The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism

“The Evils of Socialism”: The Religious Right in Early Twentieth-Century Texas

“The evils of socialism” The Religious Right in Early Twentieth-Century Texas KyLe G. WiLKisON T he Battle of Armageddon is on,and our rulers are slumbering.... Destruction will come!”Thus warned Church of Christ preacher William F.Lemmons,writing in 1914 of the menace of socialism facing Texas and America.From his East Texas home in Tyler he had witnessed the rapid growth of the Texas Socialist Party into a second-place finish in 1912 ahead of the Republicans and Prohibitionists in the governor’s race. Although the movement was still small (second place to the dominant Democrats did not mean much), Socialist inroads among his neighbors and coreligionists prompted Lemmons to pen two books attacking“the evils of Socialism.”These two early twentieth-century publications furnish a glimpse into the“plain folk”pulpit’s defense of the contemporary social order. Lemmons and like-minded preachers among the early twentieth-century Texas religious Right provide an illuminative starting point for understanding the better-known religious Right that followed in the mid- to late twentieth century.1 American politics andAmerican churches have been always intertwined to greater or lesser degrees.Historians of American politics,however,tend to leave the pulpit to the historians of religion, perhaps underestimating the political influence of American preachers. This neglect seems most pronounced when the pulpit supported the status quo. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein observed,analysis of religion’s role inAmerican conservatism has “received more lip service than sustained engagement from political historians.”2 “The evils of socialism” • 35 Indeed,preachers have been the ordinary poor majority’s most immediate leadership.That most poor people’s preachers appear to have lent their considerable influence to the cause of cultural and political conservatism is perhaps less remarkable than historians’ neglect of that influence. Understandably , when preachers behave unexpectedly and defy elements of the social order, as in the case of Martin Luther King Jr.’s generation of dissenters, they come to the attention of political historians. Thus, while we know a good deal about the political might of the clergy in the civil rights struggle, the political might of the preachers on the other side is only now beginning to be explored. When religious authority figures endorse the mainstream social, political, or economic structure, it may be unremarkable but it is not unimportant.3 Like much of the rest of the country, especially in traditional rural settings , religion played a central role in the lives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texans.The church was often the center of community life and its pastor one of the community’s respected authority figures.We know very well that their early twentieth-century sermons successfully shaped public policy in campaigns against alcohol. But what do we know of their positions on the dramatic restructuring of the early twentiethcentury Texas economy with its newly high levels of farm tenancy, rural poverty, and other matters of daily bread? Except for the case of Prohibition , much of their political influence remains unexamined in the Lone Star State’s political history.4 Although Thomas Jefferson aimed his oft-quoted warning that history supplied no examples of a “priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government”at Catholic Latin America,it is sometimes interpreted as his argument against the influence of American preachers.Jefferson made no suchargumentagainst“sectarian”(Protestant)preachers,however,because he believed the disestablished church was a voluntary association from which individuals might withdraw if the preacher chose to instruct them in politics.5 Jefferson placed a great deal of faith in individual prerogative and reason , allowing less leverage to the power of culture. Indeed, as others have shown, New Englanders failed to withdraw from their churches when instructed in politics by their Federalist pastors. The cause Jefferson and the Federalists held in common—the struggle for US independence— supplies many examples of local congregants being instructed in politics by their pastors. Might America’s “sectarian” preachers have been more influential than Jefferson estimated?6 36 • KyLe G. WiLKisON Historian Harry S. Stout makes a masterful case for the paradox lying at the heart of American political religion from the first generation of the new republic. “If Americans were to inherit the millennial promise, they must keep the covenant.” While the conservative Federalist clergy accepted the new Constitution, they saw it only as a temporal adjunct to an older, more important covenant between their communities and God. For...