On December 2nd, 1859, John Brown was executed for attempting to foment a slave revolt by seizing an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, the crescendo of two decades as a militant opponent of slavery. Seen in his own lifetime largely as a fringe figure associated with brutal acts of violence, such as infamously murdering the families of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, in death Brown came to symbolize moral resistance to slavery. Described by the biographer Louis DeCaro “as a product of the Congregational Church and the Reformed confessions,” his compatriot Charles Robinson, who once compared Brown’s execution by Virginia to that of Jesus by the Romans, declared that “the soul of John Brown was the inspiration of the Union armies in the emancipation war.” Thousands of Union troops sang “John Brown’s Body” in the 19th century and his memory has long been the subject of fierce debate among historians. Even today, socialist gun owners organize under the banner of the “John Brown Gun Club” in an attempt to build an alternative to the NRA, while dozens of historical sites honoring Brown dot the American landscape and renditions of “John Brown’s Body” have racked up millions of listens across streaming platforms.
However, Brown cannot be understood apart from his theological context. Indeed, it was the murder of abolitionist preacher Elijah Lovejoy that led Brown to “consecrate [his] life to the destruction of slavery,” likening Lovejoy’s killing to that of John the Baptist and its catalyzing effect on Christ’s ministry. Brown, like Lovejoy, was a product of the rock-ribbed Calvinism that first brought the Puritans to the New World, and a fire and brimstone evangelist before he took to the political path. In this vein, biographer David Reynolds argues that Brown understood his role in politics in Old Testament terms of divine retribution, Brown having remarked: “wherever there is a right thing to be done, there is a ‘thus saith the Lord’ that it shall be done.”
Today, the idea of mixing religion with politics has become increasingly controversial amid discourse over the alleged rise of “Christian nationalism.” Though propagators of the term “Christian nationalism” claim to be describing an anti-democratic, theocratic vision of America, the term increasingly seems to include any contact between religion and politics at all. In Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood’sBaptizing America, the allegation is brought beyond the religious right to include a sermon given at the United States Capitol in 2022 by the liberal, LGBT+ affirming Episcopal Church. Kaylor and Underwood, in a 2023 interview, include under the “Christian nationalist” banner both President Lyndon Johnson’s impassioned plea to Congress to move forth in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, to our original subject matter, John Brown’s violent abolitionism.
Despite representing an apogee of political organizing on explicitly Christian lines, John Brown and company are rarely brought up in modern discourse surrounding Christian nationalism. Instead, Christian nationalism is usually cast as the product of segregationist Southern Evangelicals led by Jerry Falwell and his “Moral Majority.” Falwell represented, however, a minority position among even the Evangelical movement of his day and certainly among clergy as a whole; the Catholic Church endorsed the Civil Rights Act, and, of course, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. emerged at the forefront of the American civil rights movement. Rather than looking to Falwell, historians and sociologists should peer back to the age of abolition for a more nuanced picture of American Christian nationalism and its effects on our society.
The opinion that the United States ought to be a Christian nation was found by a 2022 Pew Research poll to be held by 45% of Americans. Contrary to the usual image of a white Christian nationalism, 62% of Black Protestants agree with this view, 51% of whom further say that, if in conflict, the stance of the Bible ought to overrule the will of the people, numbers not significantly different from those of their white Protestant brethren. The latter view, in particular, would certainly strike a chord with Brown, whose willingness to break the law in his crusade against slavery was directly derived from his acknowledgment of “no master in human form.” In 1847, Brown had written in a letter to his son Lucian that Jesus represented “the end of the law.” Later commenting to a family giving him refuge while a fugitive, Brown lamented that “it seems strange in a Christian country that a man should be called a monomaniac for following the plain dictates of our Savior.”
In a prison letter to the Presbyterian Minister Alexander McLeod Milligan, Brown denounces the fact that “this nation, in its Constitution, makes no submission to the King of Kings.—Pays no regard to the requirements of His law—never mentions his name even in the inauguration oath of its chief magistrate.” Indeed, presented at John Brown’s trial was one of hundreds of copies of a provisional constitution of the United States, drawn up in the home of Frederick Douglass, for the government Brown hoped to build in the aftermath of the slave revolution. Brown’s constitution notably shrugs off the idea of a separation between Church and State, referencing “Almighty God” and calling for the federal government to establish churches alongside schools as a means of public education. At this trial, Brown admitted to breaking the laws of Virginia and the United States, yet plead innocent on the grounds that the court had sworn him in on a Bible that taught him to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them,” citing Hebrews 13:3. An obituary in the Cleveland Daily Herald utilized equally explicit terms, decried the execution of an abolitionist, even a violent one, “in this Christian nation.” From the pro-slavery side, the Baltimore Herald wrote with disgust of Northerners who hailed Brown as a “Christian hero,” stating that it served as final evidence that the slaveholding states ought to take their own course.
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked about the French Revolution in 1972, famously (though somewhat apocryphally) responded by saying that it was “too early to tell.” Similarly, is it perhaps still too early to judge the legacy of John Brown, ever more important in death than life. Yet, any observation of Brown may assuredly tell us that the roots of “Christian nationalism” lie much deeper than many modern observers gauge. Contrary to the myth that Christian nationalism is fundamentally a response to desegregation, “Christian nationalism” in the 19th century was an animating force in the demise of slavery.