If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority

by Angela N. Parker

Likewise, the Protestant Reformation took place in a particular context. It took place within European struggles for power and dominance. It took place on the edge of the Age of Discovery, which quickly became the Age of Conquest and Slavery. Martin Luther nailed his Theses to the door in Wittenberg in 1517. The first slave ships sailed from Spain in the 1400s. Those ships did not traverse the Atlantic, but it did not take long. The first slave ship recorded in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyage database arrived at its destination in Vigo, Spain, in 1514, in the context of Catholic Spain—three years before Luther’s Theses. Flip forward one century following Luther’s monumental moment. Germany is entangled in global slavocracy, fueling its own economic well-being through industries that support the trade. Several German families financed Portuguese slave ships. One must face this simple truth: When a society’s Christian faith—faith born from colonized and serially enslaved Brown people—does not cause that society to challenge and reject slavery outright, then there is a problem with the construction of that faith. To save our faith we must decolonize it.