The Doctrine of Humankind
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 63, No. 2 – Spring 2021
Editor: David S. Dockery
By Christopher C. Moore. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019, x+300pp., $50.00
From 1865 until his death in 1909, no one did more to promote the glories of the Confederacy than the Southern Baptist preacher, J. William Jones (1836–1909). He led a host of Southern propagandists who rehabilitated the reputation of white Southerners and made possible the nation’s indulgence of the nullification of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the United States Constitution through Jim Crow legislation, convict leasing, and suppression of black voting. It made possible also the extensive success and influence of such novels as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, and their even more popular screen adaptations.
Christopher Moore, instructor of history and religion at Catawba Valley Community College in North Carolina, casts J. William Jones as the most influential figure in this movement. Jones especially established the veneration of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as heroes of Southern religion and civic virtue. Jones’s books, lectures, and sermons made him, more than any other, the “apostle of the Lost Cause,” popularizing its version of the meaning of Confederacy and the South. And he had apostolic credentials—he knew personally Lee, Jackson, and Davis, and had the endorsement of both the Lee and Davis families.
The book, which began as a dissertation at Baylor University and is part of the America’s Baptists series at the University of Tennessee Press, argues that Jones viewed himself as called by the providence of God to be an apostle of the Confederacy to spread the gospel of the Lost Cause, vindicating Southern whites from accusations of the sins of slaveholding and secession, and from depictions of them as weaker or inferior to Northerners. It argues also that Jones’s commitment to Baptist denominationalism increased his effectiveness as an apostle of the Lost Cause.
What was the Lost Cause? It was a version of the history of the South and of the United States that insisted on the righteousness and justice of Southern whites in establishing and defending the Confederacy. Jones’s vindication of the Confederacy defended the following ideas: 1) Southern secession was entirely justified and constitutional. 2) The South did not secede because of slavery, but Southern slavery was in any case a kind and beneficial arrangement. 3) The South actually seceded to gain freedom from unconstitutional tyranny. 4) Southern soldiers comprised the greatest and most pious army in history. 5) Lee was the greatest general, Jackson the most brilliant tactician, and Davis among the greatest leaders in all history—and the three were also the most virtuous, devout, and godly men to lead any nation or army. 6) God favored the South because the South was just and right in its actions, and demonstrated his favor by visiting the Confederate army with an extraordinary revival. 7) By means of the Confederacy’s defeat and reunion with the North, loyalty to Southern values and valor would preserve the true American spirit and save America from internal dangers and external foes.
Jones and most Lost Cause writers diminished the significance of slavery in the secession of the slave states, and rarely appealed directly to the notion of white superiority. Belief in white superiority however undergirded and gave coherence to their vindication of slaveholding and to their understanding of the Confederacy and of the antebellum and postwar South.
Moore demonstrates that Jones felt a deep commitment to preach the everlasting gospel as a Southern Baptist and that he became an important figure in the denomination. He joined the very first class of students at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1859. He was appointed as a missionary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board, though he never served overseas due to the Civil War. Throughout his career, Jones pastored various Southern Baptist churches, served as the agent for Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, served the denomination’s Home Mission Board and edited its official journal, and was elected a vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Jones’s experiences in the war made him an apostle of the Lost Cause as well as a preacher of the gospel. Jones served with Lee’s army during the entire war, first as a soldier, then as a chaplain, and finally as a missionary to the army. He knew Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee during the war and developed a close relationship with Lee and Jefferson Davis after the war. He wrote biographies of Lee and Davis with the support and endorsement of their wives, Mary Custis Lee and Varina Davis. He also published a lengthy account of Jackson’s spiritual life. For twelve critical years he supervised the conservation and construction of Confederate memory as the editor of the Southern Historical Society Papers. In 1887 Jones published Christ in the Camp, his account of the revivals in the Southern armies. He later held other positions in Confederate memorial organizations.
The book makes important contributions. Above all it reveals the irony—the contradiction—between Jones’s attitude toward the Confederacy and toward Christianity. Jones served two gospels. Throughout his life Jones preached the gospel of the cross, imploring sinners to humble themselves and confess their guilt and insufficiency to God, and ask his pardon through faith in Christ. When he preached the gospel of the Lost Cause, however, Jones asserted that Southern whites were entirely right, with hardly a fault or weakness, and needing no forgiveness. “We thought we were right in the brave old days when to do battle was a sacred duty,” Jones told the 1894 reunion of Confederate veterans, “but now, in light of subsequent events, we know we were right; and with malice toward none and charity for all, we are asking pardon of no living man” (p. 199).
Throughout his career, Jones was a minister of the Confederate battle flag no less than he was a minister of the cross. At the 1906 annual meeting of the United Confederate Veterans, one former Confederate general praised Jones before the assemblage as “the greatest living Confederate today,” for Jones had “prayed harder and preached longer and more about the Confederacy than any man since the war” (p. 202). Thus, the gospel of the Confederacy spread widely in the South alongside the everlasting gospel.
Though he did not intend it, Jones’s Lost Cause crusade suborned the scriptural message of the cross to advance a secular identity rooted in Confederate patriotism, political partisanship, and the unshakeable belief in white superiority, all of which served to justify continued oppression and injustice toward American blacks through violence, legislation, and the judiciary. Jones subordinated the true gospel to a false one, with horrific consequences.
