Many books have been written about religion’s role in those movements while seeming to ignore religion’s contribution to the need for those movements in the first place. It’s a bit like praising a child for cleaning up his messy room. Religion helped perpetuate slavery in the first place, as we’ll see in chapters 17 and 24. Religion did not create slavery—war, economics, racism, poverty, and many more explanations for slavery have been advanced. But religion did provide a moral justification for American slavery. Plenty of historians and authors have focused on the cleanup while ignoring who
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