“If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession we will go down in History solely as brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our country.” –Former Confederate General Clement A. Evans, 1896.
“Patriotic education has been replaced with political indoctrination. They abolished our 1776 Commission and authorized teaching critical race theory in our schools. –Former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence, June 18, 2021.
Clement Evans, speaking to the United Confederate Veterans, knew what was at stake. “We had a legal and moral justification” for seceding, he told his sympathetic audience, but if the South failed to win the battle for the past, its defenders would be cast upon the dustbin of history.
Mike Pence, speaking to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference last weekend in Orlando, also knew what was at stake. If the Christian Right supporters of Donald Trump failed to win the battle for the past, they would be cast upon the dustbin of history.
Both men were promoting lost causes.
Southerners never let go of the belief that the Confederate cause was just. They claimed the Union won the Civil War because it had a superior advantage in men and resources. Selfish individualism and the greedy pursuit of wealth fueled the industrial North’s war machine, while virtuous southerners—Jefferson called them the “chosen people of God”—cultivated the earth. These defenders of a “Southern way of life” excoriated northern liberals for destroying their Christian society and undermining their divinely-inspired social order.
The South advanced the Lost Cause through racial violence, the erection of monuments, the veneration of Confederate leaders, the waving of the Confederate battle flag, and the control of history textbooks. By the turn of the 20th-century, this cultural program had captured the imagination of most white southerners. It was rooted in an unholy combination of white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, segregation, states rights, nostalgia, and evangelical Christianity.
While historical analogies are never exact, it is hard to ignore the evangelical lost cause on display last weekend in Orlando.
The dozens of speakers and thousands of attendees who gathered in a conference center just a few miles from the Magic Kingdom tried to make sense of how their righteous cause got derailed in November 2020 when the American people rejected Donald Trump and his brand of populist politics.
Mike Pence gave a speech filled with nostalgic longings for the Trump administration. With the country suffering through racial conflict, political polarization, and the economic and cultural effects of the worst pandemic in its history, Pence said nothing about his former boss’s failure to act quickly on COVID-19, his dismissal of scientific experts, his utter failure to lead the country through Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, his family separation policy at the U.S-Mexico border, and his endless lies to the American people. Though he was heckled by some for his role in certifying the election results on January 6, 2021, he gave the consumers of the evangelical lost cause exactly what they wanted to hear: abortion, Supreme Court justices, religious liberty, and Israel.
Pence’s speech was revisionism at its worst. But he, like Clement Evans more than a century earlier, knows that this kind of rhetoric is necessary if Trump-loving evangelicals are to end-up on the right side of history. Evans failed. So will Pence. Historians will treat this speech, and others like it, as a trip to Fantasyland.
Southern textbooks, especially those written in the decades following the Civil War, are filled with stories of heroic Confederate soldiers, threats to state rights, and happy and faithful slaves. Several speakers in Orlando—Pence, Ted Cruz, Dinesh D’Souza, and a host of lesser-known members of Congress—were also concerned about what young Americans are learning in school. They railed against “critical race theory,” a phrase being used to scare evangelicals worried that their kids might learn something about systemic racial prejudice or be exposed to Black voices in the classroom.
In the late 19th-century, the South finally managed to use violence in the form of the Ku Klux Klan to drive northern liberal reformers out of the region. Southerners described the successful Southern overthrow of Reconstruction using the word “redemption”—a theological term associated with God’s work in atoning for sin. But this is not how the adherents to lost cause ideologies think about redemption. If they did, they would need to admit that they had sinned and were in need of salvation. Lost cause defenders are always innocent. They are perpetual victims. They see the speck, but they can’t see the beam. Or perhaps they do see the beam, but if they acknowledge it they would also have to confess that their cause is morally flawed.
Instead, Lost Cause movements think about redemption in terms of “deliverance” or “rescue.” Much like God redeemed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the southern God would deliver them from the afflictions cast upon them by the defiled and worldly modernists of the North. And while former Confederates called for the South to “rise again,” evangelicals in Orlando such as Cruz and radio show host Eric Metaxas preached their own version of rebirth. Both men announced the coming of a great political and religious revival that will overthrow Joe Biden and his liberal cronies (D’Souza compared them to “Satan”) and restore America to its Christian roots. If God doesn’t initiate such a revival, those affiliated with the Faith and Freedom Coalition can trigger it themselves by merely going to the polls in 2022 and voting for GOP candidates.
But the most obvious attempt of this kind of evangelical redemption took place on January 6, 2021 when Trump followers—many of them evangelical Christians—invaded Congress. Not even the lost cause Confederates had been able to accomplish this. Southerners flew their Confederate battle flags over state capitols, but the January insurrectionists waved their Trump flags and Christian banners to help rally the faithful. In the 1870s the KKK wreaked havoc on Black communities in the South. In 2021 the Proud Boys and members of other assorted militia groups breached the barriers, trashed the office of the Speaker of the House, and offered thanks to God in the chamber of the United States Senate.
Last weekend several evangelical leaders in Orlando described these insurrectionists as agents of redemption. D’Souza said that the January 6 rioters were “the people who are really getting shafted right now.” They stormed the capitol, he added, because they just “wanted an honest count of the vote.” Metaxas said, defiantly, that “any Republican who has not spoken in defense of the January 6th people to me is dead.” (A few minutes earlier Ralph Reed’s introduced him as Christian leader known for his “civility” and “love.”)
Ever since the Civil War, Confederates have staged reunions for the purpose of rewriting history, celebrating white supremacy, worshiping their leaders, chastening their political enemies, and redeeming their way of life.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference, and other Christian Right political gatherings like it, are staged to whitewash American history, venerate Donald Trump, castigate the “radical left,” and save America. The Christian Right just needs a few more monuments.
John Fea is Executive Editor of Current
