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

by Joel McDurmon

Leaders spoke candidly of their motivations. Jackson Giles, president at the Alabama Convention, asked, “[W]hat is it that we want to do?” He answered his own question: “[E]stablish white supremacy in this state.” It worked. Black voter registration dropped throughout the South by 90 to 100 percent, virtually eliminating their voices until the 1960s. Southern states, nevertheless, still demanded congressional representation calculated by including the full number of disenfranchised blacks in the population, and received it—a dramatic increase over the mere three-fifths negotiated by their slave trading forefathers.

Pilgrim and Puritan societies entangled themselves in slavery and the slave trade almost immediately after arrival, if not before. The Jamestown colony, where the earliest Africans were brought, harbored forces—including clergymen—that had direct involvement as well as direct ties to the financing of slave privateering.

covered in tar.9 If the place of blacks in the building had to be regulated, their place at the table certainly did. In the segregated churches, it was a regular feature that blacks would have to wait to take communion after all the whites had already gone (clearly in violation of 1 Corinthians 11:21). Black Christians reacted differently to the obvious violations of brotherly love. Some submitted to the ignominy, some simply left, some left in groups to form their own churches. In November 1787, a group of blacks organized to resist newly segregated pews in St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia.

group, which then left to form its own church. Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, who despised the segregated churches, nevertheless considered the move into separate black churches even worse, calling them “negro pews, on a higher and larger scale.” If any reasoning could justify a segregated church, he argued, the same reasoning would justify segregated everything. Douglass’ fellow North Star writer Henry Bibb expanded on this: “I see no more use in having a colored church exclusively than having a colored heaven and colored God.”10 The better remedy Douglass offered was a little real resistance. Segregated pews? He counseled blacks rather to “stand in the aisles, and rather worship God upon your feet, than become a party to your own degradation. You must shame your oppressors, and wear out prejudice by this holy policy.” He continued: “Colored members should go in and take seats, without regard to their complexion, and allow themselves to be dragged out by the ministers, elders, and deacons. Such a course would very soon settle the question, and in the right way.”11

“But the doubts persisted, and many colonial slaveholders continued to resist the baptism of their bondsmen, because they feared their slaves would become ‘saucy.’ Apparently convinced that Christianity had a dangerously liberating effect, many slaveholders believe that ‘a Slave is ten times worse when a Xn, than in his State of Paganism.’”

This is just pure antichrist

Bishop Thomas Secker preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in 1740, chiding slaveowners for preventing slave conversions, “because, after that, no Pretence will remain for not treating them like Men.” Nevertheless, Secker in the same sermon assured his audience that God backed the royal and colonial law for permanent slavery for blacks even after baptism: “The Scripture, far from making any Alteration in Civil Rights, expressly directs, that every Man abide in the Condition wherein he is called, with great Indifference of Mind concerning outward circumstances.” Not only did the SPG do virtually nothing to challenge slaveowners, and not only did it virtually wink at their practices, but it was a slaveowner for most of its existence. The Society—technically a royal corporation—inherited plantations with slaves in 1710 and managed them as an absentee owner. Not only did it not consider manumitting its slaves, but it followed the standard Barbadian practice of branding slaves. How is that for Christian witness against a system that its own clergy members themselves acknowledged as evil?

“We look upon the habit of black preaching as a wide-spreading evil; not because a black man cannot be a good one; but . . . because they acquire an influence independent of the owner, and not subject to his control.” For this reason, Pinckney argued, while blacks should receive religious instruction, it should only be administered by white and southern missionaries, and only orally. This latter criteria, of course, reinforced the belief and practice that blacks should not be allowed to read and write. This left them subject not only to white oversight in general, but to a highly selective version of the Christian faith authorities chose to impose upon them.

The capstone of oblivion for this address came in its final notes, and also stands as representative of the entire culture of anti-black racism, North and South. Virtually the entirety of America united in the belief that blacks were an inferior race, not only degraded and uncivilized, but incapable of becoming civilized. This argument lay at the bedrock of subjugation from the earliest Portuguese enslavements, through all the southern justifications of continued slavery, right up to the highest political proclamations of Abraham Lincoln himself and even many of the Quakers and abolitionists. Yet here, from his own mouth, giving lip service to the need for evangelizing slaves, Pinckney undercut the whole charade by invoking the power of the Gospel. He delivers the following anecdote “from unquestionable sources”: The people [slaves] of an Absentee’s plantation, were proverbially bad, from the abuse and mismanagement of an Overseer; (the Proprietor resided in England, and the Attornies in Carolina.) The latter dismissed the Overseer as soon as his misconduct was discovered, and employed another, who was a pious man: he not only instructed the negroes himself to the best of his abilities, but accompanied them every Sunday to a Methodist Church in the neighbourhood. At the end of five years their character was completely changed, and has so continued ever since. After nearly fifteen years more, the surviving Attorney is now in treaty for the purchase of these very negroes, wh...

