How We Learned That Slavery Is Wrong

Alec Ryrie is the author of Protestants: The Faith That Made The Modern World. He has a new book out called Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. I will be reading and reviewing both books here in 2020. These lectures are basically chapters from his books.

It is worth noting that Ryrie is an Anglican professor. The Church of England recently blamed itself for the Holocaust. Less than 1 percent of British children now identify with the Church of England and 52 percent of people in Britain “belong to no religion.” British teenagers are more likely than almost any of their peers in the world to believe that their lives are meaningless. Anglicanism has essentially died from an overdose of liberalism and everything that he says must be taken with a grain of salt. Ryrie’s faith was incompatible in the long run with liberalism.

Is Protestant Christianity incompatible with racialism, white supremacy and slavery? This is an interesting question because in the United States we developed two rival Protestant cultures which came up with two different answers to the question even within evangelical Protestantism. The Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians split over slavery.

The truth is that Southern evangelical Christians used to have views about race which were far harder than our own. Abolitionism and liberalism only triumphed because the Union won the War Between the States. The Confederacy was just as convinced that God was on its side. Long after the War Between the States, evangelical Protestantism underpinned both the Lost Cause and the Jim Crow system in the South. Even in our own times, Southern evangelicals continue to have the hardest racial and cultural attitudes of any group in the United States.

Christian Zionism wasn’t a part of Southern evangelical Protestantism in the 19th century. Its roots can be traced back to the early 20th century and the development of radio and it only became the force that is today in the late 20th century due to televangelists. Conservatives channeled the backlash among Boomers to apocalyptic culture war defeats in the 1960s and 1970s into this stuff. The proper lesson here is that Christianity is always up for grabs in all ages and that it has been defined by liberals and Zionists in own times because those groups are socially dominant. They weren’t so dominant in the past and won’t be in the future.

Note: The Transatlantic Slave Trade is another example of how much harder Protestantism used to be before liberalism in the Early Modern Era. It was Christians who invented racialism and white supremacy in the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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40 Comments

  1. How do you explain Roger Williams, the liberal protestant and puritan who established Rhode Island in 1636, HW? It would seem he does not fit neatly into your historical timeline.

  2. You openly admit that Christianity like water takes on any shape that the elites desire. Protestant Christianity can morph into any ideology. Christian Identity lunatics, pederast episcopal priests, and “conservative” interracial sex advocates like John Piper all claim to be the True Christians living out the Gospel.
    In truth, German “Christians” rejected the Nicene Creed for Hitler’s new revelation. Post-Integration Southern cuckholds reject the theology of Robert Lewis Dabney and proudly advocate Martin Luther King Jr.’s new revelation of interracial sex and the bodily defilement of their daughters.
    Please engage with Christianity as it exists today. Do not veer into delusion by advocating that the Dissident Right become Absolutist Lutherans. The Lutheran Church today has more in common with Nadia Bolz-Weber than you. No mainstream church leaders openly support antisemitism or racial separatism like you and I.
    Today, the religious right is comprised of ethno-masochistic cuckholds like Russell Moore, Robert Jeffress, and David French. Never forget that in their eyes those who curse the state of Israel are cursed by God. Those emasculated men are the leaders of cuckservative Judeo-Christianity. Southern Christian leaders today support the following: interracial sex, feminism, anti-whiteness, anti-Confederate symbols, and Ultra-Zionism. You stand against all of them.
    If Christianity lacks a core message and is infinitely malleable, then why do you advocate for its revival? Perhaps, you value its utility as a social technology that restricts female promiscuity and promotes fertility, and you seek to infiltrate an existing institution, the Protestant church, instead of creating a new one.
    Why not reject these Jewish lies that brought the fall of the Roman Empire? Why not advocate for life-affirming, masculine pagan virtues instead of the life-denying creed of an effeminate, Jewish ascetic?

    • Good luck with that.

      IMO, it is weird White Nationalist LARP which is driven by alienation from society, and it is also based on a misreading of history. Christianity here in the South was “pro-White” only a generation ago. Racial differences were acknowledged. We had segregation. In fact, the only societies in which whiteness has ever mattered are Christian ones. Christianity has been malleable and has spawned everything from Seventh Day Adventists to Mormons to Pentecostals, but the core of it has remained intact.

