The Birth of a Nation: Christian Eschatology and Black Disappearance

At the conclusion of the white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation, and after the Ku Klux Klan has rooted out black empowerment through defeating Reconstruction, we see a man on a steed swinging a sword and killing. Half of the masses are reaching out to him, while the other half lay dead, slaughtered. As the man sits on the steed, the clamoring and slaughtered masses phase out of the picture and are replaced by a great gathering of Anglo’s wearing togas—dancing, smiling, happy. As we attend to this concluding scene what emerges is a Christian eschatology rooted in the eternal celebration of whiteness and the eternal celebration of black removal through drawing upon the Christian eschatological symbol of the Great Banquet from the Book of Revelation. In Birth, Jesus himself, blesses the Banquet and the complete removal of Black presence from its midst. What Birth is suggesting is that the removal of Black life from American social life is rooted within a Christian eschatological vision that places white supremacy at the center of God’s ultimate concern. By rooting this concern eschatologically, Birth is making a claim that this is how contemporary US life should look—Black people being absent from public life, a project that can only be accomplished through violent force. The final shot of the film depicts the symbolic reconciliation between the North and South, which has been provided through the religio-racial terror of the Ku Klux Klan and the return of Anglo-Jesus. Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman are rewarded by seeing the eschatological kingdom of God ushered in by an Anglo-Jesus as they look lovingly at one another, and to their amazement see the “Great City of God” descend to the earth in the form of the proverbial image of the “City on the Hill.” Accompanying this scene are the words, “liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The eschatology of Birth gives us a window into how the dominant American culture views God. While “God-Talk” at its best is a project that produces hope and perseverance in the midst of human constructed evil, it is also fundamentally a discourse on power. As a power discourse it both shapes the material world and allows for the powerful to attempt to escape the anxieties of individual death and the loss of cultural power. Theologian James Cone defines theology as “subjective speech about God, a speech that tells us far more about the hopes and dreams of certain God-talkers than about the Maker and Creator of heaven and earth.” (Cone, 38) Applying Cone’s definition of theology towards the eschatological picture displayed in Birth, what emerges is a claim of whiteness over eternity that is designed to inform the current temporo-spatial order. Furthermore, the theological ideas that we see displayed within Birth express the aspirations of not only those who created the film, but that of the nation itself. The ability to tell (and sell) a certain theological story that can live within a society - to structure the reality of that society, is tied within the nexus of theological imagination and material power. As a national story of racial propaganda, Birth provides us insight into the theo-political imagination of the American racial order. One where racial exclusion structures national identity. Black disappearance is core to this theo-political project. 

This paper concludes that black persons’ disappearance in Birth implies that they have been confined to eternal damnation, and that this informs the disappearing of black persons into hell worlds in the here and now. One site being the black mass prison – the location for the eternally damned and disappeared.