1. Material for this article was adapted from Baker (2011).
2. For a quick and good analysis of Dixon, Birth of a Nation and white supremacy and religion, see Blum (2005: 236–8).
3. The Klan's presentation of Jesus was not so different from its contemporaries. Like the Muscular Christianity movement, the order feared the feminized Christ and created an image of Jesus as selfless, redemptive and masculine. Much like Bruce Barton, the order re-created the image of Jesus to fit its members' needs. Thus, Jesus became a proponent of robes and disguise for sacred means. Stephen Prothero writes, “[T]he American Jesus has been something of a chameleon. Christians have depicted him as black and white, male and female, straight and gay, a socialist and a capitalist, a pacifist and a warrior, a Ku Klux Klansman and a civil rights agitator” (2003: 8). For Prothero, Jesus becomes the expressions of American hopes and fears as a divinity that mirrors the inhabitants of the nation. Moreover, the Klan's Jesus presents the nation as the Klan hoped it to be and signaled the order's increasing disquiet at the diversity, racial, religious, and otherwise, that changed the demographics of the Klan's fabled white, Protestant nation.
4. The 1920s' Klan's fusing of nation and Protestant Christianity was not new or unexpected. In her study of secular public sphere and its religious creation, Tracy Fessenden aptly argues that conceptions of “‘good’ religion emerges hand in hand with the new nation as a uniquely American achievement, the Puritan's sense of chosenness democratized and domesticated by Enlightenment tolerance, with the blessings of free exercise extended most liberally to matters of privately held belief and not to those allegedly irrational, regressive, or inscrutable forms of religious life—cults, sects, primitives, and so on—deemed foreign to democracy” (2007: 2). Some groups, particularly white Protestant Christians, become defined as the only individuals who are “legitimately” American. While Fessenden examines how the language of the secular allows for this prescriptions to occur, the Klansmen I study are far more forthcoming and explicit in their narrations of nation as built by and for white Protestants. Fessenden shows the subtle strands of common assumptions and portrayals of nation and the danger of the association of nationalism with a certain racialized Christianity. I, on the other hand, am showcasing how one particular movement of white Americans concretizes this common conception of religious nationalism via artifacts and symbols.
5. Aho, James. 1994. This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy. Seattle: University of Washington Press.