplanting Simmons and initiating a campaign to raise the profile and advance the political influence of the Klan. “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” was, in effect, his vision statement. And its parallels with the rhetoric of Trump’s MAGA movement are chilling.

Evans begins by noting that while in 1915 the nation was “in the confusion of sudden awakening from the lovely dream of the melting pot, disorganized and helpless before the invasion of aliens and alien ideas. After ten years of the Klan, it is in arms for defense . . . ” The Klan, he insists, is dedicated above all to “the idea of preserving and developing America first and chiefly for the benefit of the children of the pioneers who made America, and only and definitely along the lines of the purpose and spirit of those pioneers.”

According to Evans, the Klan hates no one, and simply seeks to protect the American homeland from invaders who threaten true Americans: “We are a protest movement—protesting against being robbed . . . our great cities . . . taken over by strangers . . . the Nordic American is today a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.”

And while Evans denounces the alien hordes, he also blames “liberals” (also referred to as “Mongrelized liberals”) for the civilizational crisis at hand, insisting that liberalism “provided no defense against the alien invasion, but instead has excused it—even defended it against Americanism. Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial, and spiritual treason.”

As America is being besieged by enemies without and within, he insists that “the Klan alone faces the invader . . . the Klan is the champion, but it is not merely an organization. It is an idea, a faith, a purpose, an organized crusade,” one that indeed has “won the leadership in the movement for Americanism.” Standing firmly “against radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds,” Evans insists that the Klan alone stands for American Greatness without apologies: “We believe, in short, that we have the right to make America American and for Americans.”

The anticipations of Trump here are striking.

Trump does not explicitly denounce Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Blacks in the manner of Evans and his turn of the 20th century Klansmen, nor does he invoke the language of “Nordic” racial superiority in the manner of Evans, who praises “the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestantism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are condensed into the Klan slogan: ‘Native, white, Protestant supremacy.’”

And yet, minus the reference to “instincts of loyalty to the white race,” it is easy to imagine Trump speaking in much the same way. The distinction between real, Anglo-Saxon Americans and aliens; the contempt for people of color; the obsession with stemming a literal alien invasion; the representation of liberals and radicals as traitors to the nation—these are the core themes of Trumpism.

Trump does not wear a white robe and pointy white hat, or claim to be a Grand Wizard, or burn crosses, or talk of Nordic racial superiority. He does display a remarkable solicitude for tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis, Confederate battle flag carriers, violent Three Percenters, and Proud Boy insurrectionists.

But Trump is no Klansman. He is the twice-elected President of the United States. And yet his defensive, xenophobic, and frankly reactionary vision of “Americanism” bears a striking resemblance to the vision put forward a century ago by the Klan—a group whose ideology was, and is, closer to the center of American politics than we might like to believe.


Contributor’s note: I would like to thank Robert Orsi and Bob Ivie for their comments on this piece.



Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jeffrey C. Isaac
Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include: "Democracy in Dark Times"(1998); "The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline" (2003), and "Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion" (1994).
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BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Interview

The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition Recognized Fascism Didn’t Begin in Europe

Black anti-fascists have long warned about creeping fascism, from slavery to mass incarceration to ICE terror.

By George Yancy ,

Truthout

February 21, 2026

Prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility give the Black Power salute on September 10, 1971. “I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists,” says scholar Jeanelle K. Hope. “The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.”

Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images

Back in 2016, I was asked what I thought about Donald Trump. Even back then, I saw him as an aspiring fascist, and I responded:

Simply put. He is a conduit through which white America expresses its most vile desire for white purity. An apocalyptically dangerous white man who sees himself as the center of the world. That kind of hubris bespeaks realities of genocide.

Trump 2.0 has only confirmed my fears, my dread, and my anger. Make no mistake about it: This administration is unapologetically and shamelessly hellbent on establishing a violent white fascistic state. I know that some are surprised, but the truth of the matter is that the horrible reality of anti-Black fascism is not a new formation. The soul of this country was founded upon white power, white greed, and white violence. So, I am not surprised by the likes of Trump; he is a product of a vicious poison, a historical legacy, that predates his abominable presidency. But this isn’t mere speculation or exaggeration. Our bodies and psyches are a record of this history: chains, enslavement, dehumanization, scarred backs, raped bodies, castrated bodies, broken necks, broken family ties, denied rights, denied citizenship, mass incarceration, and slow death. Indeed, there are those Black voices who not only recorded this history, but who understood its fascistic logics. For example, Black poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote:

Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.

And it was Black sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote, “We have conquered Germany … but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place.”

Amid Trump’s War on Antifa, Activists Face Arrest for Zines and Group Chats
The Trump administration now has zine distributors and jail support efforts in its sights.
By Brit “Red” Schulte , Truthout January 10, 2026

Thinking about the reality of anti-Black fascism led me to the indispensable work of Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. When it comes to documenting anti-Black fascism, they trace a longer arc with respect to the rise of fascism; they show just how European fascists drew from early U.S. laws for their own specific fascist formations, and how the U.S. functioned as the very hub of fascist discourse and practice. Given this rich history and its importance for how to strategize moving forward, I conducted this exclusive interview with Jeanelle K. Hope, who is an independent scholar and a lecturer at the University of California-Washington Center.

George Yancy: It is important to historically situate the phenomenon of fascism, especially within our contemporary context where the Constitution is being trampled upon, and what one might call the paramilitary deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Your book, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, which you co-authored with Bill V. Mullen, powerfully challenges the narrative that fascism is a phenomenon that is exclusive to 20th-century Europe. In this regard, your book constitutes a necessary counter-narrative that highlights the gratuitous violent history that Black people in the U.S. have faced since their enslavement. This counter-narrative is what you term the Black anti-fascist tradition. In brief, what are some of the features that define the Black anti-fascist tradition?

