Proslavery Bible: An Inerrant Moral Guide?

                One of the principle claims (and complaints) of the fundamentalist Christian right is that they possess an inerrant, absolute standard of morality, God’s Word in the Bible,  while they claim that secular humanists are undermining the moral fiber of the United States by a moral relativism which excludes the Bible, God and prayer from the public schools and the 10 commandments and Christmas from the public square.

                Given that all but the most Rushdoony influenced Christian fundamentalists agree with the proposition that slavery is a moral evil, this proposition can be historically tested by an empirical test case.  If racial slavery is a moral evil and the Bible is an inerrant and absolute moral guide, one would expect that slavery would be unambiguously condemned by the Bible.  Yet, just the opposite is shockingly the case.  For almost 2,000 years, Bible-believing Christians interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery.  The most bloody, murderous war (per capita) in U.S. history was commenced by Bible-thumping, Confederate Christians who were absolutely certain that God did not merely wink at slaveholding, HE positively commanded it—because slavery was a divine blessing for blacks and whites alike.

                In fact, Reverend Iveson L. Brookes, S. Carolina, 1850, would say:   “Next to the gift of his Son to redeem the human race, God never displayed in more lofty sublimity his attributes, than in the institution of slavery.”    Ferdinand Jacobs, 1850, in The Committing Our Cause to God would say:  “If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify.  If we err in maintaining this relation, I know not when we are right—truth then has parted her usual moorings and floated off into an ocean of uncertainty.”  The Confederate Army Religious Newspaper, Messenger April 15, 1864 proclaimed:  “We are fighting not only for our country but our God. . . .  It has become for us a holy war, and each fearful and bloody battle an act of awful and solemn worship.”^[i]  Hundreds, if not thousands, of sermons were preached, religious pamphlets were published, theological tomes (encyclopedic in length) were written, and newspaper articles were written by clerics and politicians alike extolling the Christian virtues of racial slavery.  This religious certainty found its way into official state declarations of why the Confederates left the Union.  For example, the February 2, 1861 Texan statement of causes for seceding stated that slavery was commanded by the “plainest revelations of the Divine Law” and that Confederates must fight to uphold the “revealed will of the Almighty Creator."

                The racist Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney advised fellow slaveholders that the Bible was slavery’s strongest bulwark against abolitionism; that the Bible was diametrically opposed to freedom for slaves: "[W]e must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and 'Thus saith the Lord' as the answer. . . .  we know that on the Bible argument the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies.  The Bible being bound to stand on our side, they have to come out and array themselves against the Bible and then the whole body of sincere believers at the North will have to array themselves, though unwillingly, on our side.  They will prefer the Bible to abolitionism."^[ii]  

                Reverend Benjamin M. Palmer, eulogized May 1902 aged 84 as the most influential man in New Orleans by “common consent,” characterized the Civil War as a holy crusade, asserting that in the entirety of human history, no war was holier:  “History reads to us of wars which have been baptized as holy; but she enters upon her records none that is holier than this.”  This statement was made in Palmer’s Thanksgiving Day Sermon 1860 in which he advocated secession and war as a Christian duty.  Thousands of reprints were published in newspapers and pamphlets throughout the South.  Palmer’s biblical exposition on the holiness of slavery and the South’s Christian duty to expand slavery was credited by many contemporaries as the decisive argument which convinced Confederate Christians to start a Civil War.

                In his sermon, he went on to identify slavery as a “providential trust,” and said it was the South’s religious duty “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.”  He asserted that God’s providential trust had been under demonic “unrighteous assault through five and twenty years.” He promised that should the South fight to extend slavery, “[t]he particular trust assigned to [them],” they would receive “the pledge of the divine protection.”  In sum, he said, “we [southerners] defend the cause of God and religion” by fighting to extend slavery.  He branded abolitionists as demonic, atheists, and “the throne of iniquity."  Palmer continued:

To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth. In this trust, we are resisting the power which wars against constitutions and laws and compacts, against Sabbaths and sanctuaries, against the family, the State, and the Church; which blasphemously invades the prerogatives of God, and rebukes the Most High.^[iii]