To maintain a truncated Christianity required a truncated message as well. Thus, aids such as Jones’s 1837 Catechism of Scripture Doctrine and Practice, designed specially for “oral instruction of colored persons,” carefully selected which Scriptures to teach and which not. The book was wildly popular, running into at least six editions in its first year alone. Some whites openly admitted they truncated biblical instruction to slaves as a means of social control. They did not want slaves to have a deeper grasp of the truths of Scripture.

One former slave summarized the typical masters’ sermon sarcastically: “Serve your masters. Don’t steal your master’s turkey. Don’t steal your master’s chickens. Don’t steal your master’s hogs. Don’t steal your master’s meat. Do whatsomeever your master tell you to do. Same old thing all de time.”

Not only did missions to the slaves not really happen, but slave testimony consistently pegs professing Christian masters as among the worst.

The Christians will oppress you more. For instance, the biggest dinner must be got on Sunday. Now, everybody that has got common sense knows Sunday is a day of rest. And if you do the least thing in the world that they don’t like, they will mark it down against you, and Monday you have got to take a whipping. Now, the card-player and horse-racer won’t be there to trouble you. They will eat their breakfast in the morning and feed their dogs, and then be off, and you won’t see them again until night. I would rather be with a card-player or sportsman, by half, than a Christian. Another told the same commission: I believe the people that were not religious treated their slaves better than those who were religious. A religious man will believe whatever the overseer says, and he has control of the hands in the field. Whatever he says is law and gospel. If he says, ‘John has acted impudent,’ the master will come round and say, ‘Chastise him for it,’ and the overseer will give him two or three hundred lashes. Then, in the next place, they don’t feed or clothe their slaves as well as the irreligious man. There was one Mr. Anderson, a preacher who married a girl who had slaves, and after that, he quit preaching pretty much, and drove his slaves very hard. He couldn’t see anything but cotton bales.... If pork was selling at a high price, all the slaves would get from the religious man would be three pounds a week, while the man that couldn’t be so religious would give them four pound...

The rudiments of theology were indeed enough to bring condemnation. Frederick Douglass certainly felt so: “Slaves know enough of the rudiments of theology to believe that those go to hell who die slaveholders.” But the simplest concepts were also able to bring utter condemnation from another perspective as well, probably best exemplified by the comments of former slave Mary Younger, a fugitive in Canada at the time: “[I]f those slaveholders were to come here, I would treat them well, just to shame them by showing that I had humanity.”

The Revolution, however, resulted in the disestablishment of the Anglican church in key southern States. After the war, Anglican clergymen fled, and evangelicals had free rein, legally, across the States. It seemed like a heavenly gift: a wide open mission field void of the most prominent opponents to date. Yet even after a few decades of the new normal, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians combined had only added a few percent of the population to their rolls. It was a dismal failure, and a time for self-evaluation and change. The only change they could muster, however, was the one they already made with the onset of religious toleration and a free market, so to speak, on potential members: evangelical clergy ceased their fiery denunciations of civil officials especially, and “assiduously cultivated goodwill among the ruling gentry by affirming their support for the established hierarchy.” While they still retained a legalistic stance against drinking, dancing, and ostentation, they nevertheless relaxed their approach in an effort to do what modern “seeker-sensitive” churches do: fill the pews, especially with wealthy members.

Sin changes churches more than churches change sinners

When one James Davis wrote a letter to the Christian Index asking whether slave owners who separated married slaves should be disciplined, he was confronted with the full force of the emphasis on the exclusive “spirituality of the church”: It is clear the scripture recognizes the relation of master and servant, & commands servants to obey their masters, not only the good and gentle, but also the forward. Here the primary obligation must rest, unless the servant can alienate the rights of his master to command, by a voluntary engagement of his own. But who will venture to affirm this? so then it follows that when the absolute commands of his master come in contact with the incidental promises of the servant the latter must yield to the former.57 The author does not seem to have realized the logical implications of this statement. It ultimately would mean that a master may do virtually anything not forbidden by secular laws, even if it caused a slave to sin or violated a sacred oath taken by a slave. This was essentially a declaration that masters could defy God’s law as long as the state said so, and the church would have nothing to say about it.