Jeanelle K. Hope: The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that there has been a long arc of fascism throughout history, and that anti-Blackness has long undergirded fascist policies and formations, thus, disrupting prevailing historical narratives and theorizing on fascism. We argue that the earliest roots (or pillars) of fascism — authoritarian rule, genocide and ethnic cleansing, militarism, racial capitalism, dual application of the law — can be traced to the colonization of Africa and chattel slavery across the Americas. One of the most salient and defining features of anti-Black fascism is genocide. We chart out the systematic genocide of Black people from the brutality of enslavement, post-emancipation lynchings, to state-sanctioned violence and police brutality. Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors and Red Record, W.E.B. Du Bois’s lynching reports in The Crisis, William Patterson’s petition to the United Nations entitled, “We Charge Genocide,” and Arlene Eisen’s 2012 report “Operation Ghetto Storm” all meticulously document the impact of lynchings and the immiseration of Black life. And with such damming evidence in hand, they argued that such acts constitute genocide. Indeed, “We Charge Genocide” emerges as a cross-generation rallying cry among Black anti-fascists like Patterson, Stokely Carmichael, and the Chicago-based youth group aptly named “We Charge Genocide.”

Beyond presenting this counter-narrative, so much of our book also names how Black people have been on the front lines of anti-fascist struggles in Europe (the Spanish Civil War), Ethiopia (the Italian invasion of Ethiopia), and across the United States. Moreover, the Black anti-fascist tradition underscores that fascism attacks on multiple fronts (i.e., art and cultural production, education, immigration, law and policy, health care, housing, etc.) and subsequently, requires a multifaceted resistance. Black anti-fascists have incorporated various organizing strategies, tactics, and actions including legal challenges, mutual aid, anarchy, autonomy, self-defense, boycotts, solidarity, and abolition.

What I think is an important takeaway from the Black anti-fascist tradition is knowing that Black people have long warned about what I describe as fascism’s incessant creep. Fascism is not born overnight. It is relentless and creeps through society, systems, laws, and more over time. Black anti-fascists have played the long game, trying to check the creep of fascism at every turn, knowing that if left unchecked, humanity will enter some truly dark days.

In your book, you write, “By the time the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini began to theorize racial purity and Aryan identity politics, discussing race in this quasi-biological sense in the U.S. was old news.” This is such an important observation as it places anti-Black racism at the very core of the foundation of this nation. Talk about the centrality of “racial purity” and how that myth shaped the U.S., and how it continues to do so. And here I’m thinking about Trump’s disgusting use of the expression “shithole countries” and his encouragement of immigrants from Norway.

Recognizing that race/racism/racial hierarchy are at the very foundation of colonial rule, it is of no surprise that race is also at the crux of fascism. From the onset, the history of the United States is marked by colonialism, and race almost immediately emerges as a system of domination to subordinate Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans brought to the country. This racial hierarchy had/has significant economic and social implications. With Black, Brown, and Indigenous people viewed as subordinate, the belief of white supremacy and white domination in the western hemisphere was fomented. Up until the early 20th century (and some would even argue still today), great lengths (i.e. anti-miscegenation laws, racial integrity laws, racial purity tests, etc.) were undertaken to ensure a rigid racial hierarchy. The mere existence of interracial relationships and mixed-race people has long served as a threat to this system, blurring the racial binary, and forcing society and governments to have deeper questions about “who is white,” and thus, gets to benefit from this system of domination.

Moreover, throughout U.S. history, this “gatekeeping” or protectionism of the white race shows up countless times from anti-immigration laws (i.e., the Chinese Exclusion Act), Jim Crow laws, the eugenics movement, and recent discourse around the “Great Replacement” theory. These efforts have largely (and unsuccessfully) sought to stymie influxes of non-white immigration, non-white births, and interracial relationships. It is also important to name that the constant pursuit of white racial purity is fundamentally tied to patriarchy, natalism and the regulation of women’s bodies, hence the recent rollbacks on abortion access and reproductive health care.

I was aware of Adolf Hitler’s admiration for the U.S.’s racial segregationist practices and its eugenics movement, but your argument delineates in detail that European fascism “had its roots in American Anti-Black Fascism.” This is a significant charge against the U.S.’s view of itself as “innocent,” and as a “shining city on a hill.” Indeed, it is this understanding of the U.S. that is necessary as we currently confront fascism in this country. You write, “Seldom have historians drawn connections between the Nuremberg Laws, Italian Racial Laws, and Jim Crow Laws of the US.” What is it about certain historians that they have failed or refused to make such a significant connection? I would even say such a significant indictment.

Naming that U.S. racial policies effectively served a blueprint for the various legal systems of European fascism would disrupt a decades-long historical narrative surrounding WWI and WWII. The story of the “Axis vs. the Allies,” and the United States’ role in defeating fascism has long been the prevailing historical narrative taken up by historians. I think there is at times a failure among historians to step back, read across archives, and to stitch multiple historical events together. We also must be honest that there has been a concerted effort among both politicians and historians to preserve a liberal or redeeming narrative surrounding the United States’ role in WWII. For example, it took decades for mainstream American history to finally recognize that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war was heinous. Yet some would still draw the line at comparing those “internment camps” to Nazi concentration camps. But it is that type of comparison that is direly needed to be able to understand the impact and evolution of fascism across time and space. We must also connect the current ICE detention centers to this broader history as well.

