From: G.G.
Subject: Civil War / Slavery

Just read your piece on the Civil War being as much theological as political and I have a quibble.

You cite the legend of Ham and the Tower of Babel as justifications for slavery, but you overlook the fact that in the Book of Exodus Yahweh specifically tells Moses, “You may own slaves,” and proceeds to spell out excruciatingly detailed rules and regulations concerning the obligations of a slave owner.

In short, when Southern preachers argued that slavery was Biblically justified, they were quite correct. Ambiguity does not exist here. Slavery was A-OK with Yahweh. But then, so was killing every living thing in a non-Israelite city. In Biblical terms, abolitionists didn’t have a leg to stand on.

St. Paul in his letters essentially told the slaves of his era to sit down and shut up and wait for Jesus to return and make them equal to everyone else, an event he expected to occur in his own lifetime.

It is true that the laws in Exodus authorized slavery, but I regard that as the least of the relevant issues because, as you’ll notice, the South didn’t enslave whites. They also didn’t enslave people from China. Exodus authorized slavery generally, for everyone — even Jews, in narrow circumstances. The American South didn’t, though.

The American South’s version of slavery was defined along racial lines and nothing more. This, in turn, was justified by the two stories of the Tower of Babel and Ham; the former explained that “nations” were forever separated by an act of God while the second explained why Africans were inferior and born to service.

Granted, it’s unlikely that slavery would have persisted so long in America if it weren’t for the explicit authorization of slavery in Exodus an for this reason the Exodus laws on slavery aren’t irrelevant. However, they are ultimately of minor relevance given the wholly racial nature of Southern slavery and the racist defenses of slavery which appeared in Southern writing. If the South enslaved everyone equally, then the Exodus laws would take on a primary role.

 

So we see that there is no Biblical argument that can be made against slavery, just as one cannot argue against burning a priest’s daughter if she fornicates, or stoning to death a farmer who plants two different crops in one field, or putting to death anyone who wears two different fabrics at once.

Yessir, that’s our Bible, the Good Book!

Now, when it comes to modern Christians, all of these are equally inconvenient. Modern Christians, including Southern Christians, can’t easily explain away slavery, the separation of nations, or the past interpretations of Ham. Many Christians argue that all of those old Hebrew laws no longer apply, and this isn’t unreasonable, but it’s not a decisive argument. First, few Christians are willing to treat all of those laws equally — most Christians try to incorporate a few of them into modern practices. Second, some of those old laws continue to be justified in the New Testament. Jesus doesn’t condemn slavery and Paul effectively defends it.

 

I still think you are underestimating the weight of Exodus in the Southern justification for slavery. There are no limits to rationalization, and no limit to the amount of contradiction suffered in defense of rationalization. Southern Christians before the war did not regard the ecumenical nature of Hebrew slavery to be an impediment to the defense of their form of slavery.

I would accept that I am underestimating the importance of the Exodus laws to Southern justifications for slavery if and only if it could be shown that Exodus played a significant role in writings of Southern politicians and preachers in defense of slavery — both general discourses on the legitimacy of slavery and specific responses to Northern critiques of slavery.

I’m sure that passages from Exodus and other portions of the Bible with expressed the permissibility of slavery appear, but in my own readings I have seen far more quoting and interpretation of the stories of the Tower of Babel and Ham. Why? Because the institution of slavery was racial in nature — it wasn’t slavery so much as race-based slavery which Southerners perceived a need to justify. Because Southern Christians defended their enslavement of millions of human begins on their readings of the stories about Ham and the Tower or Babel, those are the stories which critics today must focus upon.

 

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