“'Old times there are not forgotten:' Robert Lewis Dabney’s Public Theology for the Reconstructed South”
While his fellow churchman James Henley Thornwell has drawn more recent historical attention, Robert Lewis Dabney was a vitally important voice in southern affairs. Professor for thirty years at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, a founding professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Dabney was the southern Presbyterian theologian par excellence. In the service of his church, not only did Dabney author the only systematic theology by a southern Presbyterian, but he also co-edited the influential Southern Presbyterian Review, orchestrated the reunion of the southern Old School and New School branches in 1863, and served as moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1870. Further, Dabney was an important thinker on a range of social, cultural, and political issues. He crafted a conservative public theology that stood in opposition to the “Jacobin” theories of natural rights that emanated from France by way of the northern states.
Devastated by the Civil War, Dabney sought to strengthen southerners as well as southern Presbyterians throughout the reconstructed, “New” South by setting forth a public theology that affirmed a divine order for society. Emphasizing the doctrine of providence, rooted in God’s sovereignty and Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement, Dabney urged southerners to embrace “Bible Republicanism,” which taught social, racial, and gender inequality as God’s plan for southern society. Dabney believed that a correctly functioning society, shaped by biblical command, required hierarchy, led by white male elites who headed households. These households were units of production that farmed the land, bore responsibility for educating children, taught lessons of submission and order, and provided the building blocks for church and state. The household also trained white women to serve as the “matrons” of society, second in command to the white master and yet under his rule as well. As a result, Dabney was an untiring opponent of northern views of natural rights and northern systems of labor, arguing that egalitarian rhetoric which fueled the push for free labor held the potential for social disorder. Dabney also withstood the largely northern movement for gender equality, believing that female suffrage promoted disorder in the family and would lead to the end of Christian civilization. Finally, Dabney stood against racial egalitarianism, expressing concern about racial mixing and raising the specters of miscegenation and amalgamation, the ultimate “confusion of blood.” Biblical society, according to Dabney, consisted of a single Caucasian race that ruled over other inferior races. God, by divine providence, placed African-Americans in America for their own good—to gain the benefits of Christianity and civilization. As a result of northern interference in the South’s “peculiar institution,” Dabney argued that evangelicals should not work for racial equality but for separate organizations based on racial markers. In addition, white southerners ought to withstand progressive plans to educate blacks; instead, young African-Americans ought to be taught their God-ordained place in southern society as the laboring class. Rooted in his theological beliefs, Dabney’s longing for order as expressed in his postbellum public theology sought to make sense of his chaotic, reconstructed world.