Paternalism Reborn

In the 1880s, white Christians reframed their postemancipation paternalism as a continuation of antebellum social order, albeit with scarce paternalistic responsibility for southern whites. Their new historical accounts were white supremacist fantasies that ignored recent history in order to erase Black political power from their narratives. Black Christians denounced white southerners’ new historical narratives that claimed unchanging antebellum paternalism as a dangerous farce, and they argued that their religious and political work showed that they deserved equal rights. With these political losses and rising violence, Black Christians had to shift their arguments from claiming that Christianity was antiracist to the more limited claim that, as good Christians, they deserved political rights and freedom from violence. White southerners’ paternalism gained power from lynching’s terrorism, which black Christians denounced as sin that violated their most basic rights.