Churches not only changed their message to accommodate slavery, not only defended the system, and not only neglected to discipline offending members in their ranks, but the churches as churches engaged in what even contemporaries called “the worst kind of slavery”—institutional slave holding. This practice, engaged in by schools, colleges, businesses, and even churches as well, involved the holding of slaves by the corporate entity as an investment. The slaves in some cases would serve the institution in various capacities, but would also be leased out yearly to plantations purely for the income. Churches did the latter almost exclusively, using the revenue to pay their ministers and have some left over for maintenance and other expenses. “In many cases the slaves were the only endowment the congregation required. This freed members from the necessity of making financial contributions to their church—a substantial benefit.”60

some northern Evangelicals expressed their own racism in just as overt terms. Ohio minister Josiah Strong achieved national fame with his 1885 book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, proclaiming the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race and its mission to the world—a clear expression of the “White Man’s Burden” before Kipling coined the phrase. As General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance of the United States, Strong doubled down in 1893 with The New Era; or, The Coming Kingdom, quoting his own earlier work: “It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future. . . . The time is coming when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence will be felt here as it is now felt in Europe and Asia. Then will the world enter on a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States will assert itself. Then this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can any one doubt that the result of t...

Through all of this, the churches of the South almost universally either sat in passive approval or engaged in active support. One study reviewed 1,003 Southern Baptist district association meetings during the height of the lynching era and found only nine references to lynchings. Worse, of 117 districts in which actual lynchings had taken place, and in which over half had pastors or other representatives from the lynching communities attending the meeting, only one single meeting even made mention of the incident.78 While the main denominations, including Southern Baptists, at their highest levels did condemn violence such as lynching, they nevertheless abounded with silence and inaction in the local churches. Though exceptions certainly do exist, examples of “sunshine saints and summer parsons” were common throughout the era. One questionnaire in 1935 asked 5,000 ministers if they had ever preached against lynching or written their congressman about it. Only 3.3 percent responded positively.

There was no time in America when the majority of Christians, particularly as led by their leaders in church and in state, did not join, endorse, enjoy, and provide divine sanction for the evils of the American slave system. The few voices that demanded reform and change based upon applications of Scripture met not only opposition but a deluge of scorn, not to mention physical threat, from a vast ocean of proslavery ecclesiastical forces.

Church historian Lester B. Scherer points out that the Quakers “were the only Christian body that applied the instruments of church discipline to rid itself of what it saw as the guilt of slavery.”85 This is not quite true, for there was one other small group: the Reformed Presbytery of the United States of North America. This 1798 plant of Irish “Covenanters” were radically faithful to the demands of biblical law. As a result, they demanded “immediate and unrestricted abolition” of slavery. When the subject of compensating slaves owners to effect emancipation arose, this devoutly orthodox sect proclaimed that the slaves, not the oppressors, deserved recompense. Indeed, they did not hold back on the sins of American slave masters. To delay freeing their slaves was to “implicate yourself more and more deeply in robbery and murder.”86

South Carolina governor George McDuffie told the State Assembly in 1835, “No human institution, in my opinion, is more consistent with the will of God, than domestic slavery, and no one of his ordinances is written with more legible characters than that which consigns the African race to this condition.” South Carolina College professor Maximilian LaBorde would later second that statement: “Southern slavery is regulated by law, the principle of humanity is infused into it, it is the slavery of the Bible.”

