White evangelicals re-circulated pro-slavery theology for anti-feminist purposes.

Evidence

Phillips’s many publications reveal the influences behind his vision. In 1997 he published Robert Lewis Dabney: The Prophet Speaks, a book introducing contemporary audiences to the Southern Presbyterian theologian who had influenced Rushdoony. To Phillips, Dabney was a prophet who boldly stated what many knew to be true but few were willing to say. He praised Dabney’s “prophetic” views on the evils of public education and women’s equality, and he found Dabney’s anti-feminism “refreshingly virile.” Phillips skirted around Dabney’s proslavery sentiments, although Phillips, too, diminished the horrors of slavery and denied the genocide of Native Americans. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 430

Categorization

• XREF: Continues the book’s earlier thread of Southern heritage nostalgia and Confederate veneration as white evangelical cultural resources.
• SEED: Angle: the rehabilitation of a pro-slavery theologian as a living ancestor of contemporary anti-feminism — genealogy of a ‘prophet.’