But God Said...

In a recent article, writer John Blake asks if it is fair to invoke the Bible for political purposes.  In his thoughtful article, he explains how both opponents and proponents of slavery invoked the Bible to justify their positions.

As a seminarian and clergy within the African Methodist Episcopal communion, this subject is of particular interest to me and I have spent a good deal of time and ink on this very subject.  So, I was very happy to see a very mainstream writer, in a very mainstream medium, discuss this topic.

Blake is absolutely right.  Both sides used the Bible during the Civil War to defend and advance their positions.  What's more, the phenomenon of using the Bible to defend political motives is certainly not exclusive to the Civil War context.  Clearly, the administration and leaders of the early church used the Bible to oppress and marginalize the Jewish. Adolf Hitler used the Scriptures to justify the Holocaust, and certainly the Bible is used even today to justify anything from capital punishment to economic capitalism.

While both abolitionists and confederates used the Bible for political purposes, the slaves who were the subject of this political fight, used the Bible for necessity and to justify their existence.

Not only did confederates use the well-known passage Titus 2:9, but they also used Philemon and other letters written by Paul to justify slavery.   What's more, confederates used the story of the "curse of Ham" contained in Genesis to advance an argument that people of African descent--not just one or two of them, but the whole lot of them--were cursed by God and therefore inferior to other races.

So what do people do when they are oppressed, enslaved and cursed by God?  I mean other than Nat Turner the game.  Well, they, among other things, start finding places in the Bible that include them and contradict the notion that they were cursed.  Naturally, slaves were not allowed to read anything let alone read the Bible, so they relied on itinerant preachers and "circuit riders" to teach them the Bible. 

As slaves would listen to the preachers, they constructed a hermeneutic (or a theology, or a way to interpret the Bible, or whatever other word fits there) that drew similarities between the oppression of the Jewish people in the first Testament of the Bible.  They also hear and drew strength from stories in the gospels of love and inclusion from a forgiving, passionate, compassionate savior of the world who loved everybody called Jesus.

This use of the Bible by slaves was not for political reasons, it was for survival...