A Historically Questionable Christian Movement Could Soon Be Taught in Texas Schools

[Nevilledog]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/black-robe-regiment-christian-nationalism-schools/

No paywall link
https://archive.md/20260615170942/https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/black-robe-regiment-christian-nationalism-schools/


Bill Cook had a request for the crowd gathered before him just outside the U.S. Capitol. “I don’t think many—enough—of you have heard of the Black Robe Regiment,” he said to attendees of that day’s Jericho March rally, a Christian nationalist gathering challenging the 2020 election results that presaged the riots that would break out nearby a few weeks later, on January 6, 2021. “But if you have, lift your hands.”

Seemingly satisfied his audience was with him, Cook, wearing a red MAGA cap and a black Oath Keepers militia T-shirt, railed against COVID-19 mask mandates and church-state separation and pointed to colonial-era clergy—members of the so-called Black Robe Regiment—who he claimed had led the American Revolution and would presumably have happily battled such modern-day tyranny. “That’s radical,” he said of his ideological forefathers. “Where are our pastors today in this battle? . . . God has given you this city. This is our city. It doesn’t belong to the people that are trying to eviscerate our authority. We are the government of America.”

Then in closing, he plugged his organization—a new iteration of the Black Robe Regiment.

If, like many marchers were that day, you are unfamiliar with the Black Robe Regiment, it’s for good reason—the notion of an organized group of clergy that helped win the American Revolution is, according to many historians, somewhere between misleading and fantasy. But in recent decades, the notion of the mythologized regiment has been taken up by activists like Cook as part of their calls for America to be run as a Christian nation.

To be sure, Christianity did influence the American Revolution and the nation’s founding. “You can find ministers who also served as chaplains,” Jonathan Den Hartog, a scholar of the Revolutionary period and chair of the history department at Samford University, told me. “They marched with the soldiers. Sometimes, they even fought alongside the soldiers. Many were very strongly, both rhetorically and, I think, spiritually, in line with the revolution.” But it would be inaccurate, he continued, to frame the revolution as an exclusively Christian movement. Many clergymen were opposed to the idea or remained neutral. And some of the most famous clergy members to pick up arms, Den Hartog said, drew a distinct line between their religious and military roles.

*snip*