My Evangelical Upbringing Had Ties to White Nationalism

My Evangelical Upbringing Had Ties to White Nationalism November 24, 2016

Last week, NPR interviewed Richard Spencer, a “white nationalist” who wants to see the creation of a white ethno state. People were shocked at this interview—so shocked NPR had to explain why they aired it:

Some of you have asked why we would air the views of someone who wants to create a “white ethno-state.” The short answer is that Donald Trump drew some of his support from people with such views. We want listeners to understand what the alt-right, and people such as Richard Spencer, believe.

And to many, Spencer’s interview is indeed shocking.

MCEVERS: Richard Spencer’s views are obviously not easy to hear, but we do think they’re important to hear because of the link between the alt-right and Donald Trump’s team. I asked Richard Spencer what policies he’s pushing for – natural conservation, he said, a foreign policy that’s friendlier to Russia and this.

SPENCER: Immigration is the most obvious one. And I think we need to get beyond thinking about immigration just in terms of illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is not nearly as damaging as legal immigration. Legal immigration – they’re here to stay. Their children are here and so on.

And I think a really reasonable and I think palatable policy proposal would be for Donald Trump to say, look; we’ve had immigration in the past. It’s brought some fragmentation. It’s brought division. But we need to become a people again. And for us to do that, we’re going to need to take a break from mass immigration. And we’re going to need to preference people who are going to fit in, who are more like us. That is European immigration.

MCEVERS: You know, how likely do you think it is that some of these policies that you want to see happen will happen?

SPENCER: What I want is influence. And sometimes influence can be invisible. If we can get these ideas out there, if people can see the compelling and powerful nature of them, I think we really can change policy.

But here’s the thing: None of this is new to me.

I grew up in a white evangelical community. I was homeschooled. We regularly received Doug Wilson’s magazine, Credenda Agenda, and I regularly read it. Doug Wilson is an evangelical pastor and the founder of his own Reformed denomination. He is well known in Christian homeschool circles, and is the author of many books. He has his own Christian school association. He writes curriculum. And in 1996, he co-authored a short book titled Southern Slavery As It Was. Here are some excerpts:

Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity.

Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.

Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.

[T]he intellectual leadership of the South was conservative, orthodox, and Christian. In contrast, the leadership of the North was radical and Unitarian. This is not to say there were no Christians in the North, or that no believers fought for the North. It is simply the recognition that the drums of war were being beaten by the abolitionists, who were in turn driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.

Doug Wilson’s co-author was Steve Wilkins, who also co-founded the League of the South, which I first wrote about several years ago. As I noted at the time:

The organization isn’t shy about its emphasis on the right cause of the South during the Civil War, the importance it places on maintaining the South as a Christian “Anglo-Celtic” society, or its contention that southern slavery was a time of gentleness racial harmony. A look at the books sold on their website illustrates the organization’s fixation on the Civil War, and while the group’s FAQs reject racism they also explicitly call for the preservation of a South based on an “Anglo-Celtic core population and culture” (“should this core be destroyed or displaced the South would be made over in an alien image—unfamiliar and inhospitable to our children and grandchildren”).

As of 2013, the League’s president, Michael Hill, stated as follows:

Just so there’s no chance that you’ll confuse The League with the GOP or any other “conservative” group, here’s what we stand for: The survival, well being, and independence of the Southern people. And by “the Southern people,” we mean White Southerners who are not afraid to stand for the people of their race and region.

In 2014, Michael Hill was actually interviewed by Richard Spencer, the man NPR interviewed in the excerpt at the beginning of this post. And Hill’s language quoted above is tame, for his standards. Check this piece out:

As I look at my precious children and grandchildren, I shudder to think what will happen to them and their descendants when they become the numerical political (and actual demographic) minority. Revenge—“getting even”—will be a commonplace occurrence as our Folk are attacked and robbed of life, liberty, and property with impunity in the name of Social Justice or some other fabricated universal right. Will the long-established rights of our children and grandchildren be protected by the new regnant majority who are not products of Western Christian civilization? Or will a majority of wolves vote to devour a minority of sheep? I think you know the answer.

We Southerners must embrace a new paradigm. We must think “outside the box” in which our enemies have placed us. We must have a new organizing principal: organic nationalism. It is the answer for the South if we are serious about the survival, well being, and independence of the Southern people. That means the rejection of the status quo of living in a multicultural empire that sucks our lifeblood.

For our self-preservation dare we cast aside voting and the idea of the “consent of the governed” for a monarchy or dictatorship? No. We must simply re-define along the lines of organic nationalism the political and social entity to which we belong—the Southern nation. In that entity, our interests and moral principles will hold sway, and we can determine who gets to be called “citizen” and who exercises the right to vote and to participate in other civic matters. No more being ruled by alien, universalist elites. No more kowtowing to the interests of Massachusetts, New York, and California or those of the globalists. The Southern nation will be run by Southerners in the interest of Southerners. Will that dawning not be a glorious and blessed day?

I told you it was bad.

The League of the South is still out there, by the way. But at a moment when the media is proclaiming the rise of this “new” thing called the alt-right, it’s worth mentioning that the League of the South was founded in 1994. This stuff isn’t actually new. It may be repackaged to some extent, but in my read the rhetoric and underlying ideology appears unchanged—it’s the idea that this country belongs to the white race, and that multiculturalism is a “disease” that must be rooted out.

Don’t be fooled by the claims that white nationalism isn’t racist. Proponents claim that they aren’t racist, they simply believe that the races are better off separate. While you may not be aware of this, this argument was a favorite of segregationists half a century and more ago. Today, it is championed by men like Steve Wilkins, who also claim that the antebellum South was a time of unequaled racial harmony.

That is not how any of this works. 

These ideas were already out there. I’ve been aware of them for years. What has changed is that Trump has emboldened them, and given them the fodder they need to spread and grow. His condemnations of Mexican immigrants, his promise to build a wall and to “make America great again,” his mocking of liberalism and “political correctness” and free trade—all of this feeds into a white nationalist worldview that posits non-European immigrants and people of color as a rot that is strangling our country and globalization as a toxic process that erodes American exceptionalism.

You can expect to see this continue. Over 50% of babies born in this country today are nonwhite, and 13.7% of people currently living in the U.S. were born elsewhere. To individuals attracted to Richard Spencer’s rhetoric, this sounds frightening. They want it to stop. They want a country that looks like they do. We’ve imagined for too long that these people aren’t out there, but they are—and there are a lot of them.

While my family sometimes ran in strange circles, I never heard my parents endorse white nationalism, and many of the other evangelical publications we received were overtly anti-racist. As I grew, I became obsessed with history. I loved reading the stories of immigrants who came to the U.S. in years past. As I learned, I came to see the many similarities between immigration then and immigration now—including the similarities present in opposition to immigration. I learned that there was a time when immigrants from southern or eastern Europe were not considered white. I learned that there was a time when many Americans viewed Catholicism—and thus Catholic immigrants—as subversive and dangerous.

When it came time for my husband and I to choose a place to settle and raise our children, we chose a diverse and multicultural area on purpose. Immigration and diversity are not enemies of who we are as a people; they are who we are as a people. And yet, this past year has made it crystal clear that many people disagree—just as they disagreed in the past. This isn’t new. It’s simply the latest front in a longer struggle between nativism and multicultural diversity.

And this time, it’s our turn to fight.


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