A very current controversy right now surrounds what to teach school children about African American history. Florida’s education standards continue to be a focus of debate based on historical errors made by committee members and a section of the standards which imply slavery may have been beneficial to some slaves.
Amid this public debate, now comes a leader of an emerging version of Christian nationalism wondering out loud who was Emmett Till. Stephen Wolfe wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism which stimulated significant critical response among evangelicals. The book makes a case for a Christian government which greatly blurs the separation of church and state. Non-Christians and atheists could be jailed or executed if they become militant in their anti-Christian rhetoric. One might think such proposals would be rejected by evangelicals. Not so. Wolfe has a vocal following among far right evangelicals and appears at conferences alongside leading figures in that world.
Yesterday, on the website formerly known as Twitter, Wolfe asked.
If Wolfe (and commenter Jay Engel, who is affiliated with far right Chronicles magazine) really didn’t know who Emmett Till was, this is exhibit A about why Christian nationalists should not be anywhere near history standards in education. I know some will say, this is just a couple of guys spouting off on social media. Well, another way to look at it is that these are educated guys who are recognized leaders in their movement who just signalled to homeschooling and Christian schooling followers that knowing basic cultural information involving African Americans and white supremacy is unimportant and, as we shall see, something to ridicule.
These are also people who write a lot about culture and want to create a specifically Christian culture. For them not to know who Emmett Till was and what that means for American culture is revealing and disappointing. But here’s what is worse.
Once Wolfe did know (apparently after looking up Till’s story), he said this (see above):
Yeah, I’m supposed to care about some 1955 event that all the libs care about.
Even the Florida African American History standards include the story of Emmett Till. But Stephen Wolfe, advocate for Christian nationalism, doesn’t care. He later deleted the “who was Emmett Till” tweet and wrote this:
For Christian nationalists of the Stephen Wolfe persuasion, events depicting the evils of white supremacy aren’t important to know about. However, a memorial to the Confederacy or what various white Reformers said about just about anything is critical to celebrate. A conference on creationism is important, but facts about the unjust killing and how the failure of the legal system cost a young Christian teen his life are not. Somehow, the unjust death of Till is a “narrative” which can be overlooked as something his type of Christians don’t need to know about.
Christian nationalism is unlikely to ever gain control of the federal government. However, it has had some influence in various states and the battlegrounds are in areas like school standards for instruction. I write about this to amplify what is at stake. Some Christian nationalists want America’s school children to know only what they think they should know. Here we see a glimpse of what that might look like.
P.S. Because a Christian nationalist history in the Stephen Wolfe tradition might try to eliminate stories like Emmett Till’s, it is very important to memorialize them such as recently done by President Biden. Come to think about it, it is also why it is important to remove Confederate memorials and monuments from places of honor. We cannot forget the shame of the Confederacy, but we should not honor it.
One more thing, Wolfe really doesn’t have a problem remembering events in the past or even memorializing them. He just has different priorities. Here he laments the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, VA.
If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it
must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live
The Death of Emmett Till - Bob Dylan
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
He went from not knowing who Emmett Till was to railing against the socially enforced narrative and knowing how people were oppressed by it and just dying for someone to speak out in less than 24 hours. If he could fix global warming by Monday that would be awesome too.
I grew up in the Scotland, so I was learning about William Wallace and other highlights of Scottish history in school, not the American civil rights movement, but I have lived the last 30 years in the United States.
So it came as a bit of a shock to me that I had no idea that Black Wall Street existed or that it was burned to the ground in the Tulsa race massacre until 2020 as a result of watching an episode of Lovecraft Country on HBO that happened to feature it.
It wasn't that I knew it happened but didn't know much about it, I literally had no idea it had existed at all, and while I'm not a history buff by any means I was shocked that I had never seen or heard this major event being talked about on TV or radio, or featured prominently on a current affairs or political website in well over two decades. (And yes, I did learn about Emmett Till long before that.)
Sure the British education system was pretty good at whitewashing British colonial history back when I was a kid (and may still be, for all I know) -- the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in the Punjab springs to mind -- and it's likely no nation is completely sinless when it comes to putting its institutional thumb on the scale of history, but given the existing obliviousness of many Americans to major events in black history on their own soil, it seems crazy that conservatives would want to bury the past even more.