Thread by @JYSexton

So.

We should talk about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Black Easter of 1865 that forever changed America by knotting national identity and religion and hiding our toxic racism.

Here's what I learned writing AMERICAN RULE.

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penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

First, we have to start with the Confederacy. What people need to understand is that the Civil War was due in part to a splitting of national identity and a struggle over the soul of what American was meant to be.

The CSA believed they were the REAL AMERICA ordained by God.

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The Confederacy claimed possession over the American identity. They surrounded themselves with American iconography, especially George Washington.

Their motto was that God was on their side.

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The Confederacy was INCREDIBLY religious. The basis of their society was a belief in a white supremacist God who demanded slavery and a stark separation between whites and blacks. Their churches were a main organ of societal control and preached obedience.

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When the Confederacy lost battles, their preachers claimed it was the racist God's way of punishing them for a lack of faith and godliness. They demanded days of humiliation, prayer, and fasting.

The basis of the society was built around white supremacy and this racist God.

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The Civil War is incredibly misunderstood and oversimplified. With that oversimplification, the history of Abraham Lincoln is also incredibly misunderstood and oversimplified. This is by design and is meant to hide our white supremacist legacy.

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The most charitable way to describe Lincoln's beliefs on race is "evolving." His speeches are littered with open support for white supremacy. At times, Lincoln even tried to sell America's slaves to other countries in order to procure a white America free of racial diversity

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The oversimplification of Lincoln is dangerous. It muddles our history and hides the virulent white supremacy. It keeps us from understanding who we have been and who we are.

His assassination in 1865 only furthered that process as he was turned into a religious martyr.

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The Christian Holy Week of 1865 was...odd.

Lee surrendered to Grant on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865. This, along with propaganda and reckoning of the time, gave the war the feeling of a crusade against evil, almost like the nation being baptized in its own blood.

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We have no idea what a post-Civil War Lincoln would have done regarding race. Because he was cut down just as it ended, we have put our greatest hopes on him and gifted him a legacy that wasn't necessarily earned.

We see him for what we WISH he might have done.

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Lincoln was shot on April 14th, 1865. Good Friday. There is no understating how powerful of a symbol this was. The cutting down of a messiah following a war that had taken on its own holy tinge.

It felt like a divine history unfolding in real time.

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April 16th, 1865. Black Easter. Churches around the country worshiped the resurrection of Christ but almost commemorated the death of Lincoln.

Services were filled with black flowers and bunting. Sermons were about Lincoln.

Lincoln began to emerge as a national messiah.

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The narrative moved quickly. Lincoln had died for our sins, in this case our white supremacist/slave-holding past. Sermons tied him and Christ together freely.

America was then absolved of its sins, the baptism having been complete.

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Strange art began appearing that showed Lincoln as being God's messenger of peace and racial healing. His likeness was surrounded by angels, his death an obvious Christian martyrdom.

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Something we're all familiar with but not always aware transpired.

George Washington was fashioned as the Father. Lincoln as the son and savior. The American spirit of freedom and liberty as the Holy Ghost.

Christianity and Nationalism thrived.

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Art featured Lincoln being greeted in heaven by angels and Washington, taking the place of the Heavenly Father.

The longheld belief that America was God's ordained country grew by the day and our national mythology became its very own religion.

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The belief that America's racism and slaveholding past had been forgiven, that Lincoln's blood had washed us clean, did unbelievable damage.

It hid our very real and very present racism and all but forgave the Confederacy and white supremacists for their crimes.

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Reconstruction was hobbled by white supremacists following Lincoln but also by those who claimed the scourge had been destroyed. The Civil War, as a baptism of blood, meant the hard work of social progress and racial leveling wasn't necessary. It hid our racism.

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Something else happened though. The country being reunited without the reckoning meant that the dueling religions of the North and the South came together.

The virulent, white supremacist Confederate religion continued and grew in power and scope.

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As I've written about, Southern, Neo-Confederate preachers like Jerry Falwell continued the white supremacist religion of the Confederacy and brought it into the mainstream as an answer to Civil Rights.

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As Civil Rights preachers like MLK used Christianity to help their cause, Neo-Confederates preached that racism had been defeated by the Civil War and scrubbed clean by Lincoln's martyrdom.

It wasn't *necessary* for Civil Rights to be fought for. It was already done.

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The cornerstone of American white supremacy is to look at the Civil War and Lincoln's religious martyrdom and argue that there's no need for further reform, we'd been washed clean in blood.

It is religious/nationalist myth used as a means of oppression.

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Thus, when you hear Make America Great Again, it is a call to return America to a time before civil rights furthered us past the point of holy equilibrium, which was actually white supremacy girded by laws, a racist economy, and a religion helmed by racist God.

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The myth we are all submerged in, that of Washington as the Father, Lincoln as the Messiah, and Americanism as the Holy Spirit, this history as religion and national story, is a faith unto itself, but it is riddled with echoes of the Confederacy and blatant white supremacy

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Chances are there are churches this morning and this evening preaching a nationalistic sermon that mixes these elements together in order to keep their flocks from questioning the white supremacist order of the American present.

It is an incredible and dangerous weapon.

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These are the underpinnings and tenets of the Cult of the Shining City that I've written about in places like @newrepublic and have warned about. It is a Neo-Confederate cult that worships Donald Trump through the same nationalistic ideology.

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newrepublic.com/article/157062…

This is how we've gotten to this bizarre point, the merging of religious dogma, nationalistic myth, and the politicians and business leaders who knowingly use that toxic stew to manipulate people.

We have to reexamine ourselves and our history if we're ever to escape.

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