I have been sitting on this essay for a couple of years. It is an essay that Emma Williams and I co-wrote in my Lillian E. Smith and Christian Nationalism course two years ago. During that class, we wrote “Christian Nationalism Hurts the Children It Clams to Protect” in Religion Dispatches, and this essay arose, partly, out of that article. Initially, we wanted to submit this essay to either an edited collection or a journal. We submitted it to a journal, but it didn’t land. Since then it has been sitting on my desktop. We think that this article is important, and rather than waiting to share it via a journal or in some other venue, we are choosing to publish it here. This was first envisioned as an academic article, so it carries that format with it.

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Lillian Smith burst onto the literary scene in 1944 with the publication of her debut novel Strange Fruit, a novel about an interracial relationship between a Black woman, Nonnie Anderson, and a white man, Tracy Deen, in Maxwell, Georgia, a fictionalized town on the border between Georgia and Florida where Smith was born. The novel sold well, and it caused a storm, with cities such as Detroit and Boston banning it for being obscene due to the use of one four letter word in the book. However, they banned it because it held a mirror up to white society, causing individuals to examine themselves in the process, specifically Christians.

Writing to Walter White in February 1942, a letter which White would forward to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Smith told White that the theme of the novel “is basically concerned with the effect upon not only lives but minds and emotions which the concept of race in the South has” (How 55). A key part of Smith’s examination of the effects of racism on individuals, both the oppressed and the oppressor, focuses on the church. She continued, “It is an indictment of the church in the South and I imagine the thesis is fairly apparent that the author doesn’t think it is possible for a white person to be a Christian in the South” (55). In a letter to Frank Taylor, editor of Reynal and Hitchcok, Smith told him that Strange Fruit “is . . . the story of the conflict between our white culture and Christianity” (72).

In the novel, Tracy Deen’s mother enlists the help of Preacher Dunwoodie, a traveling tent revival preacher, in saving her son. At the end of a drive together, Tracy tells the preacher about his relationship with Nonnie and her pregnancy, and the preacher tells him to sow his wild oats, find a Black man to marry Nonnie, and to marry the white Dot Pusey, the daughter of a store owner in town. Tracy initially rejects Dunwoodie’s advice, but later he comes to the revival meeting and gets saved so that he can marry Dot. At the revival meeting, Dunwoodie ruminates that even though Tracy got saved and mill workers converted, it would not be successful “until the prominent citizens” came down the aisle because they would “be counted upon for the major financial support of the church” (249). Dunwoodie cares more about the conversion of the wealthy citizens than others because they will ultimately use their wealth, power, and prestige to support and elevate his own position.

Standing at the pulpit, Dunwoodie scrolled through a list of “prominent citizens” he sought to convert from the editor of the newspaper, who he knew would not convert, to store owners, bankers, and more. The most important man to Dunwoodie, though, was “L.D. Stephenson, member of the State Legislature’’ (249). Stephenson could possibly become governor one day, and if that happened, Dunwoodie would have a connection to the most powerful man in Georgia politics. Dunwoodie’s desire to convert these men, specifically Stephenson, points to his desire to have access to power in order to secure power. In this manner, he would be able to pull the levers and inform legislation.

For Smith, Stephenson would be Mr. Rich White, the one with the money and means to manipulate the system to benefit him. Those millworkers and even Dunwoodie would be what Smith would call Mr. Poor White. In the allegorical “Two Men and a Bargain,” Smith details the plan that Mr. Rich White has to use Mr. Poor White as foot soldiers that will support Mr. Rich White, making him more money and solidifying his power. Mr. Rich White tells Mr. Poor White that the latter can control everything from schools to the pulpit as long as he doesn’t touch the money. Thus, Mr. Poor White “told the preachers what they could preach and how they could preach and how they must preach it-except about money. (Mr. Rich White told them about money.)” (Killers 182–183). Dunwoodie and the allegorical Mr. Poor White embody what we now call Christian nationalism, the use of Christianity, wrapped in patriotism, to acquire or maintain power.

