In an interview recorded in 2019, Brad talks with Dr. Kelly J. Baker, author of the award-winning book "Gospel According to the Klan." They talk about how and why the Klan's story is THE story of white Protestant America and how the Klan is an important antecedent to the modern-day Religious Right.
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My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am super, super thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Kelly J. Baker.
For as many hats, I'm just going to mention a few.
She's the Editor of Women in Higher Education.
She's also the Managing Editor of Disability Acts, which is a magazine for disability essays, screeds, and manifestos.
Freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, The Chronicle, and many other outlets, and the author of several award-winning books, including Grace Period, A Memoir in Pieces, Sexism Ed, Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia, and the book we're going to talk about today, Gospel According to the Klan, the KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915 to 1930.
So, Dr. Kelly J. Baker, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm excited.
So, I wondered if we could just start, you know, we want to talk today about how, in ways that might surprise many of our listeners, the KKK was sort of thoroughly influenced, and one could say imbued with Christianity and Christian Protestantism, and to tell the story of the KKK according to your scholarship really means to tell the story of American Christianity in some sense.
I just want our listeners to know this is like a super fanboy moment for me because I teach Dr. Kelly J. Baker's book, Gospel According to the Klan, in my Religion and Politics classes.
And so it's like, this is really a thrill for me.
And I just, I wondered if you could do something that I do with my students, which is to say, could we just start with a kind of basic outline of the KKK?
When did the modern day Klan develop and what were the factors driving its growth?
Sure.
So the first thing to know about the Klan is that it's had a number of different reincarnations in American history.
The first, the Reconstruction Klan, happens after the Civil War, very clearly as a response to African American enfranchisement.
So this nervousness over what happens if formerly enslaved people suddenly have rights that are the same as white citizens.
And that organization had a Christian identity attached to it, but was more concerned about the racial structure of the U.S. and very committed to acts of terrorism to sort of enforce this racial order, right, where whites remained on top and everyone else where whites remained on top and everyone else was not.
The clan that I focus on is the 1920s clan, which started in the 19-teens and lasted to 1930, as the subtitle of my book so helpfully points out.
And that order was different than the first one because it was remarkably more mainstream, millions and millions of members in the U.S.
in all of the 48 continental states.
And the founders of this order understood that America as a nation was only a nation that worked if it was also a Christian nation.
So that for them, faith and nation were remarkably intertwined, right?
So that God had favored America, particularly white people in America.
And the history then was let's follow these amazing white Christian men primarily right through American history and be so excited about what they've accomplished very selective storytelling here that.
Supportive narratives about faith being important, Christianity being important, masculinity, all these sorts of things.
And so for them, they really made explicit some of the things that the first Klan didn't, which is that Protestantism was essential to American culture.
And that to be a good member of the Klan, you had to be a Protestant Christian, not a Catholic, right?
And had to understand that your patriotism was, in a lot of ways, built upon that.
That we had to understand that there were Christian homes, and you train your children in this, that Christian manhood, right, is the way that you handle yourself, and these sorts of things.
So for them, it was very much tied together, and both of these were also in relationship with white supremacy.
So for them, the piece here is that faith actually justified white supremacy, and nationalism justified white supremacy, and then white supremacy, of course, like, reflected back on these two as well, right?
So it's not that they care about what's happening with black Protestants, right?
They care what's happening with white Protestants.
And we can talk a little bit more about that order, as I'm sure we will, as the conversation continues.
After that order dies down, you see clan activity again in the 50s and 60s.
Particularly over issues of integration and concerns over what Brown versus Board is going to do, right?
Particularly with schools and also more largely with what it means to have an integrated society and what that will mean for the privileges of white people.
Again, right?
Like this nervousness over, you know, if someone else gains a part of American rights and equality, right, a piece of the American pie, then somebody is going to have to give up.
And this deep concern that white people are going to be the ones to do this.
That order was still religious, but again, the white supremacy piece is at the forefront of it.
And also the component of racial terrorism is very much the piece here too, is that when we think about the 50s and 60s clans, we almost instantly think of violence, right?
Racial violence, bombings, right?
Riots, murders of different activists.
These are very much a piece of that history.
And I think part of the thing, too, is that when we're talking about the Klan, the Klan that stands out in our mind is that Klan.
So when I was doing my research, everybody's like, oh, you know, all the Klans are remarkably overtly violent, right?
They're all involved in these sorts of things.
And then you kind of dig through the 1920s Klan and you say, oh, it's really different.
But that image of the Klan as Committing acts of terror, having this violence, having this really nasty language about white supremacy that was so obvious and so blatant, really informs how we interpret them.
And then the latter-day clans, I don't know that I should use that language, but it kind of works here.
I had a moment where I was like, wait, maybe that's not how I want to refer to it.
Let's say the clans, the more modern clans, right, are here.
Since I just created a whole new movement in some sort of way with my language.
In the 80s and 90s, became more polished, understood themselves in this sort of David Duke style that, you know, you go through politics, right?
You sort of present yourself as this respectable white supremacy, which did harken back to the 20s too, where it's very much respectable white supremacy.
Modern clans don't do so well after, like, the 90s.
There was a little bit of a resurgence after Obama's election of white supremacist movements more largely, but not as much of the clan.
So the clan, for better and worse, is stuck with its image of being a racist hate group, which is not wrong, but have a harder time than other white supremacist movements negotiating in our society now.
So that was a really, it was a Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
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