Andrew Himes > Quotes

“From my limited and immature child’s point of view, Heaven was therefore populated almost exclusively by white people who lived in the United States of America, along with the original disciples of Jesus, an uncalculated number of genuine Christians who had lived throughout the ages, and many but not all of those mentioned in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which I first read at the age of eight when I found it on my parents’ book shelf.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Influenced by Wesley and the revival movement, Englishman William Wilberforce led the successful movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Charles G. Finney, known as “America’s foremost revivalist,” was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Charles G. Finney, known as “America’s foremost revivalist,” was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney was a fiery, entertaining, and spontaneous preacher, and was widely influential among millions of Americans. In addition, however, Finney was deeply concerned with social justice. He was an abolitionist leader who frequently denounced slavery from his pulpit and denied communion to slaveholders. He was president of Oberlin, the first college in America to educate black and white men and women in the same classrooms.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Part of the explanation for John R. Rice’s obliviousness to the evils of racial injustice is provided by African-American author Joy DeGruy Leary in her landmark 2005 book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Leary described how former slaves and their descendants continued to experience the damage inflicted by slavery as a permanent traumatic injury for generations after the end of slavery. The aftermath of slavery was a continuing powerlessness, a pervasive sense of being disrespected, a lack of opportunity, and an internalized self-hatred taught to each new generation of black children. The consequences of slavery for the descendants of slaves included poor physical and mental health, difficulty in creating healthy families and relationships, and self-destructive impulses.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“A majority of colonial Americans were either Protestants or unaffiliated with any church. However, many of the leaders of the American Revolution and signers of its Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were Deists, along with James Madison, John Adams, and possibly Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Alexander Hamilton. Most Deists believed in a supreme being who had created the universe along with the natural laws that governed it, but who then took a relatively hands-off approach to human affairs. The supreme being of the Deists could be apprehended by practical investigation and the use of reason to understand natural laws. Religious faith was not needed, nor were miracles, divine inspiration, or personal revelations of God’s spirit.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The focus on social and racial justice that strongly marked John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Charles G. Finney, Jonathan Blanchard, Charles Spurgeon, and other evangelical leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries was absent from the millions of words and scores of books John R. Rice penned during his lifetime.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“For more than 100 years, indeed, dating back to the 1700s, evangelical Christians had cultivated a tradition of working to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth and of confronting social injustice. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and the most eloquent and influential evangelical preacher of the 18th century, fought to shorten the work day and remove abuses and oppression in factories and mines, supported the self-organization of workers into unions, created orphanages, and supported laws to protect children and women and end poverty.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The revival movement was responsible for a tremendous spread of Christianity among slaves in the South. Slaves came in their thousands to camp meetings organized mainly by Baptists and Methodists, where they listened to the same sermons, succumbed to the same transports of emotion, and pledged themselves to the same spiritual renewal as white revivalists. At times white slave owners were known to undergo conversion at a revival meeting and then decide to free their slaves.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Despite John R. Rice’s dislike of the Klan, he was the son of his father, a Southerner born and bred. He had grown up in a culture bathed in the ideology, politics, and religion of race. He had been taught as a child that God ordained the subordination of some races and the superiority of other races. He was born in Gainesville, Cooke County, Texas, only three decades after the end of the Civil War, and he had been raised 110 miles west of Gainesville in Dundee, Archer County, a place where only white people lived. He had never attended school with a person of color, other than, perhaps, when he briefly attended graduate school at the University of Chicago. He had attended only segregated churches with white congregations, and there is no evidence that any black person ever heard him preach in a revival meeting or at one of the churches he pastored during the first two decades of his career.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Norris’s politics fit well with the Klan because he had a holistic view of how race, religion, morality, and politics fit together. Commenting on an interracial marriage that took place at a church in New York, Norris said, “I can name to you a people south of the Mason-Dixon Line that if a Negro should take a white girl’s hand in marriage that girl would be without a Negro husband before the sun arose the next morning.” Furthermore, said Norris, he would gladly perform the funeral. [100]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Two more decades would pass before I discovered, almost by chance, that my own great-grandfather had been a Klansman.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Although Rice’s earthly racial and political ideas drove him away from the struggle for justice in the South, the heavenly core of his faith was just enough to also drive him away from the Klan and his father Will Rice’s racial politics, and to leave him open to the claims of black people for justice on earth. His opposition to integration was oddly conditional.