      It’s true that paganism is flourishing in the United States. There is nothing masculine or pro-White though about Wiccans. There is nothing “pro-White” about paganism outside of circles of extremely alienated White Nationalists. Historically speaking, paganism had nothing to do with White identity. The connection between the two is a modern invention.

      • Frankly, you’re the one misreading history. It’s not “LARPing” to desire a return to a nature-ancestor based “religion” like that of our forebears. White Christianity may have had intrinsic “pro-white” attributes (for a while), but it was a Jewish poison pill from the start. Some things take time. Judeo-Christianity was forced upon the Aryan peoples of Europe at the point of a sword. They were totally conscious of their racial identity and its importance. Judeo-Christian universalism / egalitarianism destroyed that. Wiccanism is a red herring like “NAZIism” , it has nothing to do with anything.

        • 1.) There is no evidence that your “nature-ancestor based religion” had anything at all to do with race. Paganism had nothing to do with whiteness. There was no such thing as White identity at the time.

          2.) Insofar as White identity has ever mattered anywhere in all of European history, it was only in Christian states. It didn’t exist anywhere else. There was never a pagan country or an atheist country that was “pro-White” in any sense of the word.

          3.) The poison pill wasn’t Christianity. It was the materialism at the core of modern science. That’s why the whole problem only begins with the revival of materialism and can’t be found for roughly 1,600 years before that.

          4.) It is an ahistorical myth that pagans were conscious of their “racial identity.”

          5.) The vast majority of actual pagans in the United States are Wiccans.

          6.) “Judeo-Christian” universalism and egalitarianism never destroyed a mythical “pro-White” paganism.

          • I’m not going to enumerate a response here, almost seems hysterical. If you don’t think pre-Christian Europeans were racially conscious, then we’re historically too far apart to make any progress there. Historical Europe was Christianized (by force) you can’t rationally associate all European racial behavior with Christianity. That’s like saying imprisonment of criminals makes them violent. It’s not about wiccans or paganism, its about what religious foundation is best suited for people of European heritage. It ain’t Judeo-Christianity.

          • I’ve never seen any evidence of this.

            It strikes me as nothing but sheer romanticism. The Romans invented civic nationalism. In the Roman Empire, there were plenty of White people who were slaves and non-Whites who were Roman citizens. No one in Europe at the time thought of the Vikings as their White brothers. Where is the proof that pre-Christian Europeans were racially conscious? Where does this idea come from?

          • You really don’t believe the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Romans were racially conscious, HW? You really don’t think they were capable of developing a hostile attitude towards the jews and niggers because they didn’t have a universalist jewish messiah cult to believe in?

          • Rome invented civic nationalism.

            The Greeks certainly didn’t see all the barbarians to their north as their White birthers.

            The Greeks, Romans and Egyptians had some understanding of race, but that is not the same thing as White identity.

          • It was the materialism at the core of modern science.

            No, it was not, in any way, shape, nor form, “materialism.”

            The most pro-white, racist, pro-eugenics people in American history – the original Progressives – were materialists.

            It’s certainly true that there is nothing inherently anti-white in Christianity. “Paganism” – and “neo-paganism” – are stupid LARPs that are meaningless and no one takes that crap seriously. Christianity, neither Catholic nor Protestant, is the cause of anti-whiteness. Nor is it social “liberalism.” A good case can be made that global capitalism (which is a form of liberalism) and imperialism drive a lot of mass non-white immigration.

            But it’s not “materialism” nor secularism that is the root of anti-whiteness.

            It’s Ashkenazi power that is the root of modern American anti-whiteness. No, it’s not a “single cause” of all of our problems. But the modern “anti-racist” anti-whiteness is basically a Jewish movement.

            Frankly, almost everything else is a distraction. We’d still have cheap-labor pro-immigration Chamber of Commerce conservative Republicans even without the Ashkenazis. But there would never be the level of hatred of whitey without the Ashkenazis.

            Neither blacks nor mestizos hate European peoples like Ashkenazis do.

          • Christianity was around for 16 centuries before liberalism.