Finally, I think one of the biggest issues among historians, and even many leftist activists, is the aversion to name any formation of fascism outside of interwar Europe as fascism. For far too long, many have believed that Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist rise was like capturing lightning in a bottle, when fascism has long existed beyond the confines of early 20th-century European history. From a deeply human standpoint I understand why one would want to believe that the atrocities of the Holocaust and Nazism could not be replicated. Yet, Black anti-fascists have long rang the proverbial alarm about the incessant creeping nature of fascism and its onslaught on Black life. Furthermore, to ignore or discount the claims of Black people like Robert F. Williams, Harry Haywood, George Jackson — among a host of others that have named fascism as the greatest threat to Black people (and all people) just because they don’t neatly fit within longstanding scholarly traditions on historical fascism — to me, is ahistorical.

I agree! Talk about how contemporary forms of abolitionist discourse and activism are linked to the Black anti-fascist tradition. I think that such a link is so important as it communicates the historical arc of Black people who continue to refuse fascism.

I believe the connection between abolition and Black anti-fascism is crystallized in the writings and activism of political prisoners and prison abolitionists starting with George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Kathleen Cleaver, and later in the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez, among others. Many of the Black political prisoners of the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the most vocal in naming that America was engaging in fascism, arguing that prisons and the rise of mass incarceration amounted to the latest evolution of fascism’s incessant creep on society. They recognized that prisons helped facilitate systematic genocide and was buttressed by a criminal justice and legal system that openly practiced a dual application of the law, whereby Black people were subjected to different interpretations of the law and harsher sentences, among other injustices. I think about Ericka Huggins’s letters from Niantic prison where she describes their poor conditions, the inhumane nature of solitary confinement, and the unjust way many Black Panther Party members, and other radicals of the era, were largely swept into prisons on trumped-up charges. I even think of those early pages of Assata Shakur’s autobiography (Assata: An Autobiography) where she describes the guards of the prison in which she was incarcerated giving Nazi salutes to each other. The Attica prison uprising of 1971 stands as a major inflection point in this history.

Prison abolitionists have long connected American prisons to the long arc of fascism, arguing that they are so deeply entrenched in fascism that they are beyond reform, concluding that abolition is the only solution. These arguments, of course, are most fervently explored in Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and the work of Critical Resistance. It is from Davis and Critical Resistance’s work that more contemporary abolitionists descend. Thus, it is of no surprise that during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, calls to abolish the police emerged, and with the current wave of mass deportations and practice of “crimmigration,” there are calls to abolish ICE. The Black anti-fascist tradition recognizes that the incarceration of Black people has long been tied to the fascist pillar of genocide, thus, any reproduction of incarceration — be it ICE detention centers or Japanese internment camps — will always be part of a broader fascist project. The harrowing reports of ICE detention center conditions and deaths is the latest harbinger of fascism’s incessant creep.

Given the specificity of how Black people in the U.S. have been brutalized and dehumanized in terms of anti-Black fascist logics, talk about what strategies have emerged out of Black struggles for countering and resisting (I want to say overthrowing) U.S. fascism. On this topic, I often feel a great deal of pessimism. Yet I agree with Robin D. G. Kelly where he said to me, “There is no guarantee that we will win — whatever that means — but I guarantee that if we don’t fight, we lose.”

To feel pessimistic under the boot of fascism is only natural, and a feeling that is important to sit with. To draw upon the words of Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, I think we also must work through that pessimism and “let this [moment] radicalize you.” Earlier in the interview, I highlighted some of the major organizing tactics, strategies, and actions that animate the Black anti-fascist tradition, so I’ll use this space to stress some more practical forms of resistance for this moment. First and foremost, we all must begin the resistance to fascism through organizing and studying.

Remember, fascism attacks on all fronts, so we must develop a strategy that recognizes this and can be adapted in various spaces. Fascist policies are dismantling public education before our eyes. Parents and teachers must organize at the school district level to resist book bans and anti-ethnic studies bills. And even more so, parents must see “school choice” and “school vouchers” for what they are — the privatization of public schools. This is anti-democratic.

Fascism will quite literally starve its constituents. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of mutual aid in a moment where unemployment is increasing, particularly amongst Black women, and the federal government has slashed the budgets of many social safety-net programs, like SNAP. As fascism seeks to further divide society, we must remember to take care of those in our communities.

While there have been several boycotts and protests over the last 13 months, I do think there is much we can learn from European citizens that have mounted national strikes in response to government austerity. Overall, there is much that can be done to organize workers, as fascism’s grip on capitalism will have disproportionate impacts on the worker — as we are currently witnessing.

And most importantly, one of the most significant efforts we can do to resist fascism is to build solidarity. Solidarity is crucial to resisting fascism as it spurs organizations and mass movements. Solidarity is built through relationships, shared struggle, and deep communication with one another. While this work may seem ancillary, it will prove to be our most challenging, as fascism (and predatory social media algorithms) has fractured so many communities. Fascism thrives on division (racial, economic, national, political, gender, age, etc.), so one of the most important ways to resist it is to close those divides through respect and mutual cooperation.

CRT/DEI

Interview

A New Era of Scholarship Is Shining a Light on the Black Philosophical Tradition

Without this history, students may see Black thinkers as footnotes rather than world-historical contributors.

By George Yancy ,

Truthout

February 18, 2026

From left to right: Philosophers Hubert Harrison, Thomas N. Baker, 

and C. L. R. James.

Given the field of philosophy’s paucity of Black or African American philosophers, it is still something of an oxymoron to be a Black or African American philosopher. It is still possible to get second looks when saying, “Oh, I’m a philosopher.” Being a Black or African American philosopher doesn’t compute within a culture, and within academic settings, where images and discussions of Socrates and Plato or René Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre dominate what philosophy looks and sounds like. In short, white folk continue to comprise the majority in the field: 81 percent. While most of my philosophical work has focused on the meaning of racial embodiment, especially anti-Blackness, and the structure of whiteness, I had the fortune to write and publish the first (or certainly one of the first) essays on African American philosophers Thomas N. Baker and Joyce M. Cook.

