On a recent afternoon at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, Karen Swallow Prior was leading a discussion of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" for the seventeen students enrolled in her English course on Victorian literature. Prior, who is fifty-three and was wearing a high-necked floral-print dress, looked as if she might have stepped out of "Great Expectations," except for her startling magenta lipstick, and her hair, which is dyed bright orange at the crown and a paler blond around her face, resembling an upside-down flame. On the whiteboard behind her in the windowless classroom, she'd written, "Colonialism, Imperialism, Darwinism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism / Anglocentrism."
She read aloud, "Take up the White Man's burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives' need," then noted, "Kipling was encouraging the United States to use Christianity as a tool of empire." The aggressive spread of the faith was an ideal of the Victorian age, she went on, but that doesn't mean that the Bible supports imperialism. During the nineteenth century, Christianity was used as a justification for secular political projects, and this collapse continues today. "So much of what we think is Biblical Christianity is really Victorian," she said. For example, contemporary Christians often claimed that traditional notions of proper gender roles—such as that a woman's place was in the home—came from scripture, when, in fact, they were largely products of nineteenth-century European thought. "It's super important to learn to distinguish between Victorianism and Biblical Christianity," she said.
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