The Conversion Agenda

"Freedom to convert" is counterproductive as a generalized doctrine. It fails to come to terms with the complex interrelationships between self and society that make the concept of individual choice meaningful. Hence, religious conversion undermines, and in extremes would dissolve, that individual autonomy and human freedom.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Racism's Biblical basis

Michael McAteer
thestar.com

Protestant churches in the southern U.S. once preached that slavery was sanctioned by God

Interracial marriage was a crime in South Carolina as late as 1998 when the state repealed its anti-miscegenation law.

Although the repeal was supported by a majority of voters in a referendum, almost 40 per cent opposed it. Among them was a Republican state representative who argued interracial marriage was "not what God intended when he separated the races back in Babylonian days." His stance, he acknowledged, probably stemmed from his Southern Baptist upbringing.

Disassociating his denomination from the representative's remarks, a spokesperson for the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) said that "to wrap our prejudice in the Scripture is a sinful thing to do" and referred to the SBC's 1995 public repentance for the role slavery played in its formation 150 years earlier.

The SBC's belated apology to African-Americans for "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and system racism" came 133 years after slavery was abolished in the southern states following the southern defeat in the American Civil War, and almost 400 years after the first slaves were unloaded on American soil.

Breaking from northern Baptists over the issue of missionaries owning slaves, the ultra-conservative, evangelical SBC preached a Biblical basis for slavery and later used its pulpits to vigorously oppose anti-segregation laws.
Today, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. forms a significant segment of Christian support for the Bush administration and has endorsed the U.S. invasion of Iraq as necessary to stop "rogue states" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Baptists were not the only southern Protestants who preached that slavery was in harmony with Christianity and the Bible and was sanctioned by God. Other Christians used the pulpit to fertilize the weeds of bigotry, discrimination and oppression to produce one of the most shameful chapters of U.S. history.
As Stephen Haynes notes in Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. (Oxford University Press, 2002), the 1864 general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America affirmed it was the mission of the Southern Church to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.

And then there was the Rev. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, who plays a central role in Haynes book.

Streets, parks schools and orphanages in the U.S. South bear the name of this prominent Christian evangelist, orator, "founding father" of the Southern Presbyterian Church and esteemed New Orleans clergyman of the second half of the 19th century. But, as Haynes points out, Palmer was also a vicious bigot, "a vociferous advocate of slavery who relied on the so-called curse of Ham to justify the South's peculiar institution."

A staunch defender of Southern interests, Palmer viewed the Civil War as a "holy" conflict between a righteous South and an ungodly North and devoted much of his time and energy to ensuring that God's design of racial separation and Anglo-Saxon domination were reflected in church and society alike.

Coincidentally, Palmer, who died in 1902, is recognized as the "father" of what was once Southern Presbyterian University and is now Rhodes College, a liberal arts institution in Memphis Tenn., where Haynes, a Southerner and Presbyterian clergyman is professor of religious studies.

A college commemorative plaque praises the "father" of an institution "which was the first to place the Bible as a required textbook in its curriculum and which through all the years continues to enshrine this ideal of Christian education." In Palmer's hands, the textbook was a teaching tool to underscore biblical texts justifying not only slavery in general but also the enslavement of Africans in particular.

In Genesis, the first book of the Old (Hebrew) Testament, the story is told of Ham coming across his naked father Noah who was sleeping off a drunken binge. Instead of covering his father, Ham runs and tells his brothers Shem and Japheth who avert their eyes and cover their father's nakedness. In retaliation for Ham's behaviour, Noah puts a curse on Ham's son, Canaan.

"Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

There is no specific condemnation of slavery anywhere in the Bible

The Bible is silent on what it is that Ham did to bring down Noah's wrath upon his grandson. And while both books of the Bible are replete with references to slavery and how it should be regulated, there is no specific condemnation of the practice.

In Exodus, it is written that `if a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property."

The apostle Paul did proclaim that in Christ there was "no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, Matthew did say "a disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master."

In Karen Armstrong's book, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis, the well-known author and lecturer suggests that Noah's refusal to take responsibility for his drunken state shifted his guilt and self-disgust onto an innocent party, Canaan.

"Some of the worst atrocities of history have occurred as a result of this type of scapegoating when we blame others for our own crimes and inadequacies," Armstrong says. "It provided a rational for Israel's later subjugation of the Canaanites and the proposed genocide of the native people of the Promised Land as described in the Book of Joshua."

With the later belief that Africans were Ham's descendants, "the scriptural defense of slavery had evolved into the most elaborate and systematic statement of proslavery theory," Haynes says.

What distinguishes Palmer among former slave apologists, says Haynes, is something he shares with many American Bible readers: "the American penchant for reading Genesis as a manifesto of racial destiny quite apart from the question of slavery. Palmer, who read Noah's curse as a blueprint for the natural hierarchy of humans, insisted that God had assigned the American people a unique historic mission.

Outside of slavery, he argued, the black race would experience "rapid extermination before they had time to waste away through listlessness, filth and vice."

And while he was not the first to assert that aboriginal Americans' displacement by Europeans was an act of providence, Haynes says Palmer used a Biblical text that was pivotal in American debates regarding the destinies of Africans and Europeans to illuminate the fate of the American Indian.

"As a Christian rhetorician, Palmer's goal was to demonstrate that the `practical extinction' of Native Americans under the pressure of an expanding white civilization was in conformity with the divine plan revealed in scripture."

Because the majority of Americans now share the "vision of an integrated society," Haynes says it is tempting to regard Noah's curse as discredited and irrelevant.

However, he cautions that "the stereotypes and myths that once animated racial readings of Genesis continue to operate in the American imagination." And, "given the enduring American fascination with Noah's curse, the potential for Palmer's `genocidal' reading of the curse to justify genocidal assault on a minority population should never be discounted."

As long as people read the Bible to seek justification for group hegemony, Palmer's racist views should not be regarded as ideological relics, Haynes says.
"Noah's curse may be dormant, but it is not dead: it may be in remission but it is still in need of a remedy."

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