Baker was the first Black man to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy, awarded from Yale in 1903. And it was Cook, a dear friend of mine, who was the first Black woman to receive her Ph.D. in philosophy, also from Yale, in 1965. There is serious work that still needs to be done toward the construction of African American philosophy and primary research within the field. The work is out there — but it requires far more, as it were, archeological study. Many celebrate the history of Black Studies and the canonical figures within it, but have little sense of the existence and powerful work of African American philosophers — which is not to say that these areas are mutually exclusive.

It is for this reason that I decided to conduct this exclusive interview with philosopher Stephen C. Ferguson, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University and author of the recent book, The Paralysis of Analysis in African American Studies: Corporate Capitalism and Black Popular Culture. Ferguson is one of the leading philosophers (along with John H. McClendon) whose scholarship has been invaluable in researching, locating, and critically interpreting the history and contemporary relevance of African American philosophy.

George Yancy: When I was an undergraduate studying philosophy in the early 1980s at the University of Pittsburgh, I thought that I was the only Black philosopher in the world. This was partly a function of the fact that I was typically the only Black student sitting in my philosophy classes. I had no idea that there was something called “African American philosophy.” Let’s begin there. What is African American philosophy?

Stephen C. Ferguson: A useful place to begin is with a minimal but clarifying definition. African American philosophy refers, first, to a body of texts written by African American thinkers who themselves understood their work as philosophical. This challenges a long-standing presumption within professional philosophy — that philosophy is defined exclusively by disciplinary recognition rather than by intellectual practice.

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Here the work of Black philosopher and theologian William R. Jones is indispensable. In his seminal essay, “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” Jones argued that skepticism toward African American philosophy often rests on a mistaken assumption: that race must function as its essential organizing principle. Subsequently, Jones insisted that African American philosophy is not grounded in biology or some sort of “racial essence.” As he put it, “Black experience, history, and culture are the controlling categories of a Black philosophy — not chromosomes.” In this formulation, “Black” denotes an ethno-cultural formation shaped by shared historical conditions.

This does not mean that questions of race are irrelevant. The philosophy of race is an important subfield within African American philosophy. The mistake lies in assuming that it exhausts the field.

Jones therefore urged that philosophy itself be understood more broadly than narrow professional definitions allow. He proposed attending to factors such as author, audience, historical location, and antagonist. From this standpoint, African American philosophy recognizes the philosopher as situated within a specific ethno-cultural community, often addressing that community as a primary audience. Their philosophical point of departure is a historically specific experience requiring conceptual articulation, frequently from an antagonistic position that challenges academic racism in terms of concepts, curricula, and institutions.

Underlying this account is a distinction between race and ethnicity — or more precisely, between race as a classificatory system imposed through domination and ethnicity or nationality as a historically formed collective shaped by shared institutions and struggle. In the U.S. context, African Americans constitute such a distinctive ethno-national formation — forged through slavery, segregation, labor exploitation, and political resistance within a multinational state.

Following Jones, I also draw an analytic distinction between the history of African American philosophers and the philosophy of the Black experience. The former includes all African American philosophers regardless of topic or method. The latter refers to philosophical projects explicitly devoted to analyzing the meaning and consequences of Black life under determinate social conditions. As the number of African American philosophers grows, so too does the range of philosophical problems addressed — many extending well beyond race as a topic.

As an undergraduate, I knew that Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, and others were activists, but no one told me that they were philosophers or that what they had to say was of philosophical significance. The only person who shared this with me was my mentor James G. Spady. Speak to how important it is that this history be told.

I had a similar experience as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Philosophy appeared almost entirely detached from Black intellectual life. That changed when I met John H. McClendon III. From that point forward, McClendon and I — very much in the spirit of Marx and Engels — worked collectively to recover and reconstruct the African American philosophical tradition.

One of the most important outcomes of our collaboration is African American Philosophers and Philosophy: An Introduction to the History, Concepts, and Contemporary Issues. The work was the result of years of philosophical reading and archival research. What distinguished that book was not simply that it introduced African American philosophers, but that it introduced philosophy itself through the African American philosophical tradition. Before this, African American thinkers were often treated as supplementary figures or “special” topics. Or we might find, in the case of African American philosopher Charles Leander Hill, someone who writes a history of modern Western philosophy. With A Short History of Modern Philosophy from the Renaissance to Hegel, published in 1951, Hill became the first African American philosopher to publish a book on the history of modern philosophy. No one had seriously asked how to introduce philosophy — its core problems and methods — through African American thought. That intervention remains foundational.

This matters because it challenges the assumption that figures such as Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, or Angela Davis were merely activists. What our work demonstrates is that Black thinkers have produced sustained philosophical reflection on what are often called the “big questions”: metaphilosophy, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and social philosophy. Even when these questions were not framed explicitly in racial terms, the Black experience formed the historical context of their inquiry.

“Examining Ethics” podcaster Christiane Wisehart once described John and me as “philosophical archaeologists,” and that description is apt. Our work represents a first step in the discovery, recovery, and reconstruction of an African American philosophical canon. We do not claim to have completed that task. The hope is that future generations will build upon this foundation, extending the canon we helped recover.


“Historically, Black philosophical traditions emerged less from philosophy departments than from Black intellectual culture — churches, newspapers, political movements, labor struggles, and independent study.”

African American philosophy is best understood as a species of Black intellectual thought. Historically, Black philosophical traditions emerged less from philosophy departments than from Black intellectual culture — churches, newspapers, political movements, labor struggles, and independent study. This does not sever African American philosophy from European or Anglo-American traditions; it gives it a determinate identity shaped by distinct historical conditions. Without this history, students are left believing Black thinkers are philosophical footnotes rather than world-historical contributors.

