Described by the biographer Louis DeCaro “as a product of the Congregational Church and the Reformed confessions,” his compatriot Charles Robinson, who once compared Brown’s execution by Virginia to that of Jesus by the Romans, declared that “the soul of John Brown was the inspiration of the Union armies in the emancipation war.” Thousands of Union troops sang “John Brown’s Body” in the 19th century and his memory has long been the subject of fierce debate among historians. Even today, socialist gun owners organize under the banner of the “John Brown Gun Club” in an attempt to build an alternative to the NRA, while dozens of historical sites honoring Brown dot the American landscape and renditions of “John Brown’s Body” have racked up millions of listens across streaming platforms.
However, Brown cannot be understood apart from his theological context. Indeed, it was the murder of abolitionist preacher Elijah Lovejoy that led Brown to “consecrate [his] life to the destruction of slavery,” likening Lovejoy’s killing to that of John the Baptist and its catalyzing effect on Christ’s ministry. Brown, like Lovejoy, was a product of the rock-ribbed Calvinism that first brought the Puritans to the New World, and a fire and brimstone evangelist before he took to the political path. In this vein, biographer David Reynolds argues that Brown understood his role in politics in Old Testament terms of divine retribution, Brown having remarked: “wherever there is a right thing to be done, there is a ‘thus saith the Lord’ that it shall be done.”
Today, the idea of mixing religion with politics has become increasingly controversial amid discourse over the alleged rise of “Christian nationalism.” Though propagators of the term “Christian nationalism” claim to be describing an anti-democratic, theocratic vision of America, the term increasingly seems to include any contact between religion and politics at all. In Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood’s Baptizing America, the allegation is brought beyond the religious right to include a sermon given at the United States Capitol in 2022 from the liberal, LGBT+ affirming Episcopal Church. Kaylor and Underwood, in a 2023 interview, include under the “Christian nationalist” banner both President Lyndon Johnson’s impassioned plea to Congress to move forth in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, to our original subject matter, John Brown’s violent abolitionism.