The Journal of Southern Religion � Collective Punishment Reveals White Supremacist Theology

11.9.15

The Journal of Southern Religion � Collective Punishment Reveals White Supremacist Theology: Economic power and social control are also implicated as the rationale for white extra-legal violence in one of the most influential movie pictures in the early 1900s: The Birth of a Nation. Released in 1915, the film depicted the Klan redeeming the white South from the clutches of “Negro rule” (Blum 2007). A white Jesus appears at the end to bless the machinations of the Klan, which, at first glance, dovetails nicely with Mathews’s thesis. But the appearance of white Jesus is not for the purposes of sanctifying a lynching or accepting a blood sacrifice. Instead, the white Jesus appears in order to bless the rise of the Ku Klux Klan which has wrested control of the South away from the depicted predatory black beasts and placed them under the control and authority of white men (Hutchinson 1996).