Over the past few years, since the nomination and election of Donald Trump, we have seen a proliferation of both scholarly and mainstream media work on Christian nationalism and its impact on society. Long before the term Christian nationalism made its way into the national consciousness, Smith addressed it head on through her writing. She did not call it Christian nationalism, but she did directly confront the ways that Christianity, wrapped in the guise of patriotism and feelings of cultural belonging serves as a mechanism of power and oppression. Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture” (xix-xx). They continue by noting that Christian nationalism encompasses “assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism” (10).

Robert P. Jones, in White Too Long, points out that white evangelicals claim “that their worldview and theology are derived directly from a straightforward reading of an inerrant Bible”; however, like everyone who reads the Bible they “read their worldview back into the Bible” projecting their beliefs back onto the text (101). In this manner, the Bible serves “as much a screen as a projector” (101). Smith confronts this reflection and projection in her examination of the psychological impacts of racist thought on the oppressor, and she does so by causing her readers to see how they use Christianity to project their fears onto others and how those projections get reflected back on themselves. That reflection causes them fear, and that fear causes them to increase their oppression of marginalized individuals.

White supremacy lies at the heart of Christian nationalism. Anthea Butler, in White Evangelical Racism: The Politics and Morality in America, points out that “racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (2). Writing in 1945, Smith recognized that race lies at the heart of Christian nationalism. She begins “The White Christian and His Conscience” by directly linking Christian nationalism to white supremacy: “Ever since the first white Christian enslaved the first black man, the conscience of America has been hurting” (137). Throughout the essay, Smith draws direct links between Christian nationalism and fascism in Nazi Germany, stating that just as Hitler “tried to destroy utterly the concepts of Christian love and brotherhood,” Christian nationalists did the same by “Jim Crow[ing] Jesus Christ” (137, 138). Smith’s linking of Christianian nationalism with fascism is important because Christian nationalism contains many aspects of fascist ideology.

Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade and its organ The Cross and the Flag, used Christianity as a guise to maintain white supremacy. In his radio address, “Principles of Christian Nationalism” he laid out his definition of Christian nationalism, saying that “it is simple to define and easy to interpret. We believe that the destiny of America in relationship to its governing authority must be kept in the hands of our own people. We must never be governed by aliens. We must keep control of our own money and our own blood. In other words, we must remain true to the Declaration of Independence. That is nationalism. We believe that the spiritual symbol of our statesmanship is the Cross, which indeed is the symbol of Christianity. We believe that the inspiring dynamic out of which America grew is Christianity. We believe that there would be no real America such as we love and for which we are willing to die if there had been no nationalism Christianity. Thus, when a Christian is a Nationalist, he becomes necessarily a Christian Nationalist.”

Many aspects of fascism are embedded in Gerald L.K. Smith’s definition of Christian nationalism from a mythological past to the control of education to fears of victimhood. In spite of these characteristics in his definition, Gerald L.K. Smith vehemently denied being a fascist, even though, as Glen Jeansonne points out, “Smith shared some of the beliefs of European fascists: racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, extreme nationalism, red-baiting, authoritarianism, and glorification of war, force, and violence” (212). In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges relates a story about his professor, the theologian James Luther Adams. Seeing the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right, Adams forewarned Hedges and others that they would, “in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society” (195). Adams also added, as Hedges puts it, that “Nazis . . . were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible” (194). In essence, fascism would manifest itself in the United States with the Bible open in one hand and the American flag in the other.

Following our reading of Lillian Smith and works such as Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Elizabeth McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance, Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution, and countless other texts, we have come to use the term Christian fascism to describe much of the rhetoric and positions of evangelical Christianity, specifically during the Jim Crow era and the mid-twentieth century. We did not come to using this term lightly. For the longest time, we stuck with Christian nationalism because Christian fascism carries with it a myriad of connotations that individuals do not want to confront. As Americans, when we use the term fascism, we use it in relation to specific historical regimes and moments, notably Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. We view the United States as the saviors of the free world and the promoters of democracy because we defeated fascism. We prop ourselves up, ignoring the fact that Russia, Polish resistance, French resistance, and countless others fought together to defeat the fascist regimes. We prop ourselves up forgetting multiple parts of our domestic history, like the German American Bund, denying refugees entry into the nation, placing American citizens and immigrants in concentration camps, and more.

