The Problem of Slavery in Christian America: An Ethical-Judicial History of American Slavery and Racism

by Joel McDurmon

Dabney finished with this: I would make no black man a member of a white session, or Presbytery, or Synod, or Assembly; nor would I give them any share in the government of our own church, nor any representation in it. “It is confusion.”29 Those last three words may form the most denigrating insult to the black brethren of any Dabney penned, though it is somewhat veiled to those not paying close attention. It was not just a general scriptural aspersion such as “an abomination.” That phrase appears only once in the English Bible. It is a quotation from Leviticus 18:23—the prohibition against bestiality. For Dabney, racial equality apparently stood on par with the sin of having sexual relations with animals.