The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, by J. Russell Hawkins

Abstract

As I write this review, state legislatures across the United States vote to limit the work that public schools and even public universities can do to teach the nation’s history of racism, white supremacy, and Black resistance. J. Russell Hawkins examines the kind of history that many conservative nationalists want neither to hear nor to allow. It is, then, a pressing and timely read. The book focuses on segregationist theology and politics from 1955 to 1970 among South Carolina Southern Baptists and members of the Methodist Church (after 1968, the United Methodist Church). Hawkins makes two central arguments: first, that segregationist evangelicals’ politics followed their theology—that they read scripture and understood Christian orthodoxy in a way that drove their political engagement. Secondly, Hawkins argues that segregationist theology persisted, largely unchanged, even after the civil rights movement forced an outward shift in language and strategy, from segregationist rhetoric to a colour-blind family-values rhetoric.