Two weeks ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 40-year-old African American woman–I’ll call her Cheryl–told me how lucky she felt to have given birth to three girls. Boys, she said matter of factly, were so much more likely to be murdered.
East Baton Rouge Parish has never been a peaceful place. But this year, its homicide rate has reached the highest in parish history. As of December 6, 2021, there have been 157 homicides, up 29 from about the same time the year before. This year, like all others, most of the victims are black. Most of those are male. And the likelihood of the killers meeting justice, whatever that means, is slim. That’s because the friends and families of many victims would rather take matters into their own hands than appeal to the authorities. Fearing becoming targets themselves, witnesses often don’t tell police what they’ve seen.
Cheryl herself has witnessed a deadly gunfight outside her home. She didn’t contact the police. She knew the murdered man as well as the murderer. She also knew that the latter had seen her watching.
It’s not that Cheryl wouldn’t want to have the legal system hold murderers accountable. She fully understands the ongoing cycle. She has also felt the pain of losing a close loved one to homicide. Not long ago, her boyfriend’s son who was 16 and whom she had helped raise, was gunned down on the street. When I asked her if she knew anyone else who’d been murdered, she paused, then estimated that she’s lost around twenty friends to homicide since middle school. “I’ve been to a lot of funerals,” she said.
Still, Cheryl doesn’t give in to despair. Crime, of all kinds, is a constant. You deal with it. You have to be careful. When she saw how stunned I was by the number of friends she’s lost, she bucked me up playfully, telling me that I’d be alright.
Is she—and all those who have lost loved ones—to gun homicide considered a victim in America? Not really. What about all those who’ve lost their lives? Are they considered victims who deserved protection? Perhaps by gun control activists, but not by the public at large. It’s a tragedy, to be sure. But it’s one most Americans seem willing to live with.
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The afternoon of the day I met Cheryl, I hopped in my rental car and drove west for an hour to Lafayette, Louisiana, to visit some sights. My first stop was the lovely century-old Romanesque Revival Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. I walked around the back and found the most beautiful cemetery. I wandered around for a while, and as I was leaving, I was struck by the sight of a tombstone symbolically laid in honor to all “victims of abortion.” I can’t recall having seen any other symbolic gravesites for any other groups there. All other tombstones had been set to designate where individual local Catholic residents had been buried. On my drive back to Baton Rouge, I took a detour through Iberville Parish, where I came upon a tiny, unremarkable little village. What was remarkable about it was a home-made anti-abortion lawn sign I passed on the main road into town. On the front it read: Joe Biden-Democrats party have blood on thier (sic) hands. On the backside it read simply: Trump 2024.
There’s been a lot written over the past decade on the growing role of victimhood in American life and politics. We generally understand how groups that successfully claim victim status can garner not only special legal protections but also a certain level of political power. That power derives from the ability to claim innocence, which is a precious currency in America. Still, little if anything, has been written on the political significance of championing third-party groups of victims. It stands to reason, however, that if innocence is the currency groups gain through victimhood, victims’ allies can attain a modicum of innocence themselves.
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It’s been almost 70 years since Reinhold Niebuhr published “The Irony of American History,” in which he warned a newly anointed global power that it can no longer afford to see itself as innocent. It’s not easy, he wrote, “for an adolescent nation, with illusions of childlike innocency to come to terms with the responsibilities and hazards of global politics in an atomic age.” Last year on Inauguration Day, we heard a captivating 22-year-old poet tell citizens of a nation that stockpiles as many as 4,000 nuclear warheads that “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.” Not only is innocence as prized as it ever was in American culture, it’s apparently up to average citizens to uphold an imperial nation’s virtue.
But not all Americans can claim the same levels of virtue though. White people are generally granted the presumption of innocence more than those who are not white. (This might explain why it’s harder for the most beleaguered citizens of Baton Rouge to successfully claim righteous victimhood.) White Northerners can more easily claim virtue than their Southern brethren. That’s been true since the Civil War and was only reinforced during the civil rights struggles a century later.
In 1961, the 100th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Tennessee-born writer Robert Penn Warren published an essay in which he detailed the “maiming liabilities” Americans had inherited from the conflict. While Southerners turned their historic loss into an excuse for their social failings, Northerners wallowed in what he called their “Treasury of Virtue.” They carry in their pockets, he wrote, “a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.” The North’s virtue, of course, was largely derived from its relationship to the victims of slavery.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-abortion sentiment was much stronger in the Northeast than it was in the South. While legislators in Maine and Connecticut were passing abortion bans, North Carolina and Georgia were allowing for limited legal access to the procedure. A 1970 survey of Southern Baptist pastors found that 70 percent supported access to abortion when it benefitted the mother’s physical or mental health, 64 percent in cases of fetal deformity, and 71 percent in cases of rape.
The rise of the new Christian Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a reflection of the South’s growing demographic dynamism and economic strength. The region’s population was growing and becoming more urban. The upwardly mobile helped finance the building of large modern churches whose pastors preached traditionalism yet employed all means of modern communication. Evangelicals then realized that they had the financial and political power to shift the course of national politics. The rapid expansion of the Sunbelt strengthened their movement. Their emergence as power brokers, however, didn’t mean they stopped seeing themselves as targets of northern condescension. In 1976, Southern Baptist Convention president James Sullivan proclaimed defensively that “A world had thought we were an ignorant, barefooted, one-gallused lot was jarred out of its seat when it found out that . . . our voluntary gifts in a year are approximately $1.5 billion, and that on an average Sunday our churches baptize as many people as were baptized at Pentecost.”
What this suggests is that the subsequent politicization of evangelicalism and the emergence of the Christian Right cannot be understood outside of its Southern context. When figures like Jerry Falwell, Sr., and Pat Robertson spoke of reclaiming America, they were also eager to vindicate the South. A redeemed South would redeem the nation. Not only was the region no longer poor and uneducated, but it would also no longer allow itself to be seen as less virtuous than the North. It wasn’t until 1979, the year Falwell founded the Moral Majority, that evangelical leaders began to focus on abortion as their primary political issue. It was in the subsequent decades that the South became the epicenter of anti-abortion activism.
Over the last several decades, religious conservatives have successfully adopted liberal political strategies—from developing rights-based legal arguments to Saul Alinsky-style organizing. They’ve also learned the power of victim politics. As liberals have continued to identify new victim groups in need of government protection, Christian conservatives in the South have intensified their commitment to their chosen victim group: unborn babies. There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of their activism, but the redemption they seek is not only in the eyes of God, but also in those of their fellow Americans.