In your article, “Marxism, Philosophy, and the Africana World,” you argue that the professionalization of philosophy is rooted in institutional racism. Even as a graduate student in philosophy, at Yale and Duquesne University, I was confronted by a sea of white faces. This continues to be true now that I’m a professional philosopher. Say more about how the professionalization of philosophy is rooted in institutional racism. This issue is especially important as we now face executive and legislative policies designed to erase Black knowledge production. Think here of the March 27, 2025, executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which is aimed at censoring the full truth about the struggle of Black people in the U.S. This executive order, it seems to me, is another manifestation of racism.

To address this adequately, we must begin from a dialectical materialist standpoint and situate professional philosophy within the historical development of the modern university. Specialization and professionalization were not neutral intellectual advances; they were foundational to the university’s role within capitalist society. The specialization of knowledge led to the emergence of academic disciplines; authority shifted from broad intellectual engagement to credentialed expertise. This process established boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate inquiry.

Certain ideas and figures become hegemonic — what Marx famously described as the ruling ideas of the ruling class — while others are disqualified as philosophy and displaced from the academic marketplace. Marxism, for example, is routinely declared a historic failure or an intellectual dinosaur, even as every waking hour of social life under capitalism is organized around the urgent task of making capitalism function.

The exclusion of African American thinkers from academic institutions must be understood through class location and the organization of labor in the United States. From capitalist slavery to sharecropping, and later industrial wage labor and mass unemployment, African Americans were denied the material conditions — time, security, and institutional continuity — necessary for a stable philosophical intelligentsia. Religious institutions therefore functioned as alternative sites of education and abstraction, much as they did for other oppressed groups within the U.S. multinational state.


“The exclusion of African American thinkers from academic institutions must be understood through class location and the organization of labor in the United States.”

The autodidact materialist philosopher Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” exemplifies this contradiction. He produced systematic philosophical lectures such as “World Problems of Race” and works such as When Africa Awakes, yet was denied recognition precisely because his philosophy was embedded in Black working-class political culture rather than professional philosophy.

Dialectical analysis requires us to go further. Even when partial inclusion occurred, new constraints emerged. There remain “ruling ideas” that restrict what African American philosophy is permitted to be — shaping not only who is recognized as a philosopher, but which questions can be asked without professional penalty.

If we examine African American political philosophy across the long Cold War — from the 1950s to the present — a striking pattern emerges. Many African American philosophers aligned themselves with variants of social contract theory — a framework historically used to legitimate bourgeois democracy. From William Fontaine to Bernard Boxill to Charles Mills, one finds a persistent commitment to anti-communist liberalism — often “radicalized,” but liberalism nonetheless. Structural critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and class power are often displaced in favor of moral critique or legal reform. This has been very evident during the Reign of Emperor Trump.

The irony is profound. African American philosophers are often presented as ruthless critics of racism and white supremacy, yet the dominant theoretical orientation has largely avoided questions about the compatibility of capitalism with Black liberation, or the material limits of liberal (bourgeois) democracy.

August Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards’s work The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution is instructive. It offers a real-time comparison of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass during the struggle to abolish slavery. Marx’s and Engels’s writings on the U.S. Civil War reveal abolition not simply as a moral triumph, but as a world-historical rupture between competing social systems: capitalist slavery and industrial capitalism.

By placing Douglass’s liberalism alongside Marx’s scientific socialism, Nimtz and Edwards show that while liberalism was powerful in mobilizing moral outrage, Marxism offered a deeper structural explanation of why capitalist slavery had to be abolished. It was not the fulfillment of liberal democracy, but a contradictory breakthrough that generated new forms of labor exploitation.

The point is not to denigrate Douglass, but to clarify (via philosophical interpretation) the theoretical stakes. Liberalism and Marxism offer fundamentally different diagnoses of power and social change. To remain within liberalism is to risk mistaking reform for revolution.

You’re a Marxist-Leninist philosopher and an African American philosopher. Talk about the complexity of your identity. What does Marxist-Leninist philosophy have to teach African American philosophy and vice versa?

As a good dialectician, I have to point out that the question presumes a distinction that I do not accept. It assumes that Marxist-Leninist philosophy and African American philosophy are identities to be reconciled. My own formation suggests a different starting point.

I grew up in a Black working-class community in the Midwest, raised by parents whose political sensibilities were shaped by the Black Power movement. That environment formed my social consciousness long before I had a philosophical vocabulary. As a young ravenous reader, I consumed whatever was available — Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Dickens’s Hard Times and Great Expectations, Langston Hughes, Luke Cage comics, popular history, and political biography — until encountering The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which became a moment of nationalist awakening. That awakening unfolded against the backdrop of deindustrialization, urban decay, and the hollowing out of working-class life in the 1980s and 1990s. The racial character of that devastation was obvious, but so too was its class content. So, my philosophical journey became understanding the class character of racism and national oppression, its roots in world capitalism. This required me to read Marx’s politico-economic works, particularly Das Kapital; Vladimir Lenin’s text, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism; and Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. I should add I read C. L. R. James’s masterpiece Black Jacobins in high school.

There is no neat progression “from race to class,” no linear movement from identity to politics. My racial and class consciousness emerged together, forged by the same historical conditions. I became who I was because I am a product of my time. This is precisely the point Marx makes when he reminds us that philosophers do not emerge fully formed from abstract reflection, but from material life itself:


Philosophers do not spring up like mushrooms out of the ground; they are products of their time, of their nation, whose most subtle, valuable and invisible juices flow in the ideas of philosophy. The same spirit that constructs railways with the hands of workers, constructs philosophical systems in the brains of philosophers. Philosophy does not exist outside the world, any more than the brain exists outside man…

My Marxist-Leninist orientation, then, was not an identity choice layered onto an already-formed Blackness. Blackness shaped my motivation; dialectical and historical materialism shaped my method of investigation. That distinction has guided my work ever since.

