The Confederate in Political Theology’s Attic: Robert Lewis Dabney, the Lost Cause, and Nineteenth-Century Reformed Theology

The specter of Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) haunts U.S. political theology. Widely regarded—both by his contemporaries like Charles Hodge and by those who came after him such as B.B. Warfield—as one of the most prolific and expansive theological minds in the United States in the nineteenth century, Dabney was also an unrepentant and vociferous defender of chattel slavery and white supremacy and a leading theological contributor to the construction of Lost Cause revisionism after the Civil War. A Reformed systematic theologian who taught at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia and the University of Texas, Dabney was also a slaveholder who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, serving as the chief of staff and biographer for the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Dabney’s literary corpus is expansive. It includes a nine-hundred-page systematic theology, thousands of pages of lecture notes and theological disputations, as well as hundreds of pages of political essays and correspondences dedicated to the theological and biblical defense of slavery, white supremacy, and the Lost Cause. Dabney embodies a problem that much of the field of Christian theology in the United States has long tried to suppress and ignore: that—empirically speaking—many of the historical sources of white Christian political theology seamlessly integrated Christian doctrine and white supremacy in a way that seemed to pose no contradiction for them or for many of their white contemporaries. For long periods of U.S. history, Christian theology and white supremacy have been seamlessly interwoven as compatible and mutually reinforcing modes of discourse in the public square.

As Mark Noll has argued in _The Civil War as a Theological Crisis_, the political crisis of the Civil War was ended only by Unions guns, meaning that the intellectual and theological crisis which lay at the root of the political crisis was never resolved. Dabney never recanted his views or owned up to his errors. There was never a group of theologians who performed a theological autopsy on the distorted corpus of Dabney’s theological project. Instead, most political theology in the United States simply tried to forget about Dabney, rather than dealing squarely with the massive challenge that his legacy poses to continued efforts to do Reformed political theology as white Christians in the United States. Rather than dealing with Dabney, white political theologians have simply tried to sweep him under the rug or hide him in the back of the attic and hope that he will go away. Having failed to lay Dabney and his contradictions to rest, however, political theology finds itself haunted by his spectral presence.

In this paper, I propose to bring Dabney out of the attic—to explore his spectral presence in U.S. political theology by naming him as a disturbing, embarrassing source of Reformed political theology in the United States. To do so, I draw upon the theorization of spectrality in the work of Slavoj Žižek as it has been developed by Samira Kawash, to examine what it might mean for Dabney to haunt the field of U.S. political theology. What happens when the overt white supremacist agenda of much of white Christian theology in the United States is suppressed rather than dealt with by theological communities? How does this create afterlives of white supremacy that haunt contemporary formulations of political theology that explicitly disavow racism? What would it mean—and is it even possible—to grapple squarely with the problem that Dabney’s legacy exemplifies in such a way that the spectral presence of Dabney might be put to rest? I will argue that these questions acquire renewed urgency in a time when rising neo-Confederate and white supremacist Christian movements are self-consciously returning to Dabney as a source for contemporary political theology. Indeed, having allowed Dabney to linger as a spectral presence for more than a century, U.S. political theology now finds itself facing the distinct possibility that Dabney’s theological vision may in fact be resurrected.