Do we all look alike to you, too?
There are obvious and important truths here. Writing in the midst of the civil rights revolution, scholars such as Samuel Hill and John Lee Eighmy could not help but see cultural captivity when stiff-necked deacons and ushers stood cross-armed at church house doors, defending segregation now segregation forever, or when prominent black ministers avoided association with the movement. Southern social critics and the cultural captivity school advanced a far less provincial understanding of the regional religion. In their mind, something outside Christianity had entrapped the southern soul.
Yet the religious notions of the dominant classes have rarely buttressed theologies of equality. More commonly, they sanctify inequality. “We do not believe that ‘all men are created equal’ . . . nor that they will ever become equal in this world,” a prominent Southern Baptist cleric said in the 1880s. The theology of class and blood was premised on God-ordained inequality. It was an unstable foundation in the context of American liberal democracy, but one common in human history.
Thus, southern white supremacist Christians were not necessarily hypocrites. Such a stance implies that “true” Christianity would have required acceptance of racial equality—an important point theologically, but a dubious mode of analysis for historians. White southern religious racism could be intellectually grounded in a conservative vision rather than merely hypocritical cant intended to void the clear Biblical message. God created the world. If inequality exists, then God must have a reason for it. Without inequality—without rulers and ruled, without hewers of wood and drawers of water—there could be only anarchy. Men cannot govern themselves on a plane of equality. Realizing this, God sanctions Himself to head the church, men to lead women and children, slave owners to direct the lives of slaves, and white people to guide the destiny of black people.