                The Reverend Palmer’s Thanksgiving Sermon of 1860 was echoed by scores of southern evangelical preachers.  For example, on May 16, 1862, J. W. Tucker, a southern Methodist minister, encouraged his congregation to support the war saying, “God’s providence is in this war. . . .  Our cause [slavery] is just, and God will defend the right. . . .  Our cause is sacred.” “Your cause is the cause of God, of Christ, of humanity.  It is a conflict of truth with error—of the Bible with Northern infidelity [emphasis added].”  A Presbyterian minister from Georgia prophesied that because God was on the Confederate side, within twenty years of their divinely ordained victory, abolitionist concepts would “vanish from the world,” and slavery, “stronger than ever in the South would flourish also in many Northern states and foreign countries.”   Far from gradually expiring, slavery was seen as expanding even outside of history into the millennial age according to some Southern divines. ^[iv]  To the very end of the war, southerners like the editor of the Mississippi Messenger would proclaim:  “The character of the war is, with us, essentially and necessarily religious . . . .[emphasis added]”^[v]   William Norris, writing for the trans-Mississippi army, similarly asserted:  “This war is on our part, a war for our Religion. . . .”^[vi]    

                The Confederacy was said to be a covenant people equivalent to the “Hebrew nation” and the “martyr church of Christ.”^[vii]   The wife of S. Carolina Senator Chesnut, Mary Chesnut said:  “Not one doubt is there in our bosoms that we are not the chosen people of God.  And that he is fighting for us.”  A writer for the Richmond Religious Herald of February 25, 1864 could not have agreed more, saying:  “Our enemies make slavery the central question of the war.  But no one at the South doubts the Divine Sanction of slavery.”  Conversely, a writer for the Christian Observer, February 2, 1865 claimed that “[a]ll who love the Lord Jesus Christ must and will oppose this monster heresy [of abolition] even unto death.”^[viii]  An Alabama Methodist preacher told his brother that he had a “deep Christian and inextinguishable hatred toward the demons of the north” and that it was his conviction that “it is doing God service to kill the diabolical wretches on the battlefield.”^[ix]

                Reverend J. Jones on May 26, 1862 at the Presbyterian Church of Rome, Georgia gave a comprehensive sermon entitled, The Southern Soldier’s Duty. He characterized the conflict as a religious and moral one.  The stakes, he exhorted the Confederate troops,  were ”the prosperity of true religion, and the authority of God’s word, all are committed to your keeping.”  Should they fail, true religion and God’s word would suffer. Reverend Lucius Cuthbert, Jr. defined the reasons for secession and war as essentially religious in his sermon entitled, “The Scriptural Grounds for Secession from the Union.” According to Henry Allen Tupper in yet another Thanksgiving Discourse given September 18, 1862 at the Baptist Church, secession “was necessary to salvation, and war to final separation.  Hence, the Lord . . . led providentially and imperceptibly into war. [emphasis added]”^[x]   God designedly led the Confederacy into the Civil War which was “necessary to salvation.”  It was a war of cosmic significance because Southern believers would be contending against atheistic principles on behalf of a “providential trust,” slavery. 

                Most Americans are surprised to learn that the Confederates seceded because the Bible commanded them that they must uphold slavery as a “providential trust.”  However, although already the ten footnotes above are becoming repetitious, they could virtually be continued ad infinitum.   Thus, this is an irrefutable case where the inerrant Word of God was employed with absolute certainty by true believers to prove beyond a doubt that something we believe today to be grossly immoral was lauded as an absolute divine commandment, vital to the continuation of Christian civilization.  This has obvious parallels with the similar assertions by Christian fundamentalists today that the Bible absolutely condemns homosexuality, abortion, and birth-control pills, and that the United States is on a slick and speedy path to perdition because the U.S., God’s chosen people, is fast becoming a nation of moral perverts, just like the slaveholders accused the abolitionists of being.  In a future blog I will examine how a common sense interpretation of Old and New Testament proslavery texts proved Confederates had a firm biblical foundation for their belief that slavery was a “providential trust.”  The same method fundamentalists continue to use for a whole gamut of issues today—from global warming to birth control.

