Faith, politics, and the Satanic Panic Part I
There’s no standard narrative of US history. Depending on where you grow up and who your people are you will get a different version. But there have been attempts to standardize US history, most of which find themselves centralized around the Civil War.
Even the fact that we call it the Civil War is part of that standardization attempt. It really wasn’t a civil war by any meaningful definition of a civil war, except in hindsight because of the National myth it created afterwards. I think it’s best understood as either the war for Southern Independence or the US war of unification or centralization. Really a civil war is when war breaks out within a nation or people. This is why Burke saw the 1776 conflict in the American colonies as a Civil War, not a revolution. It was fundamentally Englishmen fighting other Englishmen over English rights. That’s not revolutionary but rather the essence of Civil War.
In fact the US civil war really could be called the US revolution. It was far more revolutionary long term than the war for independence had been in 1776, and Southern style Conservatives like me tend to think Lincoln probably understood that was exactly what he was doing, remaking the union in a distinctly Hamiltonian or nationalist vision. Maybe he really didn’t think he was remaking anything but rather thought that his vision was the real American political tradition. But either way he changed federal governance forever from the way it was before.
The attempts to standardize the narrative of US history always see the unification war of 1861 as essentially the American Iliad. And in this respect they are probably correct. This is our mythic war created as much by theological as political differences. These differences still impact our politics today.
The essential difference at the time of the unification war was geographical. Yankee Evangelicals saw the faith as essentially public and Southern Evangelicals saw the faith as essentially personal. For the Yankee Evangelical conversion was something that had to happen to society. This meant injustice had to be fought, and every kind of injustice. So Yankees tended to be abolitionist. Regardless of what scripture did or didn’t say about slavery the Yankees (from a very white distance) saw the clear injustices of black slavery and knew it needed to be defeated. But they also saw the Roman Catholic Church as fundamentally unjust due to its disagreements with Protestant religion. When your faith becomes public like this and you think that your faith is the key to unlocking human destiny then whatever deviates from that faith will be unjust to some degree. These evangelical abolitionists sought to free bodies from slavery and minds from Catholicism, they were the sons of puritans afterall. When the war came they sang the battle hymn of the republic and understood it in all its post millennial splendor. They thought they were doing God’s work with rifles.
Southern Evangelicals tended to not make the faith about the transformation of society but rather the transformation of the individual. This was why they tended to be blind to some of the gross evils of black slavery. Some of it too was that they were closer to the institution and saw it for what it was, and in many ways what it was not. And at bedrock slavery simply was not an abnormal state in human affairs. This is hard for us to understand today. Slavery has been the norm in human society, freedom the peculiar. And the scriptures are simply not a liberal document. They were produced by a culture that saw slavery everywhere, and while almost no one has seen slavery as a positive good the idea of eradicating it has been almost non existent in human history. I will do a longer post on scripture and slavery at some point, because I think almost everyone in the current internet version of this debate (Christian and non Christian) is getting it wrong, but for now the basic facts as I see them are this:
Scripture simply does not condemn, nor does it put forward slavery as a positive good, it regulated the practice as a normal part of the ancient world. In this way the Torah is not unique among ancient texts or cultures. (There is at least one way it’s regulations were very unique but more on that in the big post later)
The biblical regulation of the practice included things that basically all western Christians find morally abhorrent, in other words the typical argument from Calvinist thinkers (for example Tim Keller or anyone who thinks the Torah is a universal moral guide) that really the biblically regulated practice was indentured servant hood, more analogous to employment today rather than chattel slavery is simply false. There were forms of chattel slavery allowed for and it seems like forms of sex slavery allowed for as well.
Given 1 & 2 the idea that the Torah is morally progressive on the issue of slavery, even incrementally seems a bit naive to say the least. But given the last 400 or so years of human progress I would say the idea that we are morally progressive is to say the least, naive.
