I’ve written about a phenomenon I call “the march of progress” – the way organized religion is consistently on the wrong side of moral change, from democracy to feminism to secularism to LGBTQ rights, and consistently pretends otherwise after every loss.

Because religion is inherently conservative and resistant to change, religious apologists defend every popular evil of their day. And when that evil is finally defeated and a new conception of human rights takes hold, those same apologists rewrite history to pretend they were on the correct side all along. They take credit for the outcome they fought to prevent. Then the next human rights movement arises, which religious apologists fight against fiercely, ignoring all historical parallels… and the pattern repeats.

One prominent example is how the Confederacy was a Christian theocracy. During the Civil War, prominent Confederates loudly argued that they were on God’s side, that slavery was God’s will, and that abolitionists were “undeniably atheistic” – and that because of this, God was sure to grant them victory.

Of course, the Confederacy was defeated and chattel slavery was abolished. After its loss, Christians memory-holed these inconvenient facts. (The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, would very much prefer people not remember that it was founded to protect slavery.)

But, just as historical precedent predicts, they learned nothing from their error. The next time civil rights erupted into national consciousness, Christians were once again on the front lines to stop it.

I saw this tidbit in an essay by Peter Wehner, “The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters“:

In his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation.

Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”

“Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.”

Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.

“The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting [he probably meant “flouting” —Adam] Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”

Just as modern-day Christians claim that outlawing abortion and fighting wokeness is God’s will, Christians of the civil rights era claimed that segregation and interracial marriage bans were God’s will. They argued for Jim Crow with the fervency of the true believer. White Christians wrote lengthy theological arguments backed up by biblical citations to make their case for segregation:

A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “God the Original Segregationist,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”

You can read the full text of that sermon. It’s a vile blast of old-timey Christian racism:

New Testament Text — ACTS 17:26,27

*And (GOD) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, AND THE BOUNDS OF THEIR HABITATION; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”

Our Lord God Himself was the Original Segregationist.

When first He separated the black race from the white and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states. Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries.

HE PUT THE BLACK RACE ON A HUGE CONTINENT TO THEMSELVES, SEGREGATED FROM THE OTHER RACES BY OCEANS OF WATER TO THE WEST, SOUTH AND EAST, AND BY THE VAST STRETCHES OF THE ALMOST IMPASSABLE SAHARA DESERT TO THE NORTH.

So… God didn’t intend for people to cross oceans? Did he not know about boats?

This racist theology poses huge questions about the way its author saw the world. If God’s plan was that each race would stay where it originally arose, does that mean it was against God’s will for Europeans to settle and colonize the rest of the planet? Shouldn’t we give the Western Hemisphere back to the Native Americans?

Daniel is so certain that racial integration is against God’s will, he doesn’t feel obligated to provide any reason why it’s bad. He just asserts that it is, and expects his audience to agree with him. His deepest horror and loathing is reserved for the prospect of interracial relationships, which he slurs as “mongrelization”. Obviously, there’s a subconscious bigotry he can’t put into words that’s driving his conclusions, not any process of reasoning.

The feeble efforts of the integrationists to support their views by God’s Word are not only pitiful, they are often ludicrous. When pressed for Bibical authority many of them can be no more specific than to quote such general moral principles as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ and ‘Do unto others as you would be done by, etc.

But as I loving my white neighbor as myself if I am working for a society which threatens to mongrelize his children or grandchildren? Am I loving my black neighbor as myself if I am trying to change his God-given skin-color into something contrary to both nature and Scripture?

Daniel thinks that it’s “contrary to nature” for people of different races to mingle – but obviously it’s not, because people are part of nature. Anything we choose to do is natural in that sense.

If God existed and didn’t want people of different races to have children together, he could have made us genetically incompatible with each other. Daniel never questions why God gave humans the ability to do something he doesn’t want us to do.

The reality is that, at a genetic level, all humans are the same species, and our DNA is virtually identical. The differences between us are, literally, only skin deep. They have no bearing on intelligence, moral character, work ethic, or anything else that matters.

Most Christians today, I’d wager, would say that they reject Daniel’s grossly bigoted theology – even though they believe in the same god and read the same Bible that he did. That’s exactly the point. It proves that religion doesn’t provide any inerrant or consistent morality, nor does it give us access to a source of wisdom outside ourselves. It only puts a gloss of divine approval on whatever prejudice is popular in each era.

This is why the march of progress happens. There’s no deity revealing what’s right and what’s wrong. There are only humans, arguing and fighting it out amongst ourselves. Some people cling to the prejudices of the past and resist change, while others try to pull humanity into a more enlightened future.

Fortunately, the friends of enlightenment have been winning this battle. The net effect is that – slowly, over many generations – we’re outgrowing ignorance and superstition. Moral progress is a long stairway, but we’re scaling it one step at a time. That’s an achievement to celebrate, but it would be happening faster if regressive religion weren’t trying to drag us back down.

Image: A 1959 protest against school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the signs reads, “Stop the Race Mixing March of the Anti-Christ”. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.