[i] Kurt O. Berends, “Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man,” The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy in Religion and the American Civil War  edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 146 quoting “Address of the Second and Third Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia,” Messenger, April 15, 1864.

[ii] George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010),14.

[iii] Benjamin Morgan Palmer's "Thanksgiving Sermon" November 29, 1860.  http://civilwarcauses.org/palmer.htm has the full text.  While ostensibly claiming that he never mixes politics and religion, Palmer’s sermon is remarkable for its total amalgamation of religion, race, and politics.

[iv] Kurt O. Berends, “Confederate Sacrifice and the ‘Redemption’ of the South,” in Religion and the American South:  Protestants and Others in History and Culture, ed. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina )Press, 2004), 105.  For these and multiple other claims that God supported slavery and the Confederacy see also David B. Chesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War” Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830-1865. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 345, 222, 195, 226-227, 324, 229-237, 333.  For examples of Confederate claims for God’s miraculous interventions on their behalf, see also page 298, where Reverend Joseph May Atkinson, author of God, the Giver of Victory and Peace.  Raleigh: n.p., 1862, proclaimed that if Confederate eyes could have been opened by angels as of old, they would have seen “an angel, terrible as that which smote the host of Sennacherib, hurling back the multitudinous cohorts of our self-confident invaders, filling their ranks with confusion, dismay, and death.”   On page 314 is a citation of James Elliott’s The Bloodless Victory, Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1861.  In this sermon, Elliott assures his parishioners that the bloodless taking of Fort Sumter as an answer to prayer because:  “The hand of God seems as plainly in it as in the conquest of the Midianites.” In case any young Confederate soldier might feel squeamish about killing, Reverend Stephen Elliott did his best to disabuse them of this notion; he urged them to “strike boldly . . . without any guilt. . . .  The church will sound the trumpets that shall summon you to battle.  For this ministerial endorsement of the war on behalf of slavery see page 315-316. 

[v] Mark O. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 79.

[vi] Kurt O. Berends, “Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man,” The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy in Religion and the American Civil War  edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 144.

[vii] Ibid., 142, 147, 155, 145, 143.  See also page 145 for Reverend Smith’s assertion that the original Union of states stood in direct opposition to the “order of God.”  This contradicts current right-wing evangelical assertions that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

[viii] Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 85, 291, 409.

[ix] George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 68.

[x] David B. Chesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War” Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830-1865. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 196, 219, 197, 321- 324, 344.

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Intelligent Design of Creationist Lies



            The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board case provided a famous courtroom demonstration of how fundamentalist “Christians” systematically and deliberately lied to try and impose a higher “truth” on the general public.  

                These creationists were so intent on teaching “Intelligent Design” in public schools that they lied multiple times in order to support “The Truth.”  Examples:  1) After swearing they had no idea how a creationist book got into the schools, a cancelled check paying for the books, signed by creationist Bill Buckingham, and channeled through two other creationists was produced; 2) after swearing they weren’t trying to introduce religious dogma into the schools, they were caught on video tapes saying the opposite; 3) after swearing that Intelligent Design was not Creationsism, their own books proved that they’d sloppily done a find and replace edit creating the nonsense word “cdesign proponentsists” by conflating “creationists” with “design proponents.”

                The Dover Area School Board of Pennsylvania, which had been taken over by creationists such as Bill Buckingham, was sued by those objecting to religion parading as science in high-school education.  Bill Buckingham was a school board member, chair of the curriculum committee, and he (along with some other board members) were relentless in insisting that creationism be taught as science.  Paradoxically, while many fundamentalists explicitly claim that they disdain any science as being necessary to support their Sola Scriptura, anti-Darwin stance, foot-soldiers like Buckingham were convinced that a marketing device they labeled the science of  “Intelligent Design” (ID) could get their faith-based religion into the local high-school’s science curriculum.  Given the fact that the Supreme Court prohibited creationism from being taught under the guise of science, they colluded in denyin that it was their religious belief that motivated them to attempt to introduce creationism into public school science.  They denied that ID was creationism.  The trial would show that intelligent design was indeed creationism; that the only difference in the two was a new marketing label.