One review of 279 proslavery publications up to the Civil War revealed 130 that were definitely the work of clergy, and perhaps even more were. A more recent monograph numbered a staggering 275 clergymen who published defenses of slavery. Both studies agree that around half of all such defenses came from the pens of Christian ministers—almost all of which were conservative, Bible-believing Protestants. Astoundingly, in 154 of those cases, the written defense appeared in official church publications.

the first ever printed protest against slavery in America, in fact. This brief tract appeared from the hand a Quaker, George Keith, in Philadelphia in 1693—four score and three years before Jefferson penned his immortal words, “all men are created equal.” The exhortation spans only five modern book pages, and contains as many arguments, each from the Bible. All five are literal applications of a biblical principle. Three are direct applications of the Law of Moses, and a fourth—the golden rule—is derived from it. The fifth is also an application of that law in Bible prophecy. These included: 1) Quakers are not to receive or buy stolen goods, and slavery has at its root manstealing which is a far greater crime than merely buying stolen goods (Ex. 21:16). 2) The golden rule. If we ourselves do not desire to be in bondage and slavery against our consent, neither should we keep anyone else so, let alone those who have done no harm. 3) Because fugitive slaves ought to be given their freedom and live at liberty among us (Deut. 23:15–16). If this was true under the Mosaic dispensation, how much more ought it to be true under the Gospel? 4) Because immigrants ought not to be oppressed in our land, neither should the poor and needy (Deut. 24:14, 15; Ex. 12:21). Yet while the blacks are all of the above, they are oppressed by us more greatly than anyone has been oppressed! Not only are they stolen captive, and whipped, but families are ripped apart, “Husband from the Wife, and the C...

A good example of the participation in the views of stratified society appears in the works of Presbyterian minister Robert L. Dabney. In a burning critique of the “equality” spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, Dabney praised the alternative erected by the Constitution of his native Commonwealth of Virginia. This “aristocratic republic” allowed none but landowners to vote, and that only for their own representatives to the General Assembly. The Assembly in turn voted for the Governor and appointed all judges and governors of law. These appointed local courts “formed a proper aristocracy, serving for life, appointing their own clerks and sheriffs, and filling vacancies in their own numbers by a nomination to the Governor, which was always virtually imperative.” In Dabney’s view, then, the landed population should be allowed to vote in only the most minimal case, and the vast majority of the population (not just slaves, but them, too) should have no voice or power whatsoever. Governing belonged only to the elites, and offices should only be entrusted to appointments by them.7 Dabney further demonstrated the typical southern elitism, and its fixed, virtually unalterable nature, when he argued against common schooling, particularly for blacks: With this exception, it is utterly false that every American boy may aspire to the higher stations of life. In the lottery of life these prizes must be relatively few—only a few can reach them. Nor is it right or practicable to...

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.

This strong dichotomy between that which is “spiritual” (salvation of the soul) and that which is “earthly” (government, business, etc.) is why we have also called this view a “dualism” or “dualistic” in Christian thought. It is also commonly referred to as the “two kingdoms” doctrine: one kingdom of the Spirit (or “Gospel”) and the other of everything else (“Law”). In this scheme, God is said to rule the church through the Gospel (thus it is “spiritual,” and the church is commissioned to speak to it) while he rules the rest of the universe through Providence (and thus the church is not allowed to pronounce upon it, but leave it to the status quo and the flow of history).

Spirtuality of the church, whuch does seem to be a particularly enlightenment/modern concept

This is the two kingdoms doctrine in action: when the church says that the church has little-to-nothing to say to the civil realm, and thus whatever the civil realm does, the church must accept as lawful and acceptable. The only objection even to church members engaging in legally sanctioned acts of cruelty comes if the church may determine that the members commit some kind of personal sin—anger, revenge, etc.—in the process! By this reasoning, the church could perhaps even allow a member to commit murder as long as the church determined the member did not have “revenge” in his heart when he did so! Why not? The slaves codes effectively allowed this.

Not only would slaveholding and its attendant practices not be subjects of church discipline, but agitating against them would be: “They now sought the make an antislavery stance an actionable offense that required church discipline.” In 1805, The North District Association in Kentucky took aim at prominent antislavery activist David Barrow. Representatives from an outside association, in fact, came over to introduce charges of “Meddling with Emancipation” by “preaching the doctrine of emancipation, to the hurt and injury of the feelings of the brotherhood.” So much about the bringing of these charges were irregular and contrary to the judicial structure of the Baptist churches and associations, but the power was so much on the side of the proslavery forces that they were able to ignore their own rules in order to suppress their moral opposition. The result was one more forced-feeding of the two kingdoms rule to the churches in a top-down fashion. The association issued a circular letter blasting the antislavery faction as “so far deluded, that their printing, preaching, and private conversation, go to encourage disobedience in servants, and a revolution in our Civil Government.” Barrow was eventually tried and expelled from the association.