Christian fascism utilizes evangelical Christianity to further its pursuit of power. Jeansonne continues by noting, “Perhaps the most important aspect of American fascism, absent from the European variety is its emphasis on evangelical religion” (212). The use of the Bible and Christianity to justify evil is nothing new, as enslavers showed with the Slave Bible and various laws or as segregationists such as Ross Barnett, a Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, showed during his political career. Jeansonne points out that “[Gerald L.K.] Smith’s movement, and those of many of his allies, were interwoven with evangelical Christianity. Many, though not all, American extremists were religious zealots who used the Bible to justify their secular views. They believed it their Christian duty to purge society of infidels” (212).

James Luther Adams saw this tendency during the mid-1940s when he spoke to a group of U.S. Army officers about “the Nazi ‘faith’” (25). These officers would be part of the occupation force in Germany following the war. He described the officers’ views at the meeting as “an orgy of self-righteousness,” turning around the fact that the United States helped to defeat fascists during the war (25). This caused them to inflate their ego, feeling superior to the powers they just defeated, condescendingly looking down on them. Writing about this lecture, Adams says that he tried to check their “self-righteousness” because if he did not, he would “succeed only in strengthening the morale of a bumptious hundred-percent ‘Americanism’” (25). Adams saw firsthand the fervent nationalism in Germany and the violence that ensued during his time in Germany in the mid 1930s. He also saw the striking similarities at home.

Adams reminded the officers that “similar attitudes” that existed in Nazi Germany exist in America, “not only among lunatic and subversive groups but also among respectable Americans in the army of democracy” (25). He asked them if their attitude towards African Americans and Jews differed any from Nazi views, “not a difference in brutality but a difference in basic philosophy” (25). If an essential difference did not exist, then he asked them, “What are you fighting for?” (25) Adams wanted the officers to realize that they were not immune to racism, xenophobia, and oppression.

In response, a lot of the officers asked him questions such as: “Do you think we should marry a n*****?” “Aren’t Negroes a naturally indolent and dirty race?” “Haven’t you been in business, and don’t you know that every Jew is a k***?” (26) They asked him these types of questions for over an hour, denying any similarity to Nazi Germany while at the same time expressing that similarity full throatily. He would simply ask the question again: “How do you distinguish between yourself and a Nazi?” (26) This is a powerful and damning question, on so many levels, but it is one we must think about when we think about Christian fascism.

Adams concludes by noting that a majority of the “Americans who could not distinguish between themselves and Nazis came from ‘religious’ homes, or they claimed to be representatives (or even leaders) of the American faith” (26). They saw themselves as righteous, as good, as faithful Christians. They did not see their views as evil and discriminatory. They did not see them as destroying democracy. Their faith, according to Adams, “was a trust in white, gentile supremacy — faith in the blood” (26). They clung to nation, patriotism, and white supremacy, under the guise of Christianity.

Like Adams, Smith saw the hypocrisies inherent in Christians who vociferously fought against Nazi ideology while using the Bible and Christianity to justify their own oppression back in the United States. Smith saw the ways that powerful white men weaponized Christianity to maintain a totalitarian grip on power in the South. Following World War II, “few were open to Smith’s argument,” as Margaret Rose Gladney puts it, “that white supremacy was as much a totalitarian ideology as communism or fascism” (8). Even before the release of Killers of the Dream in 1949, Smith wrote a letter in The New York Times in April 1948 comparing the Soviet Union to the South. She stated, “Totalitarianism is an old thing to us down home. We know what it feels like. The unquestioned authority in White Supremacy, the tight political set-up of one party, nourished on poverty and ignorance, solidified in the South into a totalitarian regime under which we were living when communism was still Russian cellar talk and Hitler had not even been born” (How, 120). Smith saw the long history of one-party rule that covered the South, and she saw, directly, how that rule influenced the likes of Hitler in Nazi Germany, who, as she put it, learned much from the Ku Klux Klan in the South (Killers 147). She continued by noting, “The South has been kept ‘solid’ by this one-party system which depends for its staying power on highly emotional beliefs in states’ rights and segregation,” beliefs preached from pulpits throughout the South and the nation (196).

Some of Smith’s most potent interrogations of the hypocrisy at the heart of Christian fascism appear in Killers of the Dream. From the outset, Smith calls out the incongruities between a religion that taught her “that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common father” while at the same times teaching her she “was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it,” because is she failed to recognize the latter, “terrifying disaster would befall the South” (28).

