Sunday, November 12, 2017

Gen. Kelly's Civil War Story Derives From 19th-Century Pro-Slavery Evangelicalism

That evangelicalism is deeply implicated in white supremacy gets clearer by the day.

By Julie Ingersoll / Religion Dispatches November 9, 2017, 1:05 PM GMT

When General Kelly noted this week that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man—and added that we could have avoided the war if people had been willing to compromise—he was rightly criticized.

“Honorable” is not an apt label for a slaveholding traitor, as many pointed out, and compromising on whether some people can own other people is morally repugnant. And of course the North and the South did actually compromise repeatedly.

Kelly’s opinion shocked many, but for others it invoked a familiar framework about the Civil War that protects white supremacy and is at the core of one of the most influential strands of today’s evangelicalism: the strand that helped elect Donald Trump. On Twitter, as part of the #emptythepews hashtag, ex-evangelical @toriglass wrote, “to be honest, evangelicals never stopped debating whether slavery was actually bad.”

She’s right.

Read more
https://www.alternet.org/belief/gen-kellys-civil-war-story-pro-slavery-evangelicals

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