The scriptures and Christianity are the historical source for our belief that slavery is immoral. Not the enlightenment, atheism, philosophy and definitely not “science”. Read in their totality as a wisdom document, akin to the Bible Project’s maxim “the Bible is a unified story leading to Jesus”, it is impossible to come away from scripture with a consistent understanding that slavery is something God ultimately wants as part of His kingdom for His people. There’s evidence that even the slave masters who thought the Bible taught slavery was fine knew this, since they didn’t want slaves reading it and there were edited versions they gave to their slaves.
The Exodus narrative expresses not a liberal moral vision based in liberty, as Moses says in the Prince of Egypt “No kingdom should be built on the backs of slaves”, but rather God reclaiming those that belong to Him from oppression for His redemptive purpose. This is one of the fundamental divides between the liberal and conservative worldviews: our bodies are not truly our property but God’s.
The main reason certain scholars are advocating for scripture condoning slavery is inherently political and often blatantly performative homophilia, essentially advocacy for homosexuality. This is the main reason Dan McClellan (who I will spend time dealing with directly) talks so much and so often about certain slavery passages in the Torah, he is trying to get Christianity to renegotiate our relationship to sexuality in the same way he alleges we have re negotiated our relationship to slavery. The irony here is that contemporary progressives are actually in fundamental agreement with the old South on the issue of slavery and the Bible, when their own values concerning slavery are actually formed by the unified reading of scripture, just one more way in which their worldview is ultimately a house of straw. Especially ironic since Dan McCellan loves to claim there is no evidence for the univocal nature of scripture.
Some of these points seem to be in conflict with each other, because they sort of are. It’s a complex topic and I don’t think either Christian apologists or pro homosexual activists have been honest about the nature of scripture and slavery.
More can and will be said on this when I finally do the slavery post, sometime in the future. Back to the main argument.
Race based slavery constructed around the idea of natural subjugation that Southern evangelicals found themselves confronted with daily was not the norm in human history, in part because race is a modern concept. Neither was the Atlantic slave trade. These things were peculiar evils, not the normal sort of slavery being a crappy part of human life stuff. But regardless programtic solutions to life’s injustices simply was not a big part of a Christian worldview that saw the faith as primarily about the personal. The southern saw injustice more like GK Chesterton or Solzhenitsyn would come to famously express evil.
“In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question “What is Wrong?” is, or should be, “I am wrong.” Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.” -GK Chesterton
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chesterton actually wrote a whole book detailing what was actually wrong with pretty much everything, and it’s shockingly prophetic and accurate, so it’s not as if he believed that injustice or evil outside the human didn’t matter. But the human soul is the real battleground.
In other words I think (and I may certainly be wrong about this) that the Southern Evangelicals were more Christian and more in the right theologically speaking than the Yankees, at least in terms of how their Christianity was applied and constructed, even if southern society continued to have slavery as a fundamental part of its culture. But this is not an apology for slavery or racism. Every other form of western black slavery was ended without a war (though it’s important to point out that the war of 1861 was not fought to free the slaves, if it had been I’d feel less free to criticize Lincoln) rather once it became clear to the societies that had this form of slavery that it was unjust they came up with peaceful solutions to end it. I think usually it was a manumission process based in remuneration for the slaves. This peaceful process became unthinkable in the United States because Yankee evangelicals saw the practice as so inherently evil that they couldn’t accept giving money for the freedom of slaves because that would be somehow granting moral authority to the property rights of the slave master. That little piece of inflexible ideology maybe what ultimately led to the change in Southern ideology regarding slavery as a necessary evil into a positive good. Either way that was how the battle lines were drawn creating an atmosphere of irrationality regarding a complex institution. By the time of the unification war of 1861 the southern fire breathers had come to see slavery as a central good in their culture and the northern radicals did not want a peaceful process to free slaves. There was no way to break the stalemate. If the war had been prevented (either through southerners not seceding or through Lincoln not making war) I believe what would have happened was that slavery would’ve died off in the South gradually for mostly economic reasons. If correct this clearly would’ve been better for everyone involved. Slow and peaceful is better than violent and sudden, especially since Jim Crow (which was invented in the North) replaced slavery. It’s very unclear given the way antebellum southerners lived that the disease of Jim Crow would’ve been able to infect the south without the North winning the war.
