The Lost Cause provided white Southerners-and white Americans in general-with a misunderstanding of the Civil War that allowed them to spare themselves the shame of their own history.
The Nationalist’s Delusion – The Atlantic

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply the Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery.

Lost Cause of the Confederacy – Wikipedia

Lost Cause Theology
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Lost Cause Theology

This theological worldview—Lost Cause theology, premillennialism, an individualist view of sin, an emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus, and the Bible as the protector of the status quo—has created a mutually reinforcing, closed habit of thought among white evangelicals. The system protects white Christian interests on the one hand and white consciences on the other. In return, white Christians defend the system from external critique, relying on the cultural tool kit it provides.

Lost Cause theology, with its underlying commitment to preserving white supremacy, has proven remarkably durable, even as it has adapted to new times. Its main contours are still discernible in dynamics driving our politics today. Paul Harvey, historian at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, summarized the Lost Cause narrative this way: “Ultimately… white spiritual leaders preached that a sanctified, purified white South would rise from the ashes to serve as God’s ‘last and only hope’ in a modernizing and secularizing nation.” Writing in the mid-1960s, cultural anthropologist Anthony Wallace described Lost Cause religion as a revivalist movement aiming “to restore a golden age believed to have existed in the society’s past,” terms eerily close to contemporary calls by President Donald Trump to “Make America great again.” It is true that old-school Lost Cause theology is rarely aired in mainstream white churches today. But its direct descendant, the individualist theology that insists that Christianity has little to say about social injustice—created to shield white consciences from the evils and continued legacy of slavery and segregation—lives on, not just in white evangelical churches but also increasingly in white mainline and white Catholic churches as well.

Jones, Robert P.. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (p. 1, 6, 33, 70-71, 101, 102, 104-105). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

As noted southern historian Samuel S. Hill summarized it: “Many southern whites have regarded their culture as God’s most favored. To a greater degree than any other, theirs approximates the ideals the Almighty has in mind for mankind everywhere.”31 Even after the war, this fundamental conviction was questioned by few. The central question was a theodicy dilemma: how to square the ideas of providential power and white Christians as God’s chosen people with military defeat. Finding Confederate political ambitions foreclosed, the new battle was transposed from the political arena, where disputes were settled with military violence, to the cultural arena.

This new cultural project has become widely recognized by scholars as “the religion of the Lost Cause,” a term derived from an 1866 book with this name by a Richmond editor named Edward Pollard, who called explicitly for a “war of ideas” to sustain southern identity.32 All cultural movements need a core organizing idea. Ideally, this idea is widely shared, legitimized by authoritative institutions, grounded in a moral worldview, and connected to other values and interests. And if it is seen to be under threat and in need of urgent defense, all the better. The Confederate political project may have run aground, but its animating core commitment to white supremacy survived and fit these criteria well.

Jones, Robert P.. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (pp. 89-90). Simon & Schuster.

The historical contradictions between the various confident declarations about biblical teachings on race by white Christians are head spinning. As a social consensus coalesced around the immorality and sinfulness of slavery following the Civil War, white evangelicals retreated from the previously unflinching claims of biblical support for slavery. And only just recently, as Americans are beginning to name white supremacy as a social sin, white evangelicals have also repudiated their previous, and equally confident, claims that the separation of the races was an obvious biblical dictate. Having reluctantly conceded these points, with concessions coming only after they have become socially untenable, white evangelicals, incredibly, continue to assert that their current theological conclusions are derived directly from an inerrant Bible.

There is stronger evidence that it is the other way around: that white Christians’ cultural worldview, with an unacknowledged white supremacy sleeping at its core, has been read back into the Bible. And if this is true, a deeper interrogation of our entire theological worldview, including our understanding and use of the Bible and even core theological doctrines of a personal relationship with Jesus, is in order. Until we find the courage to face these appalling errors of our recent past, white Christians should probably avoid any further proclamations about what “the Bible teaches” or what “the biblical worldview” demands.

Jones, Robert P.. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (p. 104). Simon & Schuster.

To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion.

Jones, Robert P.. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (p. 105). Simon & Schuster.

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Lost Cause

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Table of Contents

Lost Cause Theology

Further Reading