Quotes from Andrew Himes

From my limited and immature child's point of view, Heaven was therefore populated almost exclusively by white people who lived in the United States of America, along with the original disciples of Jesus, an uncalculated number of genuine Christians who had lived throughout the ages, and many but not all of those mentioned in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which I first read at the age of eight when I found it on my parents' book shelf.

Influenced by Wesley and the revival movement, Englishman William Wilberforce led the successful movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.

Charles G. Finney, known as "America's foremost revivalist," was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders.

Combined with aggressive assaults on the Republicans during the 1871 campaign, Democratic clubs and groups of Klansmen aimed violence at black communities across the state in order to scare those voters away from the polls.

Another volunteer Negro soldier named Scott Thomas reported that he had been owned by John Rice, probably also a son of Dangerfield Rice, brother of James Porter Rice, and uncle of my great-grandfather Will Rice.

Billy Graham's success in finding a way to move beyond the outmoded racial politics and strained racial theology of the Old South would be a model for the rise of the Religious Right and its leaders, including Jerry Falwell in the 1980s and 90s.

Slavery proved to be a much more complicated issue for American evangelicals both North and South, who discovered that their religious attitudes and interpretations were colored by their economic interests. This pattern was played out in the history of the Rice family, whose evangelical theology underwent a transformation as they moved within two generations from being small yeoman farmers to landed proprietors whose wealth depended upon the system of chattel slavery.

Charles Spurgeon was a fierce opponent of social injustice, especially slavery, and joined other evangelicals in crusades to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, especially for children.

The supreme being of the Deists could be apprehended by practical investigation and the use of reason to understand natural laws. Religious faith was not needed, nor were miracles, divine inspiration, or personal revelations of God's spirit.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

A deep strain of anti-Semitism ran through the teachings and sermons of many fundamentalist leaders such as Ham and William Bell Riley.

American foreign policy and social policy for decades. Christian fundamentalism in America has its roots in the history of the South after the end of the Civil War.

In one such book, provocatively titled "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers," Rice explained that God had commanded women never to cut their hair, that God intended women to be subordinate to their husbands, and that women should never pastor churches.[‡‡‡‡]

M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressed his belief that Hitler's moves against German Jews were unfortunately necessary because they had used their strengths "for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people," and he charged that "since the war some 200,000 Jews from Russia and other Eastern places had come to Germany. Most of these were Communist agitators against the government.

Rice would carry that burden for saving lost souls for the rest of his life, and it was driven by genuinely heartfelt compassion based on a powerful rationale: if sinners were going to burn in the literal flames of a materially real eternal fire unless they accepted the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, then any sensible, empathetic, and responsible person would devote all of his life to saving non-Christians from their God-ordained fate.

The revival movement was responsible for a tremendous spread of Christianity among slaves in the South. Slaves came in their thousands to camp meetings organized mainly by Baptists and Methodists, where they listened to the same sermons, succumbed to the same transports of emotion, and pledged themselves to the same spiritual renewal as white revivalists. At times white slave owners were known to undergo conversion at a revival meeting and then decide to free their slaves.

I had heard so-called "Christian" military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to "defeat Communism," thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?

Two more decades would pass before I discovered, almost by chance, that my own great-grandfather had been a Klansman.

Will Rice saw the Ku Klux Klan as an heroic embodiment of the Old South, as protectors of Christian beliefs and defenders of white womanhood, as soldiers who wielded a holy sword in service to the Lost Cause.

I ended up as much a Maoist failure as I had been a Christian failure. Souls were still unsaved, and the imperialist bourgeoisie was still in power. Before I graduated from high school, I had lost my faith in the fundamentalist God I had been trained to worship and serve.

In the minds of many Texans, the principle attraction of the Klan was its defense of Christian morality. The Klan presented itself as a contender for the historic Christian faith, a defender of Christian civilization, and an advocate for the good Christian people of the South and the country.

Most Texas Klan supporters saw no contradiction between the politics of the Klan and the fundamentalist theology of the Baptist churches many of them attended on Sunday mornings.

In 1871 the campaign of lies, terror, and intimidation of black voters was a success. Black voters in Texas simply disappeared from the polls, and the Democrats swept the elections for Congress. Within two years the Democrats in Texas had an unbreakable lock on the legislature and all statewide offices, and most of the gains in the areas of civil rights, social justice, education, and tax reform had been turned back.

Fellow Englishman Charles Spurgeon was a fierce opponent of social injustice, especially slavery, and joined other evangelicals in crusades to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, especially for children.