In virtually every aspect of its existence, “Baptists redefined slavery to be a civil rather than a moral and religious issue.” This compromise “meant Baptists no longer would debate the morality of the institution of slavery.”62

Sensitive to this fact, the proslavery advocates among the southern clergy leveraged it. Who would dare go against the authority of the Bible openly? For this reason, a young Robert L. Dabney explained in an 1851 letter that the path to defeat the abolitionists was to take the debate squarely to them in terms of the Bible alone. This would expose them, he argued, by exposing that for all their appeals to religion, they actually despised the Bible at the heart of it.

TGC and John piper and others supoort Dabney in part beause of his biblicism but it mtters what Dabney thought he was supporting

Noll relates that the American defenses of slavery from Scripture “had virtually no influence outside the country.”80 Other orthodox Presbyterians abroad viewed the South’s self-defense as right next to blasphemy. The United Presbyterians of Scotland erupted with scorn in 1861, condemning the southern churches’ defense as “the foulest and most revolting” doctrine ever enunciated since the crucifixion. They made clear where they stood: “Sympathy with the Southern States! We have as much sympathy with them as with a gang of robbers or a crew of pirates.”

just as certainly as Noll is wrong about this particular angle, he is almost certainly right that the antislavery arguments failed due to a “widespread commonsense [not Bible-based] consensus about race.” This overwhelming racism was cultural, and it was as widespread among Christians in the North as in the South. The same Charles Hodge, for example, who opposed slavery nevertheless joined the mainstream view that blacks were not prepared for freedom, would be a danger to the public welfare, and thus needed the State to regulate their lives. For this reason, church historian Philip Schaff could conclude in 1861, “Of all forms of slavery the American is the most difficult to dispose of, because it is not only a question of domestic institution and political economy, but of race. The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.” Would that more theologians could have both understood this profound statement, and overcome the truth of it.82 Unfortunately, the few thinkers of the day who did understand this problem also had to lose much respect for the orthodox theologians and the divinely inspired text they associated with their proslavery positions. Frederick Douglass, for example, discerned the racism at the root: “[N]obody at the North, we think, would defend slavery, even from the Bible, but for this color distinction…. Color makes all the difference in the application of our American Christianity.”

Despite the fact that racism was almost as universal in the North, and that many of the proslavery arguments had been made in the North as well as many other places in the world up until the mid-1830s, the South’s desperate, vehement, and unrepentant perpetuation of the two evils together was indeed unique in the world, and certainly as part of a social system which southerners insisted was necessarily determinative to the political order.

That the proslavery position was more of a pan-American phenomenon than a uniquely southern creation overall is certainly correct. Southern defenders like Dabney, for instance, proclaimed the North’s collusion in slavery and the slave trade early and often. Despite his distortions and selective argument in other ways, he was right on this point. This truth, however, does not so much exonerate the South from the curses and reviling that were piled upon her, but broadens the condemnation to its rightful horizons in the further reaches of the nation.

Yet with all their biblical emphasis, they did not arrive at the simple faith expressed by the early Quaker George Keith. Consider what would have resulted had they done so: First, American slavery had at its root “manstealing,” or kidnapping (Ex. 21:16), a far greater crime than merely buying or selling stolen goods. Had the Protestant churches preached against this sin, disciplined any members involved, including civil officials, not a single British or Dutch ship would have received or delivered a single African as a slave.

Second, apply the golden rule. If we ourselves do not desire to be in bondage and slavery against our consent, neither should we keep anyone else so, let alone those who have done no harm. If this principle had been upheld, the ministers would not only have upheld the freedom of every innocent slave in every case, they would also have preached for the equal rule of common law in the Americas as on English soil.

Third, fugitive slaves ought to be given their freedom and live at liberty among us (Deut. 23:15–16). If this was true under the Mosaic dispensation, how much more ought it to be true under the Gospel?

Fourth, immigrants ought not to be oppressed, and neither should the poor and needy

Fifth, slave souls were the merchandise of Babylon (Rev. 18:4–5; 13:10), and the Lord says “be not partakers of her sins, that ye receive not of her plagues.” Recall that the earliest Africans brought to Jamestown had been taken by Calvinist privateers plundering “Roman antichrist” ships. These Protestants saw themselves engaged in a prophetic-apocalyptic war with this very Roman Babylon. Yet instead of putting an end to the sin of trafficking in souls, the Protestants did just the opposite of the command, partook of her sin, and became just like her. Had they stayed true to the prophetic mission they professed, they would have ended the slave trade through a just war instead of joined it, and brought both its sins and its plagues to America.

