Slavery has proved to be the most challenging moral issue in the history of the United States. It prompted secession, which threatened to split the Union into competing nations. It precipitated the most costly war that we have ever fought, drenching our own soil in the blood, not of enemies, but of fellow Americans. Its aftermath gave rise to segregation, which poisoned the soul of the South for a century. Even now, the spectre of racism is the most powerful shaper of our regional identity. The institution of slavery posed the supreme challenge to Southern religion, a challenge that our ancestral faith miserably failed to meet.
Here, as nowhere else, white southern evangelical Protestantism was tried and found wanting at the judgment bar of history. For our purposes today, the response of Southern religion to the sin of slavery provides a haunting case study of a faith that failed to grow. For this was not an instance of timidity or cowardice, as if the pulpit muted its denunciation of a monstrous evil. On the contrary, the Southern clergy in one voice went to the opposite extreme; vigorously defending slavery as divinely sanctioned. They succeeded in making slavery an article of faith in Southern Christianity, an essential component of its religious worldview. And yet this was a conviction which all of us finds repulsive scarcely more than a century later. Because we are agreed on how the slavery question should be settled, let us ask why our forebears, based on the same Christian faith which many of us share, came to a totally opposite conclusion.
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Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18-27).[2] For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment. Here is the beginning of that familiar ploy by which those who insist on a literal reading of the text try to bolster their position by suggesting that their opponents are liberals.
The debate over biblical slavery was based on a Reformed hermeneutic, which insisted that Scripture was an omnicompetent, infallible authority for life, which should be interpreted literally using common sense.[3] That approach may not be far from the view that some of you hold today. If so, how would you counter those who insist that the Bible sanctioned slavery? Admittedly that question has become somewhat theoretical in our day, but there are many who, like the more extreme abolitionists, are prepared to reject the Bible precisely because it does seem to endorse such reprehensible practices as slavery. The problem here is that the traditional Southern hermeneutic gave to slavery a transcendent justification rooted in sacred Scripture. Bad as it was to claim that slavery was backed by the almighty dollar, Southern preaching succeeded in claiming that it was also backed by Almighty God! Do you have a hermeneutic adequate to challenge that conclusion, or do you just hope that the hard questions will somehow go away?
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Why was religion unable to serve as a corrective to this repressive cultural consensus? To consider that question we must recognize two trends in the Americanization of Christianity. The first was the democratization of church polity according to which most congregations, especially in the dominant Baptist denomination, had become self-determining with little or no external control by ecclesiastical bodies or clergy hierarchy.[6] The second was the interpretation of the priesthood of the believer in terms of American exceptionalism according to which the Bible was self-interpreting so that ordinary folk using common sense could readily grasp its message for themselves.[7] The practical effects of these trends are described by Genovese with no little irony:
Decade by decade, church leaders frankly acknowledged that the sentiments of the white communities largely determined their response to measures for segregation, disfranchisement, and the politics of race. The capitulation to a community sentiment that, in effect, defied Scripture proved one of the many joys of the steadyindeed endlessdemocratization of the churches.[8]
What this means is that Southern religion had become such an integral part of the prevailing culture that it was never able to get the critical distance needed to challenge slavery. Pastors were so immediately answerable to their people that they lacked the leverage to fulfill a prophetic role. The church became so enmeshed in the power structure of the day that vox populi had indeed become vox Dei, the voice of the people had become the voice of God, making the pulpit but an echo of the pew.
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Like Cyrus, Lincoln was forced to use the terrible swift sword of war to do his messianic work of deliverance. And what a costly redemption it was! More than 620,000 soldiers lost their lives, more than all the casualties in our nations other wars combined from its founding through Vietnam.[15] The South saw twenty-five percent of its white males of military age slaughtered in the carnage.[16] Soon it would endure the agonies of Reconstruction and, to this day more than a century later; it still struggles to gain equal footing with the rest of the nation. But the religious cost was equally great in terms of the loss of credibility. Mark Noll remarks with biting irony of the biblical debates over slavery:
The Northforced to fight on unfriendly terrain that it had helped to createlost the exegetical war. The South certainly lost the shooting war. But constructive orthodox theology was the major loser when American believers allowed bullets instead of hermenutical self-consciousness to determine what the Bible said about slavery. For the history of theology in America, the great tragedy of the Civil War is that the most persuasive theologians were the Rev. Drs. William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.[17]
Clearly this heartbreaking bloodbath would never have been necessary if the evangelical faith of the solid South had been mobilized to solve the slave question by the deepest teachings of its Scriptures on sacrificial love instead of by committing regional suicide without a foreign shot being fired. Does this mean, therefore, that we should simply give up on religion and resort to political and military action to achieve our moral aims? Not at all, for the Christian faith can be a powerful force for constructive change when its teachings are insightfully understood and courageously implemented. Antebellum Southern religion proved ineffective in solving the slave question, not because it was worthless and needed to be discarded, but because it was immature and needed to grow! At a catalytic moment in world history, when market capitalism made possible the substitution of free wage labor for bound labor (and hence the overthrow o slavery), capitalism allowed itself to be caught in a cultural cul-de-sac. It thus forfeited the chance to provide leadership in one of the great moral breakthroughs of all time.