“Flashes of lightning to quicken our steps”: Lillian E. Smith and Christian Fascism

I have been sitting on this essay for a couple of years. It is an essay that Emma Williams and I co-wrote in my Lillian E. Smith and Christian Nationalism course two years ago. During that class, we wrote “Christian Nationalism Hurts the Children It Clams to Protect” in Religion Dispatches, and this essay arose, partly, out of that article. Initially, we wanted to submit this essay to either an edited collection or a journal. We submitted it to a journal, but it didn’t land. Since then it has been sitting on my desktop. We think that this article is important, and rather than waiting to share it via a journal or in some other venue, we are choosing to publish it here. This was first envisioned as an academic article, so it carries that format with it.

Lillian Smith burst onto the literary scene in 1944 with the publication of her debut novel Strange Fruit, a novel about an interracial relationship between a Black woman, Nonnie Anderson, and a white man, Tracy Deen, in Maxwell, Georgia, a fictionalized town on the border between Georgia and Florida where Smith was born. The novel sold well, and it caused a storm, with cities such as Detroit and Boston banning it for being obscene due to the use of one four letter word in the book. However, they banned it because it held a mirror up to white society…