            Where does liberalism come from? Why does it emerge in 17th century Western Europe? What changed? The thing that changed was modern science which is based on naturalism, materialism and empiricism. This is what all the earliest liberal thinkers were reacting to in their times. This is the source of the departure that is all of modern philosophy which begins with Descartes.

          • Muh pagan oak tho, HW. Muh pagan oak.

            Nature religions as such are primitive and gay. We have developed beyond that, and no longer need to kill small animals and waste beer in ironic sacrifices.

            I also think Christianity is dead. Christians killed it.

            The root of what both traditional paganism and Christianity were, had a foundation in natural law. That is to say, both were grounded in truth and the reality of how things are, rather than an abstracted conception of how they ought to be.

            Regarding Ancestor worship, knowing my family like I do, even as little as I do, the last thing I owe them is reverence. But I love them, and they are here with me.

            What we need, is to all stop bullshitting eachother and ourselves about all the things that have failed us, because they have long since abandoned the basic nature of how things are and no longer make any kind of sense.

            The answer is not in symbols and affectations, or the personality cults of big orange boomer fucks who don’t keep their word.

            Neither is it in the nihilism and secular faggotry promoted by the corpse of the Altright.

            A new synthesis is required.

            We have come far enough in our science to know that there is alot beyond our senses, which we cannot account for. I have felt and experienced real darkness, physically manifest. I’ve heard the walls crawl around me when I was alone, and seen the spectre of that nameless menace that lurks at the corner of your eye, just out of focus. It scares me that I don’t understand these things. But, I do know these things are real. That makes them a part of nature, even if they are parts that are scary. There is more to this natural world than our simple means can account for. People know these things intuitively and the people most honest about it are usually the ones we discount as bumpkins.

            The old ways are coming back because they can no longer be denied. Maybe the long suffering natural affinity that our people have for the spiritual will finally wake up again. Maybe the cynicism of our modern age will perish in time for a revival, at least for Whitey.

            An understanding of the spiritual aspect of this thing, grounded in reality and natural law is what we all need.

            Wearing a Thors hammer necklace and wasting beer isn’t going to make you happy if you had the IQ to be a part of this thing in the first place.

            Neither is submitting to the various and sclerotic clerics of a dead religion, whatever flavor you subscribe to.

            There has never been a more pressing need than to honestly address this issue.

            I agree with HW regarding how things were, recently. I just don’t think they are that way still. The trajectory of history isnt linear in its rate of progression. It progresses exponentially based on increasingly rapid iterational variations of theme based on the zeitgeist of the age. Punctuated velocity. We are nearing an asymptote and shit is moving fast. It isn’t always that way. It is right now though. Everything is moving fast toward an inevitable crescendo. This is why people always feel like they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instictively we know that we are nearing the end of an age.

            What we have been doing has failed. Thats all folks need to know its time to reconsider the efficacy of their approach.

      • My comments were too harsh. TBH, I strongly sympathize with your ideological struggle, and your commentary never fails to provide insight. I was raised in a SBC church. Every Sunday, my pastor’s daughter stood beside her black boyfriend in the front pew. The flag of the American Empire and Israel stood imposingly behind the podium where feminist and philosemitic sermons were delivered. These Southerners would routinely pray to Yahweh to save the Jews and racial minorities from their persecution. This spiritual dependency on a set of scriptures alien to our people degrades us. The Bible centers the history of man upon a wandering tribe of goat herders and contains too many internal contradictions and historical inaccuracies to count.
        However, I do not advocate for white nationalism nor the degenerate ideology of lesbian Wiccans. White people are not a nation. Racial nationalism is an oxymoron as a race is not a nation. A nation is a homogeneous people group that share a common ancestry and ideology. White, or European descended, citizens of the USG do not share a culture, history, or destiny. I am an southerner of Anglo-Celtic or Nordic stock. I have very little in common with a Sicilian who lives in the heart of NYC. You are certainly correct about Whitemanistan. It doesn’t and will never exist except as a thought experiment in Richard Spencer’s perverted imagination. I hope that Nordic men like us will establish an international religion that protects our people spiritually from self-induced genocide, miscegenation, sexual perversion, recreational drugs, and feminism: the social utility that Germanic Christianity once provided. We must develop a new and improved social technology that corrects the mistakes of Christianity. I know that you have read Nietzsche. We cannot return to 1861 and expect a different outcome. The South is dead. The American Dream is dead. We must look to new horizons like our Hyperborean ancestors once dared.