But this seems to be what always happens in American politics. Sides become radicalized over a complex issue neither seems to completely understand, while powerful people take advantage of the emotions and ignorance. And the Christians who think that Christianity is about the conversion of society instead of the conversion of the individual are the ones who seem to get co-opted most fully into the political struggle and then lose their Christianity, because society and politics have taken precedence. The legacy of northern abolitionism in particular is bizarrely complicated in how it impacts contemporary politics.
The direct physical and geographical descendants of northern abolitionism are not Christian. The cross has been replaced by the rainbow flag in New England.
But what is the modern moral equivalent of abolition? The pro life movement, of which I tend to see myself to be part of. Not just because I think that slavery was immoral and that legalized infanticide and elective abortions are immoral, but because in many ways they have the same moral evangelical fervor and the goal of outlawing a practice that society now takes for granted.
And we all know where the Yankees stand on abortion and where the South does as well, at least generally politically speaking. So again we can’t be rational on this issue because we have the same radical departures from each other. But now of course it’s not just Yankees versus the South but red states versus blue states, the geography is more complicated, and even states themselves are divided. Just look at California. But we know where the battle lines are drawn. And while I think one side is clearly more right I think that those methods, and many things that are said and done, are at least unwise if not wrong. Abortion abolitionists in particular are not doing anyone any favors, except for their prayers that justice would come to pass. But people who want to prosecute mothers who had abortions, which has never been normal amongst the pro life crowd, those sorts might as well be advocating for abortion. That kind of lunacy is the problem with American politics.
But that’s not really why I wrote this post. I actually think Trump has somehow cooled the abortion politics of America, because he federalized (not him directly) the issue. It’s hard to see this as a bad thing. I’m not really sure what will replace abortion as the central issue, maybe immigration already has, but if DC can basically maintain the current status quo my guess is long term things will flatten on this issue because people mostly have what they want, the blue states still have abortion and the red states have restricted it severely. That might be naive on my part.
I really wrote this post to wrestle with the implications of a recent Christianity today podcast: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It’s a chronicle of the Satanic Panic. If you don’t know what that is or don’t remember imagine the Salem witch trials became nationalized for about a decade, in the 80s and early 90s. I remember seeing something on the local news in Dallas, when I was very little, about Satanists killing dogs. There were wild claims about cults sacrificing babies and all kinds of stuff. It led to teachers getting arrested. And in the end none of the cases of satanic ritual abuse were ever substantiated. But it became mainstream for a little while to believe there were satanic cults killing dogs and doing all kinds of awful stuff.
Mike Cosper is the main guy behind this podcast. He came to my attention when his previous podcast, the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, went semi viral within my social media community. I still maintain that podcast was ultimately about Trump, not Mark Driscoll, and Christianity Today’s confusion over the appeal of Trump. I would love to have a long conversation with Mike on my podcast someday, not to set him straight or anything but just because I’m genuinely not sure what he thinks or was trying to accomplish through any of these podcasts. I find the narratives generally compelling with moments of utter frustration over things Mike seems to find confusing, that I think could only be confusing to a cultural elite person like him. I really just want to have a long conversation someday with him, to try to understand it all.
But I definitely think this new podcast is stronger than the Mars Hill one overall, in part because the subject matter is more compelling. I knew a lot about the satanic panic before this podcast, partially because I was raised within its periphery. My parents are Baptists but not fundamentalists, my interaction with the panic came mostly from the media and consuming Christian culture produced at the time. And I find it interesting as a cultural phenomenon in general. The Monster talk podcast was probably the first place I started to understand what had actually taken place in terms of the hysteria.
But towards the end of the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea NAR (the new apostolic reformation) raised its complicated head, that helped synthesize a lot of my thoughts on Lincoln, Christianity Today, Trump, and the current state of American Christianity.
I would try to listen to Devil and the Deep Blue Sea in its entirety before next week’s post if I were a reader of this substack. It’s very interesting and well produced.
(Part Two of this very long substack will be published next Sunday or Monday lord willing)