From an early age, Smith noticed the duplicity of a Christianity that taught her to love her neighbor while also telling her she was superior to Blacks. Smith details an early experience in these lessons when a young girl named Janie came to live with the Smith family at their home in Jasper, Florida. A white club woman, heading to “her washerwoman’s” house saw “a little white girl” outside near the gate (35). The woman got other club women involved and they removed the girl from her family because she was “a white girl” residing with “a Negro family” (35). Janie came to live with the Smith’s even sleeping in the bed with Lillian. However, after a few days the Smiths received a call about Janie from “a colored orphanage” (35). The clubwomen, under the guise of “protecting children,” kidnapped Janie from her family, and now they saw Janie not as a white girl but as a Black girl.

Anne, Smith’s mother, informed her and her sisters of the news and that Janie would have to leave their house. This news prompted Smith to ask her mother various questions about the reasons for Janie’s departure. Eventually, Anne told her that she was too young to understand, and while Smith couldn’t put it into words at the time, she knew what had occurred was wrong, and at that moment, she knew that her parents “had betrayed something which they held dear. And they could not help doing it” (37). She knew her parents’ religious views, but she discovered that even they could not confront the racist structure of the community. Of this moment, Smith writes, “Something was wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people” (39). She recognized that the white society that went to church on Sunday morning had no problem oppressing their Black neighbors for the rest of the week.

Smith herself started to fall into the lessons, seeing herself as “white” and Janie as “colored.” She pushed the memory out of her mind for thirty years, and when she confronted it, she realized the effects of rhetoric and oppression on the oppressor as well. She writes, “I began to understand slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there” (39). Smith worked, throughout her life, to extricate herself from the frame, and she strove to instill within the campers at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, the camp she ran from 1925–1948, tools to help them do the same.

At Laurel Falls, Smith engaged the campers in the arts and in discussions about race, psychology, and more. They would write and perform plays, sometimes over multiple years. One play borrowed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The campers wrote a play about a prince who traveled from planet to planet accompanied by some traveling companions. The campers decided that the Prince’s companions should be Conscience, Southern Tradition, Religion, and Science. For Religion, one of the campers said, “I know we should take religion along . . . but it just doesn’t belong on the stage with the others–after all, it’s near us only on Sundays” (Killers 44). So, Religion moved to the balcony, overlooking the Prince’s journey on the stage. The campers saw the role that Religion plays in life, and they also saw how Religion, specifically Christianity, gets subsumed by cultural influences such as Southern Tradition. The play, which the campers constructed, symbolized the tensions they each endured as white girls in the South, the pushing and pulling of Christianity, tradition, and science on their actions and the ways they viewed the world.

Traversing the universe, the Prince sought to play to all children, regardless of race, ethnicity, or class. However, the campers in the audience felt that this would not work, and Smith called upon the Prince’s traveling companions to intervene in the conflict. Conscience and Southern Tradition joined the Prince on the stage, both telling the Prince they would not allow any integration. In response, the Prince looked up to the balcony seeking assistance from Religion and Science. Conscience proclaimed, “I never listen to Religion where segregation is involved. No one does, down here” and when a young camper asked for Religion to come to the stage and push back the thoughts of segregation and superiority, a girl in the balcony shouted out, “Religion doesn’t do that in the South . . . Religion stays out of controversies. You know that. Our place is up here” (48). Noone helped the Prince achieve equality; rather, each of the traveling companions pushed back against growth.

At the conclusion of the play, the Prince said that even though they knew what would happen “the Prince in our play wants to do right. We know it is right to feel this way. Our conscience has changed whether the one in the play has or not. There should be a way to work it out. Religion and Science should have helped me” (49). The campers knew right from wrong, kindness from oppression, but tradition overpowered their Christian faith and logic, causing them to stagnate and wither. To suture this rupture, Smith and the girls talked about ways to mend these tensions, and one of the steps involved defining what exactly they meant by the word “religion.” Did religion simply mean following a faith tradition? Reading a sacred text? No, the girls determined that “Religion is love” because love could “help push Southern Tradition off the stage and teach it a few lessons about being nice to other people” (50). The campers knew the answers, but like the younger Smith, when faced with her mother’s responses to Janie’s removal from the Smith home, they also imbibed lessons that ran counter to their beliefs.

