Lost Cause Ideology Helped Preserve Claims of White Superiority Following the Confederacy’s Defeat
To illustrate how utterly insane Southern white supremacists are one need only to look at their own words before and after the Civil War., not mine THEIRS. The racist White preachers of the “Lost Cause” strongly believed that enslaving human beings produced order and morality within the Black population. Black people were either looked upon as property or as “heathens” in need of being “saved.”
However, when the end of slavery took place and the southern slave owners lost the war they came up with all kinds of excuses to justify why they lost. These excuses ranged from religious reasons to that of incompetent leaders on the battlefield. The idea of a “Lost Cause” also tried to erase why they went to war, and it was not because of “Northern Aggression,” but it was because the wealthy planters were afraid of losing their slaves while poor Whites thought they would become the equals of Blacks if slavery ended.
Paternalism After Reconstruction
The wealthy plantation owners used White preachers to claim that Blacks were made “civilized” with slavery. They also had extreme fear that Black men would begin to take advantage of their so-called “pure” White women. After Reconstruction, this explains why segregation became the substitute for slavery. The ministers of the “Lost Cause” philosophy saw their new system after slavery as one of paternalism, which was the idea that Blacks were like children and needed White fathers to tell them what to do. Episcopal preachers, and Robert E. Lee was a follower, advanced the idea that Whites needed to be in control of Black education as a way to create a new form of White racist discipline since slavery had declined.
This is why white supremacists like James Steptoe Johnston founded St. Philips College. One must remember that the religion of the wealthy slave owners was Episcopalian.
Robert E. Lee belonged to an Episcopalian Church and was even a member of one in San Antonio for a time.
Education and the Lost Cause
Blacks were to be forced to learn vocational skills only, and those skills were to service the needs of Whites, a replacement for slavery. The “Lost Cause” idea was a way for White southerners to retain an identity of superiority in light of being crushed by the North and Black soldiers. In this way, Christianity and the Confederacy were able to keep a form of slavery by funding and supporting Black schools that only taught what they wanted to be taught. This slave owner-Christian connection taught historical lies and even went so far as to name a Sunday school the “Stonewall Jackson Sunday School.”
This Lost Cause insanity was enhanced with monuments to the fallen slave army with gigantic statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other bigots.
White Supremacy in the 21st Century
It stands to reason that the racism created by the defeated South would find religion as a good place to hide. It is logical to conclude that the brainwashed in the country are still living in a creed developed by white supremacists and this explain how Trump is able to pull this way of thinking out of Confederate graveyards even in the 21st Century.
Robert E. Lee was made into a god that carried the bigots forward into battle even after he was dead. The Episcopal Bishop Theodore Bratton was quoted as saying, “The South above any other section represents Anglo-Saxon, native-born America.” This mentality is back with the “Great Replacement Theory” and why they do not people of color crossing the border. White supremacy was the primary component of southern heritage and this is what they hide.