As I was coming of age philosophically, I intensively read Black philosophers debating whether philosophy could be meaningfully adjoined to Blackness. Against William Banner’s insistence that philosophy must transcend Blackness, Roy D. Morrison (among others) posed a deeper challenge: whether Enlightenment reason itself could be reconstituted from the standpoint of Black historical experience — a project that reads as a prolegomenon to any future Black Enlightenment. Those debates raised a fundamental question: Is Blackness a philosophical perspective, or is it an object of philosophical investigation?

Here Black Studies becomes decisive. Its relationship to the philosophy of the Black experience is analogous to that between physics and the philosophy of physics. Black Studies created the intellectual space in which Blackness could be studied systematically as a material and historical phenomenon rather than treated as a deviation from an assumed universal norm. Philosophy is a critical tool among others for conceptual clarification, critique, and synthesis. It is therefore no accident that early work in the philosophy of the Black experience appeared first in Black Studies venues rather than in philosophy journals, which were far slower to recognize Black life as a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry.

It was through my engagement with Black Studies that I came to understand the limits of bourgeois democracy. And yet, professional philosophy treats bourgeois democracy as the natural — and often the only — horizon of political legitimacy. Among many African American philosophers, this assumption largely goes unchallenged. Questions about justice, rights, and citizenship are routinely framed within liberal constitutionalism, while alternative democratic traditions and historical experiences are left unexplored. Where, for example, are the sustained philosophical engagements with democracy in Cuba, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, or the Soviet Union? What might these experiences teach us about popular sovereignty, collective decision-making, and mass participation beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy?

This silence reflects the long Cold War repression of socialist political thought. It is therefore telling that figures such as Marxist philosopher C. L. R. James remain marginal within contemporary philosophy curricula. James’s Every Cook Can Govern, a profound meditation on democracy from ancient Greece to modern socialism, should be central to any serious discussion of democratic theory.

As McClendon put it succinctly, Blackness provides the motivation for doing philosophy, not the philosophical orientation. I take that formulation seriously. Marxism-Leninism offers African American philosophy the analytic tools to examine capitalism, imperialism, and the state as material systems shaping Black life. The relationship, then, is not one of identity complexity or reconciliation, but of theoretical necessity.

As African American philosophers, we must do more to get African American students to pursue the field professionally. What strategy do you suggest?

Any serious strategy must begin with an honest reckoning with the history of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and its attendant academic racism.

This was already clear in 1974, when Jones issued concrete recommendations to the APA: placement services, rosters of Black philosophers, surveys of philosophy at Black institutions, graduate fellowships, colloquia on Black philosophy, curriculum development, and the upgrading of philosophy at Black colleges. Since that time, the philosophical landscape has not moved beyond the horizon Jones set. Incremental progress has occurred, yet the overall number of African American philosophers has remained low.

We can no longer wait for professional philosophy to magically deliver Black students into the discipline. We must build our own institutional infrastructure — connected to the academy but not dependent on its permission, promises, or resources.


“Our struggle is an intergenerational relay race: We inherit unfinished questions and are accountable for carrying them forward. No one is coming to do this work for us. The future belongs to those who build.”

Changes in professional philosophy will come through institution-building and long-term strategy, not spontaneity. We must create layered spaces of intellectual formation — archival recovery, collective study, political education, and intergenerational mentorship — inside and outside the academy. Only through institution-building will we sustain a Black philosophical community that revisits core problems at increasing levels of rigor over time.

Forward ever, backward never!

In a moment when Black Studies and ethnic studies face sustained political attack, building independent yet affiliated philosophical infrastructure is not separatism; it is institutional realism.

Our strategy cannot rest on persuasion alone; persuasion presumes institutions are willing to act. History suggests otherwise. What is required is construction. Our struggle is an intergenerational relay race: We inherit unfinished questions and are accountable for carrying them forward. No one is coming to do this work for us. The future belongs to those who build.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

Clementine Barnabet: The Black woman blamed for serial murders in the Jim Crow South

A grainy photograph of Clementine Barnabet.

A 1912 edition of The Atlanta Constitution newspaper via Wikimedia Commons Lauren Nicole Henley, University of Richmond

The Conversation

February 19, 2026

In April 1912, a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to murdering four families in and around Lafayette, Louisiana. The widespread news coverage at the time effectively branded her a serial killer.

Her confession, however, did not align with the timeline of crimes that had gripped America’s rice belt region with fear. Even today, her guilt is debated.

From November 1909 until August 1912, an unknown assailant – or assailants – zigzagged across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Many Black families were slaughtered in their homes under the cover of darkness. An ax – the telltale weapon – was almost always found in the bloody aftermath.

All but one of the scenes were located within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. In each case, a mother and child were always among the victims. Evidence of additional weapons was often found nearby, suggesting a deliberate cruelty to the carnage.

Dubbed the “axman”, the unknown assailant eluded the authorities and terrified local Black communities.

Today, when scholars and laypeople alike discuss Clementine Barnabet, they oscillate between two extremes: portraying her as a fear-inducing, cult-leading Black female serial killer, or as an innocent young Black woman caught in circumstances beyond her control.

In more than a decade of researching Clementine Barnabet, I’ve been struck by how print media created overtly sensationalized accounts of the mythology of the axman and, by extension, the axwoman. Whether Barnabet committed the crimes she said she did – or any of the axman murders, for that matter – is irrelevant to the primary motive the media constructed for her fatal violence: religion.

Diverse faith traditions

In Jim Crow Louisiana, various expressions of faith were possible. The state’s history as a French colony – one that also practiced slavery – meant it was home to the largest percentage of Black Catholics in the United States.

At the same time, religions like Voodoo, that originated in West Africa, reached the region on slave ships. Voodoo was not necessarily at odds with Catholicism; enslaved practitioners creatively adapted their ancestral faith to that of their enslavers.

