Which Bible verses did Klan leaders most frequently quote to justify white supremacy?

1. How the Klan treated the Bible as a source of racial identity

From the Klan’s revival in the 1910s through later iterations, leaders presented the Bible as a kind of ethnic charter — “the family history of the white race” — and made membership explicitly a white‑Protestant commitment, dressing ritual and symbol (robes, cross burnings, adapted hymns) with Christian language to legitimate racial exclusion ^{[5] [7] [8]}. Klan newspapers and pamphlets reinforced that religious frame: by restoring the Bible to schools and singing adapted hymns, the movement fused civic claims about “native, white Protestant supremacy” with scriptural authority ^{[8] [9]}.

2. Genesis and the “Canaan curse”: the single most durable biblical pretext

Scholars trace a long thread from early modern and antebellum racial theology to the Klan’s usage of Genesis — especially the tradition that read Genesis 9’s “Cursed be Canaan” as a justification for enslaving or segregating Black people — a reading explicitly cited in broader surveys of Christian defenses of slavery and racial hierarchy that Klan leaders drew upon ^{[1] [3]}. That interpretive move became a staple in white supremacist scriptural argumentation because it offered a theological origin story for racial difference, even though the underlying exegesis was historically fabricated and contested ^[1].

3. Romans 13 and the language of law, order, and obedience

Another frequently invoked passage was Romans 13 — the Pauline injunction to obey governing authorities — which Klan sympathizers and allied figures used to defend social order, segregation, and the subordination of dissenting minorities; modern commentators note a long history of using that chapter to silence challenges to racial oppression ^[2]. The verse’s appeal was pragmatic: it lent moral cover to policing and institutional hierarchies by converting political claims into religious duty ^[2].

4. Numbers 25, Phineas, and militant selective readings

Less uniformly cited but still present in extremist circles is the appeal to Numbers 25 and the figure of Phineas, used by some violent extremists (e.g., “Phineas Priests”) as a biblical warrant for attacking interracial intimacy or “impure” social mixing; the connection is documented in both community Q&A about extremist exegesis and histories of violent sectarian movements ^[3]. Such uses exemplify how narrative episodes of zealotry are abstracted from context and weaponized in modern racial violence ^[3].

5. Christian Identity, British‑Israelism, and the textual scaffolding for white supremacy

By the mid‑20th century and after, strands like Christian Identity layered genealogical claims — arguing that Anglo‑Saxons were the literal heirs of Israel’s “lost tribes” — onto biblical texts, creating a hermeneutic that read scripture as ethnic genealogy rather than theology; that movement provided a systematic scriptural framework that echoed and amplified Klan claims ^{[4] [3]}. This ideological overlay made particular verses function as identity markers, not merely moral teachings ^[4].

6. Pushback, theological rejection, and limits of the record

Mainstream Protestant and scholarly voices have consistently rejected these readings as exegetically weak and morally perverse, noting that the Klan’s citations were selective, context‑stripped, and often borrowed from older pro‑slavery theology rather than from robust theological argumentation ^{[6] [7]}. The sources document which passages were most commonly appealed to but do not provide a quantitative tally of “most frequently quoted” verses across every Klan era; therefore statements about frequency rely on thematic prominence in historical and journalistic literature rather than a comprehensive citation count ^{[5] [9]}.