From the not really OT department, an excerpt from “The Rights and Duties of Masters”, an 1850 sermon by the Rev. James Henry Thornwell:books.google.com

These are the mighty questions which are shaking thrones to their centres—upheaving the masses like an earthquake and rocking the solid pillars of this Union. The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake. One party seems to regard Society, with all its complicated interests, its divisions and sub-divisions, as the machinery of man—which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and skill, may be taken to pieces, re-constructed, altered or repaired, as experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates “this little scene of human life,” as placed in the middle of a scheme whose beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and whose development and completion must be sought in the still more unfathomable depths of the future—a scheme, as Butler expresses it, “not fixed, but progressive—every way incomprehensible”—in which, consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance—disorder the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to tamper as to sport with the name of God.

This kind of ‘reasoning’ remains typical of the US right to this very day, and even seem to be gaining ground within the GOP.