Some, even though they knew these things, chose to remain firmly in the grasps of a society that taught them to look down on others. Following the play, a seventeen-year-old camper, who had gone to Laurel Falls for years, approached Smith told her, “You made us think of ourselves as no better than other people. You shouldn’t have done that” (51). The camper said he hated Smith for holding a mirror up to her and showing her her own reflection. What the camper saw scared her, because even though she knew right from wrong, laws and culture told her something different. This caused her to tell Smith, “I’m saying these things because I’m scared–at what I am looking at in me” (53). Confronted with herself, she had to question her family and the lessons she learned. She told Smith that her mother reads progressive periodicals yet has decided “that the signs stay up and segregation is going to be here forever,” and she asks about her parents and others, “Why pretend and go to church and say nice words? It doesn’t make sense! What does religion mean to them? If it isn’t real, what do they get out of it?” (53) The play and the camper’s fears get to the heart of Christian fascism where Christianity serves as a balm for the conscience and as a bludgeon to wield in order to maintain power and social hierarchies.

Laws told her she was better than a Black person, and the camper felt afraid of breaking the law. The camper’s fear did not just affect her; it would affect her children as well. She told Smith, “I’ll teach my children not to think about things like this. I’ll teach them that money comes first, before people, that it’s more important. I won’t let them be hypocrites” (55). The campers knows the hypocrisy she inherited from the lessons she learned, and instead of battling the hypocrisies, she decides to double down by telling her children that only money matters. In this manner, she seeks to spare them from being hypocrites, but while she does this, she damns them to carry on white supremacy. Responding to the girl, Smith points out the fascist underpinnings of the camper’s statement. She told her, “In other words, you would make little Nazis out of them” (55). Smith saw the connections between Christian nationalism and fascism, specifically the ways that it causes one to deny the lessons learned on Sunday as they go through the week oppressing others. After relating the history of racism in the United States, Smith told the camper that Southerners learned their lessons well. They took what “southern tradition” taught them to heart, and while they “did not use the word dictator,” due to belief in themselves “as free Americans,” they blindly “obeyed the invisible power as meekly as if Hitler or Stalin had given the orders” (72).

Smith saw the church as a disseminator of Christian fascism in the South because once one walked outside of the home, “Custom and Church took charge” of educating individuals and making sure they fell in line. All wrapped in Southern Tradition, children learned the lessons well, even getting to the point of turning a blind eye to white supremacy and racial violence, as if they lived next to Dachau. When a lynching occurred, “no one publicly condemned it and always murders went free,” moving back into the pews on Sunday mornings (97). Children learned early how to be soldiers in the fight, the Mr. Poor White serving at the behest of Mr. Rich White. “Southern tradition,” Smith writes, “taught her bleak routines with flashes of lightning to quicken our steps” (98). Here, as Robert Brinkmeyer notes, Smith draws parallels through the use of her language and her comment to the young camper about raining “little Nazis” to “Hitler’s SS” (141). Like James Luther Adams and others, Smith saw the connections between Christian nationalism, Jim Crow, and fascism, and she detailed the ways, through her writing, that they all worked together to maintain white supremacy and power.

Works Cited

Adams, James Luther. The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, Edited by George Kimmich Beach, Skinner House Books, 1998.

Brinkmeyer, Robert. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950, LSU Press, 2009.

Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Gladney, Margaret Rose. “Introduction to the 1994 Edition,” Killers of the Dream, by Lillian Smith, 1949, W.W. Norton and Company, 1994, pp. 5–10.

Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Free Press, 2006.

Jeansonne, Glen. Gerald L.K. Smith: Minister of Hate, Yale University Press, 1988.

Jones, Robert P. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Perry, Samuel and Andrew Whitehead. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Smith, Lillian. How Am I to be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, edited by Margaret Rose Gladney, University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream, W.W. Norton and Company, 1994.

Smith, Lillian. Strange Fruit, Harvest Books, 1992.

Smith, Lillian. “The White Christian and His Conscience,” Fellowship, vol. 11, no. 8 (Aug. 1945), pp. 137–139.