• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1533 0

in a position of dominance over the Hutu majority, which in turn helped set the stage for the horrible outcomes there. You could probably turn on a Christian radio broadcast today and hear a preacher deny human rights to Palestinians on similar “biblical” grounds. It’s an old and tired game: quoting sacred texts to strengthen an us-versus-them mentality that, in today’s world, could too easily lead to a last-tango, nuclear-biochemical kamikaze Crusade jihad.1 In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says. No wonder, in my travels around the world, I am asked questions about the relation between the Bible and violence (and the associated question of how Christians should relate to people of other faiths) more than any other single question.

This triplet of troubles presents us with corresponding moral obligations, I believe. We must find new approaches to our sacred texts, approaches that sanely, critically, and fairly engage with honest scientific inquiry, approaches that help us derive constructive and relevant guidance in dealing with pressing personal and social problems, and approaches that lead us in the sweet pathway of peacemaking rather than the broad, deep rut of mutually assured destruction.

These obligations became more obvious to me than ever a few years ago when I prepared some lectures on how to read the Bible. I decided to go back into American history and investigate how the Bible was used by the defenders of slavery in contrast with the promoters of abolition. What I found was deeply disturbing.

Slavery, of course, has a long history. One might say that in its earliest form, it represented a step up from genocide and abandonment. Instead of being exterminated, vanquished males were allowed to survive as slaves of the victors, or instead of being slaughtered or abandoned to starve to death, destitute women and children were allowed to survive as slaves of the rich. But from there, slavery extended into a far-reaching global industry, culminating in the Euro-American trade in African slaves that lasted about four hundred fifty years and stole the freedom and future of 11.5 million Africans.2 Nearly everyone alive today experiences benefits or losses or both in the aftermath of this (in)human tragedy.

When I began my research, I quickly discovered how hard it is to find proslavery literature today. As Eric McKitrick, author of Slavery Defended, says, “Nothing is more susceptible to oblivion than an argument, however ingenious, that has been discredited by events; and such is the case with the body of writing which was produced in the antebellum South in defense of Negro slavery.”3 Several authors, however, have summarized that literature, notably William S. Jenkins, in Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South, and Larry E. Tise, in Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840.4

Tise studied the writings of 275 pre–Civil War proslavery writers in the United States. They came from all parts of the country, not just the South, and from all denominations—notably Presbyterian (almost 30 percent), Episcopalian (20 percent), and Baptist (17 percent). Their lines of argument closely resembled similar arguments posed by British and Caribbean proslavery writers from 1770 to 1830. In addition to popular speech makers and tract writers, there were highly educated proslavery advocates like Thomas Cobb, the lawyer who wrote the Confederate Constitution and the Georgia Constitution and helped found the University of Georgia School of Law. In addition to writing an important proslavery text, he painted these words in large letters on his house, showing his passion for the subject: “Resistance to Abolition Is Obedience to God.” He died in 1862 as a general in the Confederate Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg, defending slavery with his last breath.

There were also many proslavery novels, counterparts to the abolitionists’ famous Uncle Tom