February 15, 2025

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION:

The revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment (Miles Smith, January 31, 2025, Washington Examiner)

Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading architects of the amendment, believed he was participating in a revolution of the slaveholding South and in broader American society. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” said Stevens, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.”

People often don’t realize the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment, and conservatives in particular downplay its revolutionary nature. American historians have for a long time treated the actions of the Republican Party, and the ending of slavery in particular, as a modest but nonetheless substantive political and social revolution.

Allan Nevins, whose eight-volume history of the sectional crisis and the Civil War won a string of awards in the middle of the 20th century, called the Civil War a revolution, as did Pulitzer-winning historian James McPherson, author of the 1989 book Battle Cry of Freedom, which is perhaps still the single best history of the Civil War. In fact, it’s hard to see how the Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not remake the United States.

The understandable desire to protect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and the tendency to view the Constitution as an almost sacred document that created an exceptional nation, are powerful but not always historically helpful ways to conceive of the 13th Amendment and the other two Reconstruction amendments. While slavery did not create the American republic, the Constitution undoubtably tolerated ownership of human chattel.

We did not Reconstruct hard enough.

iDENTITY PRECLUDES THE nEW cOMMANDMENT:

The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical (Jake Meador, 1/31/25, Mere Orthodoxy)

[W]e are now seeing the emergence of what might be called “right exvangelicalism.” If left exvangelicals sought to keep Jesus but dispense with the church, right exvangelicals are following a similar trajectory, but from the other side of the political spectrum. This causes the right exvangelical to end up mirroring the left exvangelical, as it were: Start with right-wing politics circa 2025 and then come to Christianity after you’ve already committed to the political vision of the American right. But whereas this move caused left exvangelicals to keep a proxy of Jesus and dispense with the church, it is causing right exvangelicals to keep a proxy of the church and dispense instead with Jesus. The church can stay as a vehicle for promoting civic religion, for insuring that Christian moral norms are given deference within the culture, and as a way of inculcating the kind of moral vision they seek to enact, particularly as it relates to sex and gender and “common culture.” Jesus’s place, however, is far more ambiguous.

Minimally, one can observe a pattern of behavior amongst right exvangelicals defined by a tendency to condemn many Christian moral norms. Humility and meekness is now “loser theology,” it would seem, and the Sermon on the Mount is leftist drivel. The only Jesus preserved in their conception of the faith seems to be the Jesus of the Second Coming who returns in judgment. The Jesus of the Gospels, “strong and kind” in the words of a song my kids sang for their Christmas program once, is notably absent.