Southern defenders today routinely chant, “Heritage, not hate,” but what is routinely called heritage is actually a mythology created for public consumption after the fact. It is a revisionism, and an easily disprovable one at that. It is impossible to build a Christian society on a heritage of lies, and perpetuating falsehoods is just another form of hate.

As we saw, however, Virginia made other attempts to stimulate supply, which reveals how much demand actually existed. In 1659, the council enacted a subsidy in the form of tax breaks for ships delivering slaves. The act allowed a fat 80 percent off taxes for exports of tobacco to foreign nations if the ships of those foreign nations would first bring black slaves to Virginia ports. This was originally passed with an eye to tapping burgeoning supplies of slaves in Dutch West African factories.

Maryland did the same thing in 1671, but more candidly declaring that the measure was intended for “Encourageing the Importacon of Negroes and Slaves into this Province.”

Anyone injuring or killing a slave was technically presumed guilty, but the guilt was expunged in the court process merely by denying it under oath. He could simply say in any case that the slave had resisted and he feared for his life; or, he was punishing the slave and the slave attacked him. Or he could say he approached a runaway who threatened him, or whatever. There could be a thousand scenarios made up, and each one would technically purge the complaint against him. His case then could only be rebutted upon the testimony of two white witnesses. Remember, blacks could not testify, and on a plantation where family members and white employees derived their livelihood from the master, who would risk speaking out unless they had clear proof, conviction, and willingness—if even then for a black slave, after all? Legal realities and double standards like these are the reason so few masters were ever prosecuted for killing slaves. The threat of death continually hung over the heads of black slaves, despite the law, while the prosecution was rarely ever a threat at all to whites who killed slaves.

At this point, the southern apologist’s only remaining pretense was the classic appeal to the paternalism of the masters: But the seeming severity of this restriction was almost wholly removed, among us, by the fact that he always had, in his master, an interested and zealous patron and guardian, in all collisions with other white men. From oppression by his own master he found his sufficient protection, usually, in affection and self-interest.15 Except in the thousands of daily cases where they did not.

Likewise, legislators in Pennsylvania recognized as early as 1780 that the institution tore apart families. In the preamble to its emancipation law of that year, they acknowledged the “unnatural separation and sale of husband and wife from each other and from their children, an injury, the greatness of which can only be conceived by supposing that we were in the same unhappy case.”28 Abolitionists hammered the South for engaging in the practice, and shamed the churches not only for tolerating it in society, not only for refusing to discipline their slaveholding members who engaged in it, but for virtually ignoring the problem altogether over the decades.

In this light, Dabney’s appeal to the Virginian framers was no bluff, nor would it have been at all surprising to his countrymen: John Randolph of Roanoke once openly stated, “I am aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.”

The problems of slavery and racism in Christian America have never been problems of Scripture and Christian discipline, but of the lack of them.

Earmarked benefits for blacks provide some of these hate groups’ strongest appeals to whites, however little these earmarked policies actually help blacks, either absolutely or compared to more general social benefits that would not have the same potential for racial polarization.2 In terms of current events and politics, Sowell is certainly right: the programs do not work, and the resentments they cause only compound the problem.

Cite some real evidence instead of talking points .

This is the only reason leftist forces succeeded to begin with: progressive liberalism joined black righteous resentment. The latter was legitimate; the former was not, but it was the only organization in society willing to reach out to the latter. Had the church done its job at any stage along the way, the rise of the modern programs Sowell rightfully decries would not have prevailed. Conservative southerners, however, defied racial integration unbendingly. They would stand or be broken only. As Sowell notes elsewhere, “What was necessary to break the old racial politics of the South was at least a substantial minority of white voters responsive to other issues—including racial peace—to split the white vote, and so make it politically impossible for any party to antagonize the entire black electorate and expect to win. This was in fact the political situation in the South in the wake of the enfranchisement of blacks.”3 That substantial minority of white voters could have, should have, been the conservative churches reaching out, repenting, apologizing, welcoming blacks. Instead, it was liberal whites. Guess who still has the allegiance of most blacks today? This will not change until the necessary Christian and conservative groups change.

This line is ridiculous

Lest there be any confusion, no one has written more forcefully than myself opposing the state and statist, socialist programs, including public schools.

What the hell? You opoose public schools?