        • I agree it is awful.

          I was raised as a Methodist. I was quickly alienated from that and became an atheist. I love history though and when you step outside of our times you can see that pretty much all of this is of very, very recent origin. There is no such thing as a perfect system. Any system is only as good as the people who live in the present. The enemy has infested and perverted ALL institutions in our society, not simply the churches. They took over the universities long before the churches.

          As cucked and awful as the Southern Baptists are today, they were literally the last major institution in society to buy into this “racism” nonsense and apologize for slavery. It wasn’t until the 1990s that this happened. The Southern Baptist elites have gone along with the mainstream culture. They haven’t spearheaded these cultural changes.

          • HW, I agree with your logic. All institutions converged with Jewish anti-white male hegemony. This program operated from the top down, and it is unfair to blame Christianity alone. However, we have clearly observed the failure of the Church to collectively defend us from the anti-white, Philosemitic ideology of the enemy. The Church evidently lacks the antibiotic language and virility to fight against the pathogens of miscegenation and racial equality. Currently, Christian leaders teach racial reconciliation which promotes interracial sex and friendships. Unfortunately, the future growth of Christianity will be concentrated in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Interfaith marriages will be increasingly interracial.
            I know that you have thought more intensely about our cultural crisis and as a result, possess more wisdom than me. As a leader, you most likely are more socially skilled and knowledgeable than me. However, I cannot understand why you want to replicate a failed strategy. We have experimented with this religious technology. It failed. Instead of attempting to revive the AIDS-ridden corpse of Judeo-Christianity, let’s try to build something new. HW, what do you think?

      • The South was pro-white IN THE FACE OF CHRISTIANITY – DESPITE CHRISTIANITY.

        Wow! Yikes!

        I get it. People are Christian. They were raised that way and don’t think much about it – like speaking English, or even better, an accent, or even better, childhood obesity. That isn’t going to change any time soon. But let’s at least get causality correct.

        Take a poll of Christians world-wide, how many would be “pro white”? Almost none. How many would cite Christianity as a reason why? Almost all.

        The Southern culture is an expression of the Aryan Expansion that started 6 to 8K years ago: hierarchical, honor based, aristocratic, agrarian, militaristic, committed to Order, an unabashedly Aryan – an Expansion in which Christianity was a retarding force except when it was too weak to retard.

        A retarding force created by Hellenistic Jews (Josephus, Berenice, Agrippa, Tiberius Alexander, Uncle Philo) when they were occupied by the Rome of the Julio-Claudians.

      • Christianity has little to do with White Identity. White Christians were busy beavers proselytizing non-Whites into their faith everywhere they conquered. Christian Whites didn’t pray, “Thank you Lord for our White victory over the dark savages.”

        White Idenity and Christianity merged with Aryan Nation’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian (Christian Identitymovement) in the 1980s under the direction of Pastor Butler in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

        Science freed us from much ignorance. Science consists of observing the world by watching, listening, and recording. Science is curiosity in action about the world and how it behaves. Science isn’t an issue of left or right (leftist professors get shekels for grants more often thanks to the post-WWII jews in academia). Science is a set of best practices of inquiry, shaped by great minds over hundreds of generations, in order to help us understand any and all phenomena in the universe.

        What pisses Christians off is that science ate from the “Tree of Knowledge.” That’s a big ‘no no.’ We must remain stupid and benighted forever.

    • A. Whiteman makes the typical flawed argument that pagans always make, “modern Christian culture is flawed, so the whole thing is flawed and should be denounced.” They won’t make that same argument about Europe though, “the current state of Europe is pozzed so the whole thing should be discarded.”

      America was built by WASPs. That is a very specific ethno-religious group. Not just “Whites” and not just “Christians.” Definitely NOT pagan. America still has the most Protestants in the world. The South is where they live. So naturally, pagans can fuck off back to paganville. Their whining is identical to the jew: outsiders who hate us and want to destroy us. Fuck off pagan scum, this is not your home.

