Christian Nationalism? The Case of Beecher’s Bibles

With all the hoopla surrounding the term “Christian Nationalism” today and the danger it supposedly represents, I thought I would give an historic example of a time when Christians, explicitly as Christians, involved themselves in the political process enough that as a result of their actions, actual and not metaphorical, blood was shed.  At the outset, let me offer up that the term “Christian Nationalism” escapes a decent academic definition untainted by the deepest of biases, so I won’t even try.  Instead, let’s look at what happened with “Beecher’s Bibles” and maybe we can take a lesson from it.

Beecher’s Bibles refers to the Sharps rifles that abolitionist opponents of slavery, who generally speaking were religiously motivated by their interpretations of scripture, sent to “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s to assist in the struggle against Southern slavery expansionists.  Let’s learn about the Sharps rifle first.  It was a black powder gun renowned for accuracy, designed and introduced by (no pun intended) Christian Sharps in 1848.  It was used by Civil War sharpshooters (pun not intended, the word comes from the use of the rifle) and later by buffalo hunters.  You might recall seeing Clint Eastwood using one in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, or Kevin Costner wielding one as Wyatt Earp, or Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under.  Notably, in the antebellum era of muzzle loaders, it was a breech loader, making it quicker and faster to reload, firing up to ten rounds a minute compared to 2-3 for a muzzle loader.  They were, therefore, high-end and expensive guns that specialist marksman units wielded in the Civil War, rather than the rifle of the common grunt.  I only point this last bit out to note that they were expensive, and valuable, as rifles go during that time period.

What was Bleeding Kansas?  It was the prelude to the Civil War that began with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.  This act was to allow for a “peaceful” solution of whether either territory would be a slave state or free state via a popular referendum.  Unsurprisingly, given the depth of feeling on the matter, violence arose.  Demographically, there were more Northerners in Kansas who didn’t support slavery than those who did support it, but there were significant numbers of slaveholders from nearby Missouri, which was neutral in the Civil War but a slave state, who had an economic and social interest in a pro-slavery outcome. 

A passing glance at history shows that a well-organized minority will always defeat an apathetic, or uninvolved, majority.  Therefore, it’s no surprise that pro-slavery and abolitionists eventually started shooting at each other.  Current events in these United States today show that the popular will on a topic rarely influences policy outcomes unless elites decide that the popular will is in alignment with their own.  By comparison, most people, in antebellum Kansas were “free staters” who didn’t want slavery where they lived, but neither did they want its absolution in the South.  The fringe wings set out to drag everybody else along to their preferred policy, almost forced due to the outcome to the conflict being resolved by a vote at the ballot box rather than outside forces.  Even nonviolent movements are followed along in their wake by violence.

There were numerous instances of “murder, mayhem, destruction and psychological warfare” in eastern Kansas and western Missouri by both sides of the opinion divide on slavery.

One of the most notable of these was when John Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery advocates.  Yes, that same John Brown who later attempted to create a slave revolt across the South at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1859 which was put down by the local militia with some late assistance from Marines led by none other than Robert E. Lee who in 1861 took leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia.  Brown had left Kansas due to the abolitionist success there; like all moral crusades when they achieve success, they start looking for another target.  

During the height of the mayhem in Kansas, abolitionist Northerners created a campaign to have more abolitionists move to Kansas and demographically overwhelm the pro-slavery advocates.  As part of this campaign, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the Presbyterian pastor of Plymouth, successfully raised a significant amount of funds throughout Protestant churches in the North to give Sharps rifles to these abolitionist settlers.  Plymouth Church became the “Church of the Holy Rifles,” and the Sharps Rifles got the nickname “Beecher’s Bibles.”

Just how effective the campaign from both sides, which devolved into a sort of unauthorized mini-civil war of election fraud, pitched battles, raids, assaults, assassination and counter assassination was, is up for historical debate.  My goal in this short post is only to make the note Christians, explicitly as Christians, chose two powerful weapons against their perceived enemies: demography and high-end rifles.  The morality of Bloody Kansas is all muddled by 21^st Century standards and does not overlay well with the modern gun debate.  Moreover, it’s further complicated that while armed self-defense is a right which can be explicitly supported by scripture, politicking by clerics in the manner of Beecher generally isn’t.  Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.   

By 1859, demography and armed violence had won out for the abolitionists.  The fourth and last constitutional convention was held for Kansas, and by this time free staters were solidly in control.  The document they produced barred slavery.  Three months before Fort Sumter, Kansas joined the Union as the 34^th state.    

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Other source: The Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights, 2^nd Edition.