                Minister Bill Buckingham perjured himself multiple times during the trial.  He denied having any religious intent in promoting ID as science.  Yet he was documented on video-tape with proof to the contrary.  There were contemporaneous multiple local newspaper accounts that he had pushed hard for ID because of his religious presuppositions and concerns.  At trial, he testified that the newspapers got it all wrong.  Eye-witness testimony also indicated that he had mixed religion and science in his advocacy for ID.  Again, everybody but him remembered events incorrectly.  His own parishioners knew he was lying because they knew how much he harped about critical it was to get God back into public school science.  However, in order for ID to masquerade as science,  a legal fiction had to be maintained.  He also lied when he stated that he had no idea how 60 copies of an ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, had arrived at the high-school.  It turned out that their conception had not been so immaculate after all.    “Lawyers for the plaintiffs got hold of the check that had paid for the books and found—lo and behold!—that it had been written by Bill Buckingham, who had raised the money from his congregation one Sunday morning at Harmony Grove Community Church.” “The check was made out to Donald Bonsell, father of school board president Alan Bonsell. . . .  Remember, in his deposition Buckingham had denied any knowledge of where the books had come from.  The money was surreptitiously raised in a church by a member of the board, laundered through the board president, and given to a former board president, himself known for his activism in bringing religion into the schools, who secretly bought the books.  If you were trying to prove a covert religious intent, you couldn’t find a better story than this one to illustrate it.”[i] 

                Alan Bonsell, the school board chairman, lied through his teeth in denying any knowledge of how 60 anonymous copies of the creationist text, Of Pandas and People, arrived at the high-school.[ii]   He very well knew that he had solicited church member donations to purchase the books;  As judge Jones observed:  “They deliberately, in my view, lied.”  Yet, even after being caught red-handed in the lie, these believers in “the Truth” did not repent of their sin. The intellectual father of the Dominist movement,  Reverend R. J. Rushdoony, had justified deliberate deceit, after all.[iii]   They were indignant that a George W. Bush appointed Republican judge should have the audacity to point out that they had lied.  Media shills, like  Bill O’Reilly and Pat Robertson, called the Republican judge “fascist” and “absurd,” respectively.  The threadbare charge of “activist judge” was trotted out, emptying it of any other meaning than a judge whose reasoned, constitutional application of the law some crank disagrees with.  Their hangers-on even sent Judge Jones death-threats for his Dare to be a Daniel integrity.  U.S. Marshalls had to put Jones and his wife under twenty-four hour protection.  The Christians had decided to turn the tables on the lions.  Ben Stein, a Nixon speech-writer and economist, produced a movie critical of Judge Jones entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”  In it he let viewers know that whereas ID led to “Love of God and compassion,” “science leads you to killing people.”   His allies’ death-threats he did not explain.  It was just part of a greater media circus wherein unremitting misinformation is churned out trying to link science and the bogeyman of “secular humanism” to Nazi death camps when there is actually massive proof of Christian anti-Semitism being foundational for Nazi death camps.

                The total lack of honesty honey-combed the ID ranks.   The Discovery Institute was a major player in the game of charades.  They were in league with Bonsell and Minister Bill Buckingham.  They claimed that ID had nothing to do with creationism and the book Of Pandas and People which they had provided the local zealots.   They prevaricated about the relation between creationism and ID because legal precedent had banned creationism from being taught as science; since it was clearly religion and non-science, and since the Supreme Court had established the precedent that religion could not be taught under the guise of science.  The stunning proof of this bold-faced lie was almost miraculous.  The previous creationist version Of Pandas and People was saturated with religious creation terminology.  When the Discovery Institute decided to re-label their book as ID to evade the Supreme Court’s strictures, they used a find and replace software program trying to eliminate creationist finger-prints.  They revisers did such a sloppy job that when they meant to replace “creationists” with “design proponents” they created the chimera “cdesign proponentsists.”[iv]  Judge Jones characterized their shenanigans as “breathtaking inanity,” “a mere re-labelling of creationism.”