  3. Slavery was an African institution that Americans adopted for a few hundred years, until Christians stamped it out. It was wrong because it harmed Americans. Imagine if there was no slavery in North America. There would be no Africans here. The Southern plantation class were wrong and their evil continues to harm America today. The problem wasn’t the War of Northern Aggression so much – the problem is that African slavery wasn’t stamped out sooner.

    White supremacy was always an unstable system that would fall one way or another. Blaming “liberalism” is absurd, it was the right-wing, conservative Plantation class that hated whites and needed an authoritarian system to keep their African servants in line. African slavery kept the South from industrializing and enriched a tiny minority of race-mixers via cheap agricultural imports. The Dixie Plantation class were the anti-white oligarchs of their day. They were “spiritually Jewish.” They wanted to kidnap whites and enslave them right next to their African slaves.

    • How so?

      Did slavery end in the American South like it did in Haiti? No, it was crusading White liberals who abolished slavery and changed the Constitution itself in order to incorporate blacks as citizens.

      • Even Lincoln wanted to send the African slaves back to Africa. Most of the whites against slavery wanted the blacks sent back. The Radical Republicans weren’t even particularly popular in the North. Groups like the Quakers were always a minority. The entire conflict started because the Planters wanted to populate the entire continent with their pet Africans.

        After the war, the Plantation class just put the Africans back to work but had to pay them some pittance and had to allow them to leave if they wanted.

        Yes, just imagine if Dixie suffered the same fate as Haiti.

        Throughout history, when one ethnic group enslaves another it’s only a matter of time until there is a reversal of fortunes. Dixie isn’t even close to unique.

        North America would be a White utopia if it weren’t for the Planters and their pet Negros.

        • Lincoln only pretended to want to send the slaves back to Africa because he needed to hold the Border States to win the war. He also pretended for years that he really wasn’t opposed to slavery where it existed. He was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth for giving his last speech which was about enfranchising blacks in Louisiana. The Radical Republicans were liberals who changed the Constitution to enfranchise blacks. They wrote liberalism into the Constitution itself in the 14th Amendment.

          Dixie didn’t suffer the same fate as Haiti. Slave rebellions were extremely rare here and were easily squashed. The downfall of the planter class wasn’t caused by the blacks. It was caused by the Union with the Northern states. As for the White utopia of the Northern states, you are forgetting that blacks were citizens in New England and people there were outraged by the Dred Scott decision that said that only Whites were citizens. No one forced them to repeal their own miscegenation laws, integrate their own states, change the entire Constitution so that we all have to live under “equal protection of the laws.”

          • you are forgetting that blacks were citizens in New England

            There weren’t enough blacks to matter. There were, like, two black families in Vermont. No one cared.

            It was the Dixie Planters that cursed America with blacks because of their conservative, liberal, pro-free trade, pro-capitalism, pro-usury religion.

            If I had known this, I would have picked my own damned cotton.

          • And none that would have necessary, if Southerners planted and picked the crops they grew,instead of using African slaves and Whites in indentured servitude (of which many perished, before their “contract” expired).

    • I wholeheartedly agree. Sam Dickson said as much. Sam and I both descend from “spiritually Jewish” plantation owners that valued cheap labor and cotton profits over racial integrity and the long term good of the Southern people. Knowing my family’s history, I have no doubt that one of my paternal ancestors impregnated a black slave. Many blacks still carry my last name. Truly, Ralph Northam, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter are the ideological heirs of Planter capitalist politicians. They justify capitalism through their paternalistic treatment towards blacks. They have done their utmost to recreate the neo-plantation: a thriving white and Jewish capitalist class, a struggling, poorly-protected white middle class, and a large underclass of cheap black labor. The decisions of my ancestors have caused me to live among uncivilized Africans as “equals.” Compared to the North, the South lagged behind in technological innovation, income equality, quality of life, and intellectual achievement due to their implementation of the Bermuda plantation system. Unfortunately, “The New South” is increasingly resembling the Old South.

  4. Glass’ book “Strangers in Zion” is also an indispensable work in detailing the transition in the south from southern cultural Christianity, to northern, fundamentalist culture that happened from 1900 to 1950…tent-revival-styled propagandizing from one side, and increasingly secularized liberalism from universities and seminaries on the other.