Some displays of faith were not organized religions at all, but folkways. Hoodoo, for example, has West African origins, though it also draws upon European and Native American elements. Hoodoo practitioners – sometimes called doctors – and their clients often practice a religion, yet they also seek comfort in the supernatural possibilities of their craft.

This craft involves the physical manipulation of earthly elements such as graveyard dirt or plants like John the Conqueror root to achieve magical ends, often resulting in conjures – or ritual objects – needed to bring about desired goals. Conjures are believed to help people protect themselves, harm one’s adversaries, alter one’s circumstances, intervene in one’s relationships and more.

In their most powerful form, believers contend that conjures can bring about a person’s death.

For some believers, elements of Catholicism, Voodoo, Protestantism and hoodoo combine into syncretic faith practices. Incorporating multiple systems of beliefs has been an aspect of many Louisianans’ identities for generations. Most of the time, this blending of practices, ideologies and communities is depicted as a quirky – even “backward” – way to make sense of the world.

Yet during the axman’s reign in the early 1900s, a Black woman’s confession to murder was interpreted through the lens of religious deviance rather than diversity.

A timeline of events

When Barnabet confessed in April 1912, it was technically the second time she had done so. The first time was in November 1911 in the aftermath of the Randall family murder. Five members of the Randall family and their overnight guest had been brutally slaughtered in Lafayette, Louisiana at the end of the month.

According to regional newspapers, Barnabet was in the crowd that had gathered near the Randall family’s home after the murders were discovered. Reportedly, she caught the attention of the local sheriff. Not only did she live near the slain, but, according to a New Orleans daily, the authorities found “her room saturated with blood and covered with human brains.”

Barnabet was given a “third degree” examination – meaning she was tortured – by the New Orleans Police Department, and then supposedly confessed that she had killed the Randalls because, according to a Midwestern newspaper, they “disobeyed the orders of the church.” That church would become a topic of scrutiny and sensationalism by regional lawmen and news outlets alike throughout much of 1912.

At that time, Barnabet is also said to have confessed to killing another family in Lafayette.

Thus, Barnabet had already been in jail for over four months before her springtime confession. Between January and March 1912, four more families had been axed to death between Crowley, Louisiana and Glidden, Texas. In April, when Barnabet re-confessed, she added two more families to her victim roster.

In aggregate, the four families Barnabet confessed to killing had been slain between November 1909 and November 1911. Four more families had been murdered between her arrest and second confession, meaning she was in jail when they occurred. After her second confession and while she was still in custody, another three families were attacked with an ax, though for the first time, people survived the axman.

This convoluted timeline, in which more than half of the axman murders occurred after Barnabet had been apprehended, presented a challenge for investigators. They generally believed the crimes were related. Yet Barnabet could not have physically carried out the attacks in 1912.

To explain the continuation of the killings despite Barnabet’s incarceration, local lawmen leveraged the young woman’s own statements that had landed her in jail in the first place: that religion compelled her to murder.

It was this November 1911 confession that gave investigators the motive of religious fanaticism to attach to the axman crimes. Then, in January 1912, when the Broussards – another Black family – were murdered with an ax in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the local police found a Bible verse scrawled on their front door. This overtly religious symbol appeared roughly two months after Barnabet’s first confession and seemed to confirm her claims.

By April 1912, the idea of religiously motivated serial murder had been circulating in the rice belt region for months.

Hoodoo, conjures, and sensationalism

Barnabet’s confession was transcribed by R. H. Broussard (no relation to the victims), a newspaper reporter for the “New Orleans Item,” in April 1912.

According to the report, Barnabet claimed that she and four friends purchased conjures from a local hoodoo doctor one evening while socializing. They paid the practitioner for his services. Supposedly, the group then used the charms to move about undetected while committing murder.

In both her November 1911 and April 1912 confessions, Barnabet offered faith-based motives, albeit different ones. In the first case, it was the victims who reportedly erred in their religious duties. In the second, it was Barnabet’s own belief in hoodoo that facilitated such carnage. White media outlets did not interpret either of these statements as evidence of the region’s deep history of diverse faith expressions.

Instead, they labeled Barnabet “a black borgia,” “the directing head of a fanatical cult,” and the “Priestess of [a] Colored Human Sacrifice Cult.”

Moreover, sensationalized news coverage labeled the church Barnabet mentioned as the “Sacrifice Church.” Not surprisingly, the press depicted it as a cult-like organization, portraying Barnabet as either a low-level member or the “high priestess.” Sometimes, news reports also conflated the Sacrifice Church with Voodoo, thereby criminalizing a legitimate West African-derived religion as a cult.

According to unsubstantiated media accounts, the so-called Sacrifice Church promoted human sacrifice to gain immortality. Simultaneously, newspapers treated the conjure Barnabet possessed as proof of her fanaticism, reporting her claim that the only reason she confessed was because she had lost her charm.

Combined these selective – and sensational – interpretations of Barnabet’s supposed religious beliefs ignored the possibility of diverse spiritual practices that enriched life in the rice belt region.

Jim Crow and Black faith

I have yet to find evidence the Sacrifice Church existed. My research suggests the white press conflated the word “sacrifice” with the word “sanctified.” This might have been due, in part, to both sensationalism and ignorance.

Pentecostalism, a branch of evangelical Christianity that emphasizes baptism by the Holy Spirit and direct communication from God, started growing in popularity in the U.S. in the early 1900s. Many Pentecostal denominations call their adherents saints and their churches sanctified. Since sanctified churches were relatively new to Louisiana and some Pentecostal teachings – like speaking in tongues – challenged more mainstream Protestant doctrine, Pentecostalism might have contributed to the media’s reporting.