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The new Republican Party was formed to denounce the act and stop the expansion of slavery, and the abolitionists began to clean their rifles and grease their wagon wheels.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“From Rice’s point of view, he was sincerely taking a moderate and even-handed position, calling to task “extremists” on both sides of the civil rights struggle. “Race hatred is wrong,” he concluded. “It is just as wrong when stirred up by Negro newspapers against white people as it is when stirred up by white people against Negroes…It is just as wrong when stirred up in a church by a modernist infidel preacher as it is when it is stirred up in the South by an over-zealous defender of southern white womanhood and the status quo.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressed his belief that Hitler’s moves against German Jews were unfortunately necessary because they had used their strengths “for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people,” and he charged that “since the war some 200,000 Jews from Russia and other Eastern places had come to Germany. Most of these were Communist agitators against the government.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“I had heard so-called “Christian” military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to “defeat Communism,” thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago youth, visited a small town in the Delta country of Mississippi. The teenager entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Within a day Till was dead, so savagely beaten that it was beyond the ability of his mother to recognize her son. Two white men were arrested: Roy Bryant, the husband of the white woman, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam.” An all-white jury quickly found the defendants not guilty, and they were released. The two men immediately provided an interview for Look magazine in which they openly admitted to and bragged about committing the crime.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“In September of 1952, Rice announced a cooperating board for the Sword of the Lord Foundation designed to be a who’s who of the evangelical movement, tantamount to a national governing body for evangelicals. The board included the most prominent evangelical pastors, evangelists, college presidents, publishers, and broadcasters in the country: Billy Graham; Raymond Edman, president of Wheaton College; Pat and Bernie Zondervan, publishers; Louis Talbott, president of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles; Bob Jones Sr. of Bob Jones University; and Robert Cook, president of Youth for Christ.[151]”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The first Baptist missionaries had reached Texas in 1812 in company with the first white American settlers who crossed the Red River. By 1848, there still were only 950 Baptists in the state, 250 of them black slaves. Baptists were a somewhat radical sect in those days. They believed that blacks and whites were all the children of God, equal in the sight and judgment of God, and equally deserving of salvation, so Baptist missionaries were sent out to both the slaves and to the whites.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“In 1871 the campaign of lies, terror, and intimidation of black voters was a success. Black voters in Texas simply disappeared from the polls, and the Democrats swept the elections for Congress. Within two years the Democrats in Texas had an unbreakable lock on the legislature and all statewide offices, and most of the gains in the areas of civil rights, social justice, education, and tax reform had been turned back.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Evangelicals believed that in the sight of God all were equally sinners in need of salvation, all equally redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, all in need of divine grace. The evangelical belief in the “universal priesthood of believers” implied that among Christians there was no hierarchy, no justifiable distinction among people of different races, different classes, or different sexes, and there could be no interposition of a priest of the church between believers and their God.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“However, Rice went on to say that while Jim Crow laws ought to be abolished, “many things are worse than these, and most intelligent people would prefer to have Jim Crow laws than to have unrestrained intermarriage between the races.” The problems with integration were practical, Rice believed. Negroes were “not inherently inferior”; however, Negroes were unfortunately “not morally advanced” compared to white people. For example, Rice said, “Some years ago in Atlanta, Georgia…a check proved that venereal disease was 10 times as frequent among Negroes as among white people…Now suppose that the question of whether white people and Negro people should use the same swimming pools in the parks of Atlanta comes up.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“By the early 21st century, the most profound consequence of globalization and the culture of the Internet has been an expansion of our understanding of who our neighbors are. Ideas and influences can travel around the world and touch the lives of millions within seconds.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“The opposition of fundamentalist preachers and leaders to the civil rights movement was deeply connected to their historic separatism. They believed in an inerrant Bible that had been inspired by God, and they also believed that God explicitly ordained the separation of the races. The claims of the civil rights marchers were an affront to their interpretation of the Bible, and not just to their racial beliefs.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“It was the work of all true Christians, Wesley urged, to act as instruments of God for the suppression of slavery.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Slavery in law had been abolished, but slavery in fact continued until after World War II, and was accomplished and supported through violence, brutality, imprisonment, torture, denial of civil and human rights, and enforced poverty.”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

“Billy Graham’s success in finding a way to move beyond the outmoded racial politics and strained racial theology of the Old South would be a model for the rise of the Religious Right and its leaders, including Jerry Falwell in the 1980s and 90s.  ”
― Andrew Himes, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family