Quotes from Andrew Himes

The white population of Texas from before the war, then, was never truly beaten, never truly surrendered, and was never brought violently to terms with the new realities.

And it was Texas that turned out to be especially congenial to the development of Christian fundamentalism in America.

A fundamentalist was set apart from "the world." We were definitely going to Heaven when we died, and those with different views on Heaven, Hell, God and Satan, sin and salvation were definitely going to Hell, which was more than a shame because Hell involved eternal torment, literal flames, and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Slavery in law had been abolished, but slavery in fact continued until after World War II, and was accomplished and supported through violence, brutality, imprisonment, torture, denial of civil and human rights, and enforced poverty.

The keystone of slavery in its new guise was the system of convict labor, which entrapped hundreds of thousands of black men in a permanent state of terror and involuntary servitude, and which kept the entire black community in a state of quiet, fearful resignation.

Fundamentalists like Norris were calling for a new struggle to preserve Southern values, Southern religion, Southern culture, and the Southern way of life. And this new battle against modernism was more critical and historically significant even than the Lost Cause of the 19th century, fought to defend the God-given rights of Southern white people to own black slaves.

Especially in Appalachian east Tennessee, where there were few slaves and few slave owners, the evangelical revivals of the Awakening movement cradled the abolition movement.

This new fight was for the heart and soul of America against the tide of racially degenerate immigrants who sought to dilute her Anglo-Saxon bloodlines and undermine her Christian identity with their Roman Catholic conspiracies.

As the struggle against modernism picked up steam, the nativism and anti-Catholicism of fundamentalists such as Norris assured leaders of the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan that their enterprise had been blessed by God.

Nothing in John R. Rice's life or career suggests that he would ever condone or support the racist mob violence that had been on display in Sherman in 1930. But his failure to criticize the Sherman Riot or to call for racial reconciliation or repentance for racial crimes can be attributed to some basic assumptions he must have made.

In the climate of fear whipped up by fundamentalist preachers and Southern politicians, the Klan rapidly spread after 1918 from Georgia to other states North and South, including Texas, four states to the west.

First, if Rice had preached to his all-white Texas audience in 1930 against racial injustice or oppression he would have been castigated as a modernist, a radical socialist, or a social gospel do-gooder, and lost all his influence in the fundamentalist movement, most or all of his friends, and maybe even his life.

The focus on social and racial justice that strongly marked John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Charles G. Finney, Jonathan Blanchard, Charles Spurgeon, and other evangelical leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries was absent from the millions of words and scores of books John R. Rice penned during his lifetime.

A principal leader of the revival movement in east Tennessee was Samuel Doak, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered his famous "Sword of the Lord" sermon in 1780 sending the Tennessee militia off to defeat the British. As the fires of revival flared up in the 1800s, Doak converted to abolitionism, freed all his slaves, and then traveled the countryside preaching that any true Christian would condemn and work to end the institution of slavery.

Doak and other early abolitionists planted a host of Presbyterian churches and "log cabin colleges" that taught a strong antislavery doctrine. They laid the basis for eastern Tennessee to become the first true locus of the abolition movement in America.

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

An escaped slave named Jerry Rice from the vicinity of the Rice plantations, whose owner was named William Rice—quite probably the brother of James Porter Rice—was listed as a volunteer for the United States Colored Troops for Missouri.

The alternative to Deism was a more profoundly personal religious experience such as that offered by the revivalism of the Great Awakenings.

It was the work of all true Christians, Wesley urged, to act as instruments of God for the suppression of slavery.

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.

Although Wesley was not a pacifist, he was deeply opposed to war, which he said was "a horrid reproach to the Christian name, yea, to the name of man, to all reason and humanity…When war breaks out, God is forgotten…So long as this monster stalks uncontrolled, where is reason, virtue, humanity? They are utterly excluded.