The American Future (27 page)

Now here's a peculiar thing: the Republican candidate, on a hilltop in North Carolina, come to seek the blessing of the evangelical Grahams, father and son, Billy and Franklin, is caught in a photo op looking as though he would rather be anywhere else, the smile glued on, his whole demeanor a portrait of a man in extreme discomfort. Meanwhile the Democratic candidate goes to Zanesville, Ohio, the kind of small town where nineteenth-century circuit riders shook up the faithful and is seen amid tow-haired students at a Christian community college saying that support for faith-based community services would be “at the moral center” of his campaign.

Obama has always pitched his appeal ecumenically, wanting Americans divided by the culture wars to come together in the broadest of tents. Peeling off white believers from their allegiance to the Republican Party seems, at first sight, a stretch. The history of white Protestantism after the Civil War seemed to take it as far as possible from that of the black church. In the South, its ministers were determined to sanctify the defeated heroes—Lee, Davis, and above all General Stonewall Jackson, whose life was canonized as a model of selfless Christian gentility. Every time another Confederate general died, the funeral was used by the church to project an image of the South as a shot-through citadel of Christian virtues, holding the fort against an oncoming tide (especially in the New South) of commercial debasement, sexual depravity, and liquor-drenched stupor: the sins of the metropolis marching on the corn-fed encampment of the righteous. While it was appreciated that the black churches were all that stood between this bastion of “civilized” America and the terrifying specter of Blacks on the Loose, extreme vigilance was needed if what remained of the right order of things was to survive the assault of modern vice.

It was in that paranoid atmosphere that, during Reconstruction, the founders of the Ku Klux Klan presented themselves as an order of modern crusaders. With their headquarters in Nashville, cheek by jowl with Fisk and its singers, and their imperial wizard the Confederate
ex-general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan rapidly developed into a vigilante organization, bent on terrorizing anyone opposing the perpetuation of white supremacy or supporting the institutions of Reconstruction. In the minds of the Klansmen they were resisting an alien Northern occupation, but their violence was so out of control that Congress outlawed the order in 1871. Some thirty years later, however, a North Carolina Baptist minister, Thomas Dixon Jr., gave it a second life. His novel
The Clansman
featured a Presbyterian preacher to the Klan giving his blessing to their battle to protect “Christian white civilization” from the depravity of black scalawags and their Yankee carpetbagging puppeteers. Filmed by D. W. Griffith as
The Birth of a Nation
, the movie fired thousands to rejoin a Klan reborn after the ex-Methodist minister William Simmons led a procession up Stone Mountain outside Atlanta. Beneath relief carvings of the Confederate heroes Lee, Davis, and Jackson, an altar was erected and the first Klan cross burned. By 1921, there were more than 100,000 members, organized in cells from the Midwest right through the old South, and many of them heard sermons and lectures from Protestant clergy who endorsed their claim to be protecting southern Christianity from the bestiality of the lower races—Jews as well as blacks.