Although the Sacrifice Church may have simply been a linguistic error in reference to any number of sanctified churches in the rice belt, it is possible that Barnabet did indeed possess a conjure. The hoodoo doctor she accused of selling her and her comrades their charms was arrested and questioned by the Lafayette authorities. The statements he gave to the police aligned with hoodoo practices even as he denied knowing Barnabet or being involved in such folkways.

Given the variety of faith practices in Jim Crow Louisiana, it is possible both that Barnabet believed in her conjure and that sanctified churches were growing in popularity in the region. Whether she ever attended one is hard to know, just as the legitimacy of either confession is difficult to determine.

What is clear is that faith anchored the statements Barnabet made to the authorities. The other anchor, however, was murder. The consequences of how these events aligned reverberate in how Barnabet has been depicted.

Barnbet was front-page news in 1912. People knew her name, even as they debated her guilt. When she was convicted of murder, she was sentenced to life at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. A little over a decade later, she was released and disappeared from public view.

Today, however, no Black female serial killer occupies a similar place in America’s collective memory.

In recent years, there have been calls for a more serious acceptance of Black women’s experiences, knowledge and beliefs within the dominant culture. This shift also invites, I believe, a fresh look at Barnabet’s confessions and the crimes that were attributed to her.

Lauren Nicole Henley, Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pharaohs in Dixieland: How 19th-century America reimagined Egypt to justify slavery

Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images Charles Vanthournout, Université de Lorraine

The Conversation

February 19, 2026 

When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture.

At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans often viewed their country as an heir to the great civilizations of the past. The tales of ancient Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels became a source of fascination to Americans, though in different ways.

In the slaveholding South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African Americans, biblical Egypt served as a symbol of bondage and liberation.

As a historian, I study how 19th-century Americans – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used ancient Egypt to debate questions of race, civilization and national identity. My research traces how a distorted image of ancient Egypt shaped competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided nation.

Egypt inspires the pro-slavery South

In 1819, when lawyer John Overton, military officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson founded a city in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the ancient Egyptian capital.

While promoting the new city, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran alongside it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”

“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.

In the region’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, saw the promise of an agricultural empire built on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”

There was a reason pro-slavery businessmen and thinkers were energized by the prospect of an American Egypt: Many Southern planters imagined themselves as guardians of a hierarchical and aristocratic system, one grounded in landownership, tradition and honor. As Alabama newspaper editor William Falconer put it, he and his fellow white Southerners belonged to a race that “had established law, order and government over the earth.”

To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a great hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a special legitimacy. And just like the pharaohs, the white elites of the South saw themselves as the stewards of a prosperous society sustained by enslaved labor.

Leading pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina lawyer and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia lawyer and politician Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt as an example to follow.

“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”

A distorted view of history

But their view of history didn’t exactly square with reality. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt, but most slaves had been originally captured as prisoners of war.

The country never developed a system of slavery comparable to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude was neither race-based nor tied to a plantation economy. The mistaken notion that Egypt’s great monuments were built by slaves largely stems from ancient authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, popular culture – especially Hollywood epics – would continue to advance this misconception.

Nonetheless, 19th-century Southern intellectuals drew on this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an ancient and divinely sanctioned institution.

Even after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, nostalgia for these myths of ancient Egypt endured. In the 1870s, former Confederate officer Edward Fontaine noted how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”

Turning Egypt white

But to claim their place among the world’s great civilizations, Southerners had to reconcile a troubling fact: Egypt was located in Africa, the ancestral land of those enslaved in the U.S.

In response, an intellectual movement called the American School of Ethnology – which promoted the idea that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – set out to “whiten” Egypt.

In a series of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization dominated by whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as proof of the greatness that a slave society could achieve. And they also promoted a scientifically discredited theory called “polygenesis,” which argued that Black people did not descend from the Bible’s Adam, but from some other source.

Richard Colfax, the author of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Most mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German study of Egyptian skulls, to reinforce this view. Writing in the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, he explained how the German study had concluded that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton’s “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1844 study of Egyptian skulls, reinforced this view. He argued that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, noted the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, Morton established “the Negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and physician and propagandist John H. Van Evrie formed an effective triumvirate: Through press releases and public lectures featuring the skulls of mummies, they turned Egyptology into a tool of pro-slavery propaganda.

“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, adding that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”

Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to both “prove” Black inferiority and advance the idea that their beloved African civilization was populated by a white Egyptian elite.

“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”

Denouncing America’s pharaohs

This distorted vision of Egypt, however, wasn’t the only one to take hold in the U.S., and abolitionists saw this history through a decidedly different lens.

In the Bible, Egypt occupies a central place, mentioned repeatedly as a land of refuge – notably for Joseph – but also as a nation of idolatry and as the cradle of slavery.

The episode of the Exodus is perhaps the most famous reference. The Hebrews, enslaved under an oppressive pharaoh, are freed by Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical image of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply shaped 19th-century moral and political debates: For many abolitionists, it represented the ultimate symbol of tyranny and human oppression.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Black people could be heard singing in front of the White House, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”

Black Americans seized upon this biblical parallel. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a contemporary pharaoh, with Moses still the prophet of liberation.

African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth also invoked Egypt as a tool of emancipation.

“In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that the same principle lives in us.”

Yet the South’s infatuation with Egypt shows how antiquity can always be recast to serve the powerful. And it’s a reminder that the past is far from neutral terrain – that there is rarely, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over history and memory.

This article has been updated to correctly attribute Samuel George Morton as the author of “Crania Aegyptiaca,” not as the author of the Charleston Medical Journal article. Quoted texts from Phillis Wheatley and William Falconer have also been slightly amended for accuracy.

Charles Vanthournout, Ph.D. Student in Ancient History, Université de Lorraine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.