                Thus, there is proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that the local foot-soldiers, the local clerical leaders, and the institutional backers and publishers of the ID material all engaged in, not just a dishonest conspiracy to lie to the court and defraud the public, but in a clumsy, third-rate cabal of conning the public.[v]  When this was painfully obvious to both them and their media echo-chambers, they did not retreat an inch from their brazen dishonesty.  Their religious faith gave them the absolute certainty that they were fighting in the Lord’s cause; therefore, any means was justified in achieving their noble end—saving high-school students from evolution and thereby saving America from dastardly secular humanists. 

                A common epistemological debating strategy/tactic that ID practitioners use is to say that “there is no way to achieve objectivity.”  Therefore, empirical evidence which is not consistent with their view of Sola Scriptura can be totally disregarded.  Says Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis:  “You’ve either got on God’s word glasses, or man’s word.”[vi]   Thus, all empirical or scientific facts are merely “man’s word” and have zero probative value if they conflict with “God’s word glasses.”  Knowing that they have God’s Truth, Intelligent Design proponents like Minister Buckingham or the Discovery Institute have no scruples about committing perjury to maintain the truth.  Ironically, while obsessed with a very particular religious view of biology, the whole point of their efforts in this law case and in the entire Intelligent Design project is to deny that their obsession has anything to do with religion.  It’s merely the best Science!

                The extreme contempt for the truth and for facts that the vanguard of the Christian Right exhibit in their crusade to make the United States a Christian Nation is shocking.  Yet those most zealous in telling lies on behalf of the truth make no apologies.  Some of their thought leaders have expressly justified deceit in behalf of a “good cause.”  That good cause is taking “Dominion” over a corrupted, secular society.  Most just unconsciously hold that one need not keep faith with the devil.  Unfortunately, there are multiple, well-documented cases illustrate this disturbing phenomenon.   This phenomenon permeates many other cause célèbre in the culture wars.  I have documented other examples in previous blogs (see those regarding Rick Santorum).  More examples will be forthcoming in future blogs.

                The questions is:  Why do such “Christians” believe they MUST lie to uphold “The Truth?”  Do they lack faith in the truthfulness of their own dogmas?

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[i] Gordy Slack,  The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything : Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA  (Jossey-Bass, 2008), 152-159.  Buckingham’s and Bonsell’s transparent religious ax to grind was also documented by Slack:  At a board’s annual retreat in 2002, Bonsell said his highest priority was “creationism” and his second highest “school prayer.

[ii] Pandas and People’s copyright is held by a Texas religious foundation headed by a minister whose articles of incorporation describe its mission as “proclaiming, publishing, preaching [and] teaching . . . the Christian Gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of the day.”  Yet all the people associated with it would claim that they had no religious mission in promoting the book in high-school science classes; a claim absurd on its face.   On online ad for the book enthusiastically describes its hybrid character in that it 1) “has no Biblical content, yet [2] contains creationists’ interpretations and refutations for evidences [sic] usually found in standard textbooks supporting evolution.”  See Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 89.

[iii] Millionaire Howard Ahmanson bank-rolled both the Chalcedon Foundation of Rushdoony and the Discovery Institute which backed the Buckingham faction on the Dover school board.

[iv] Given their skill and integrity in creating this counterfeit reality, one can only imagine the science that they conjure up as a replacement for well established biology, chemistry, and physics.

[v] The whole cabal reminds me of the utter gullibility of some people’s faith.  I recently received a breathless, ecstatic email from a relative concerning amazing proof of the biblical flood and Bible history in general.  Attached were purported photographs of archaeological specimens of the Nephilim.  Nephilim, for the uninitiated, are said to be the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" referred to in Genesis 6:4.  Giants, demi-gods, great warriors, mythical mysteries of some sort according to various religiously inclined speculators.  In any case, crudely doctored photographs using a distorted perspective were offered as stunning proof of 21^st century archaeological proof of salvation history.  I have personally received numerous such reflexive acts of joy where persons were so enamored of “concrete proof” of something that disproved secular humanist’s world view that they forwarded the amazing facts to all and sundry on their email address book without taking two seconds to consider the complete absurdity of the hoax which they were perpetuating.  On some occasions when I gently pointed out the hopeless inaccuracy of such tales I got the response:  “It never bother to verify the veracity of such things, I just pass them along.”

[vi] This is the position of Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis as quoted in Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 95-97.