Quotes from Andrew Himes

86 percent believe that Christians are hypocritical, saying one thing and doing another. 75 percent believe that Christians are too involved in politics. Over two-thirds believe that Christians are out of touch with reality, insensitive to others, boring, and not accepting of other faiths. 90 percent believe that Christians hate homosexuals.

On the day of their arrival on Hazel Hill my family's history and fortunes—and my own heritage—were first indissolubly linked with the enslavement of human beings. There Dangerfield bought his first slaves and began building a hemp plantation, the foundation of the family's wealth and success. Just a few years later, in 1827, he died a prominent citizen and prosperous landowner, leaving his second wife Nancy and 11 growing children.

Over the forty-two years that the Rice family lived in Missouri during the 19th century, the family evolved from poor dirt farmers to be the owners of many slaves and several contiguous plantations laid out on broad flat plains and green fields south of the wide river. They could leverage vast wealth embodied in human beings whom they owned as one might own a horse or a hat.

The new evangelical movement in the early 19th century was strongly focused on social justice and social equality. The famous English preacher Charles Spurgeon saw some of his sermons burned in America due to his censure of slavery before the Civil War, calling it "a soul-destroying sin," "the foulest blot" which "may have to be washed out in blood.

The first Baptist missionaries had reached Texas in 1812 in company with the first white American settlers who crossed the Red River. By 1848, there still were only 950 Baptists in the state, 250 of them black slaves. Baptists were a somewhat radical sect in those days. They believed that blacks and whites were all the children of God, equal in the sight and judgment of God, and equally deserving of salvation, so Baptist missionaries were sent out to both the slaves and to the whites.

According to John R. Rice, the not guilty verdict was perfectly understandable. Responsibility for Till's murder lay with the NAACP and other "race agitators," and not with the white men who in fact killed him.

Globalization has forced us to confront an extraordinarily diverse world that is undergoing massive change at a pace unimaginable to our parents or grandparents.

Before Will was two years old, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the slave states of the South seceded from the Union, launching the Civil War. The war would be murderous and merciless beyond the capacity of any American to imagine in 1861, and both sides used their religion and their notion of God and his justice to define and defend their parts in the mayhem.

The Rice family owned more slaves than most other families in the vicinity of Warrensburg, and on August 13, 1862, the family fortunes suffered a severe blow.

The roots of 20th century American fundamentalism can be discerned in the confluence of these two streams of immigration, culture, and history. A unique American expression of evangelical Christianity emerged—profoundly democratic, anti-royalist and anti-clerical, militant and missional, convinced that God was naturally on the side of Americans. Any who disagreed might be suspected of being on some side other than God's.

In the first years after the Revolutionary War, Baptist evangelicals in the South as well as throughout the country were deeply opposed to slavery. They believed that all were equal in the sight of God, criticized the categories of race and class, and embraced the cause of freedom for African Americans.

The influx of Civil War refugees had significance for the future evolution of Texas culture and politics in the decades after the war. The descendants of the refugees would be among the most embittered, and hardcore in their opposition to the post-war rule of the Union Army and the Reconstruction policies of the national government.

The very ground on which the structure of 20th-century fundamentalist theology and politics was built has crumbled into sand. The reason for which modern fundamentalism was created—in opposition to modernism and liberal theology—has been swept away in the avalanche of new ideas, in new dialogue between different faith traditions.

Although Rice's earthly racial and political ideas drove him away from the struggle for justice in the South, the heavenly core of his faith was just enough to also drive him away from the Klan and his father Will Rice's racial politics, and to leave him open to the claims of black people for justice on earth. His opposition to integration was oddly conditional.

By the early 21st century, the most profound consequence of globalization and the culture of the Internet has been an expansion of our understanding of who our neighbors are. Ideas and influences can travel around the world and touch the lives of millions within seconds.

The Baptist teaching that all are equal in the sight of God seemed to run right up against the notion that any human being had a right to own another.

Those who were die-hard supporters of the Confederacy, including many slaveholders, fled farther south to Texas, where they settled down to rebuild their lives and communities after the war. My own Rice family was among them.

The opposition of fundamentalist preachers and leaders to the civil rights movement was deeply connected to their historic separatism. They believed in an inerrant Bible that had been inspired by God, and they also believed that God explicitly ordained the separation of the races. The claims of the civil rights marchers were an affront to their interpretation of the Bible, and not just to their racial beliefs.

Accordingly, the test of "loving your neighbor" is showing compassion for someone you might naturally be inclined to hate or fear or despise—not someone who is your natural ally or blood kin or fellow citizen.

The Protestant reformation, in the eyes of many evangelicals, implied a social and political revolution as well.

The traumatic experience of the Civil War and its aftermath in the 19th century was the incubator of Christian fundamentalism in 20th century America. The agony of the Civil War had a devastating impact on subsequent generations of Southerners, many of whom carried the burden and promise of their Scots-Irish heritage.

I am ashamed to admit that I believed black people smelled bad and had low moral standards and that good Christian white people only associated with a few "good" colored people—despite the fact that I knew no Negroes firsthand. Isn't that remarkable? Where in the world did I get those strange ideas?

For his entire adulthood and throughout his public ministry in Texas, John R. Rice had avoided talking about the subject of race. He had never, by any published report or in the memory of any of his friends or family members or in any sermon in The Sword of the Lord, attacked or defended the institution of slavery or the subjugation of black people by white people.

By contrast, Rice said, "Negro ministers, unfortunately have...very often had a bad influence. The Negro minister [Martin Luther King Jr.] in Montgomery, Alabama, who led in the organization of a Negro boycott of the buses, led that fight, unfortunately, not as a Christian trying to make good Christians and to lead in Christian understanding between the races. He led that boycott as a modernist and a socialist who was more concerned about racism than he was about Christianity, I fear.