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Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

Lynn S. Neal
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Extract

According to the biblical book of Daniel chapter 3, King Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled the Babylonian Empire where the Jews lived in exile, commissioned the building of a ninety-foot golden image and commanded the people to worship it. Refusal to comply meant one's death in a fiery furnace. While most obeyed the king's dictate, the story recounts how Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, Jews who worked for the king, refused to worship the image and remained loyal to their God. In response, the king bade his men to stoke the furnace and burn the defiant rebels. To the king's amazement, the trio appeared unscathed amid the red-hot flames, and he glimpsed a mysterious fourth figure with them. Seeing this, the king called the men to come out of the furnace and they emerged unharmed, protected, according to the text, by the fourth figure, an angel. The story depicts Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego as heroes who withstood the forces of evil and witnessed the power of their God. It speaks to the fidelity of these men and to the intolerant nature of Nebuchadnezzar's faith. While this passage and its lessons may be familiar to many, in the 1920s they gained additional meanings that provide us with important insights into the workings of religious intolerance in the United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 350 - 378
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2009

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References

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26 I have been unable to locate a library with a complete collection of White's The Good Citizen, a nativist periodical she published from 1913 to 1933. Branford Clarke illustrated this newspaper, and many of these images were then used in White's pro-Klan books. For example, the August 1925 issue (volume 13, no. 8) features four of Clarke's drawings, three of which later appeared in Klansmen.

27 White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 41.

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47 White, Klansmen, 8; White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 11; White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 6. Kathleen Biddick describes typology as follows: “Christian typology posits the theological supersession of the Christian Church over Israel. Christians believed that the New Testament superseded the Hebrew Bible and redefined it as the Old Testament. Exegetically it maps the figures of the Old Testament onto their fulfillment in the New Testament”: see her monograph, The Typological Imaginary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 4–5. Also see Goppelt, Leonhard, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New ([1939] Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982)Google Scholar, and Davidson, Richard M., Typology in Scripture (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. In White's case, typology is not limited to biblical interpretation; for her the Bible provides the pattern, or type, which is later duplicated in American and world history—the antitype.

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49 White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 6; White, Klansmen, 63.

50 Popovich, Ljubica D., “Popular American Biblical Imagery: Sources and Manifestations,” in The Bible and Popular Culture in America, ed. Phy, Allene Stuart (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 193–233Google Scholar. See Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, and Promey, Sally M., “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” The Art Bulletin 85:3 (September 2003): 581–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, some scholars are researching themes of conflict in visual culture; however, the role and representation of religion in those conflicts is not prominent: see Johnston, Patricia, ed., Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

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59 Dyer, The Matter of Images, 16; Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 115.

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61 White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 61–65.

62 Mitchell, “Contemporary American Caricature,” 728. Interpreting Jesus in terms of one's own context and ideology is certainly not unique. Rolf Lundén writes that “at various points in history, Jesus has been made into a monk, a soldier, a social radical, a guerilla fighter, and a hippie. In the twenties, as I have shown, he was a businessman”: see his Business and Religion in the American 1920s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988), 105.

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65 Similar tactics are used in representations of race and heterosexuality: see Richard Dyer, White, 10–13, 42, 45, 70.

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67 This subtitle corrupts Ann Braude's title to her seminal essay, “Women's History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107.

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69 White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 62.

70 White, Klansmen, 45, 47.

71 White, Klansmen, 43–44; see also Higham, Strangers in the Land, 205–206.

72 Blee, Women of the Klan, 38.

73 White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 41.

74 White, Klansmen, 5–6; White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 5.

75 White, Klansmen, 49.

76 Ibid., 53.

77 White, Klansmen, 56; White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 40.

78 White, Klansmen, 60.

79 Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 68.

80 For more on the “conflation” of biblical and American iconography, see Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 220–255.

81 White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 24–25.

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85 “Klansmen Take Notice!” The Good Citizen 13:8 (August 1925): 5, and “A Marvelous Sale,” The Good Citizen 13:8 (August 1925), 10.

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88 Higham, Strangers in the Land, x.

89 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 29.