    “Who hath done this!?” asks William Blake. “Thy ministers hath done this!”

    I’d add that dogma is just as much an institution as any brick-and-mortar building of the same title…and like the brick-and-mortar institutions, it can be captured and turned to the purposes of the capturing spirit.

    Neither words in a confession nor words in a constitution can solidify an institution…it must be spirit or nothing…

    (Why Donald Davidson opened his infamous defense of the south with a surprising defense of poetry.)

    • Like clockwork. I just knew someone was going to go to the jewish testaments to justify Southern plantation slavery.

      Maybe yahweh should have etched an eleventh commandment. Thou shall make use slavery in my name.

      I suppose White taxpayer slavery for negro gibs is okay because it’s written in the bible, eh?

      • At least you can’t argue this way and also claim to be a “socialist”.

        You ought to respect Southern spirit and culture, even their arguments to justify their society…if for no other reason than you’re posting in a community where, for at least a few of us, that culture and spirit remains strong and passionately held.

        How kids could find government-school materialism more inspiring and persuasive than Southern spirit, I’ll never understand.

      • Actually, i was using the bible to try and show that southern slavery was not the same as biblical slavery. Biblical servants were treated much better.

    • That sermon was so cringeworthy you ought to be publicly flogged for posting it.

      For those unable to discern spirits, here’s a rule of thumb: any white man, standing in front of a congregation in the past 50 years, speaking about this issue, is automatically suspect.

      Take a step back and study “worldviews”…then you’ll see how obvious it is that this man, like all modernist Christian apologists, is not defending Christianity. Rather, he’s wiggling hard to try and make God’s holy and precious word, palatable to neo-jacobin lunatics…of whom, he is chief.

      Please note how he never argues against Southern slavery. It’s assumed evil from the outset. Not even Satanists like Sam Harris present a case against it…they just assert it’s wrong then engage in foppish hand-waving if a Christian disagrees.

      Would to God I had been in that audience when he asked for a show of hands from all those willing to defend the institution.

      “Sir, not only do I reject the idea that Southern slavery was evil, I strongly assert it was a positive good!”

      • How can southern slavery be a positive good? if it caused splitting up of families, rape, torture, treating humans like garbage.

        Not that every slave owner was a monster and did these things, but enough of them did. I am sure that if you were the slave you would not be calling it a positive good.

        Being pro white doesn’t mean that one must say that slavery was good.

  5. I’ll leave a few brief comments for you to consider:

    – It’s wrong to seek the end of an institution just because there are sinners in it. Men beat their wives yet the “family” remains a holy institution. So arguing that evil men exist and exploit institutions is not an argument against institutions.

    – You’ve imbibed a healthy dose of Hollywood propaganda about every-day life in the South. You may not have to be pro-slavery to be pro-white, but you had *better* have strength of mind enough to challenge government-school indoctrination, and you had also better have the courage to romanticize your ancestors. They weren’t perfect but you cannot honestly, as a Christian, claim our world of drag-queen story-hour and the massive slaughter of unborn infants, is preferable to the “evil” “rape-filled” American South.

    – As to me changing my mind if i were a slave, this (often repeated mantra) belies a misunderstanding of the entire issue. I *am* currently a slave, thanks to Yankee imperialism!

    The first premise in the pro-slavery argument is that slavery can *never* be abolished. Setting aside prisons, military inscription, heavily-enforced contractual obligations, and the like, we still have the broader notion of “wage-slavery” and the persistence of economic class. There will *always* be a peasant class – a class of men whose primary labor is governed by others. No amount of modernist, economic, magic can undo this state of human affairs.

    …better, by far, then, to have the governing of this “peasant class” (call it what you must), decentralized and regulated by a strong system of Christian social mores, rather than entrusted to impersonal bureaucracy and the “invisible hand” of capital. (And yes, slaves in the old south had horizontal mobility, comparable to the horizontal mobility of modern wage-slaves…and perhaps as much or more upward mobility).

    I’ll give you the last word here (if you wish to respond), and note that, if you’re really passionate about the issue, you ought to visit my blog (linked above), since I’m one of the few remaining men in the world with the courage to defend such a Godly institution.

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