And so we’ve come to the end of the road, a consideration today of the final chapter of Kathy Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs (the full set of posts is available here). We’ve enjoyed working through the book over the past several weeks, and look forward to a healthy conversation about the final chapter.
Tag Archives: patriarchy
Godly Heritage and Plantation Chic: The Case of Vision Forum
A recent news story has me thinking about the weird enduring appeal of the Lost Cause. It seems to me that this news story about a contemporary religious organization might lead us into an interesting case study. Why, at this late date, do so many Americans still want to see the antebellum South as a tragically vanished world of nobility and grace?
Most early Americanists are familiar with David Barton, a conservative activist who argues that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. He’s been mentioned here several times as the most visible proponent of a view that’s common among members of the “Religious Right.”[1] What’s less widely understood is how often his Christian-founding ideology overlaps with a claim advanced by a few other evangelical conservatives: that the Confederacy—and antebellum southern culture, if not slavery itself—are also part of “America’s Godly heritage.”[2] In these circles, in other words, the Founding is sometimes wrapped up with the Old South.
The Junto 