The Bible and slavery

I took an American church history class last month, and I've had an idea percolating since then.

What if versejacking was the reason we had good Anglicans and Baptists and Methodists in the South saying that the Bible doesn't have a problem with slavery? They would grab a verse or two to show how slaves were a part of Jewish society in the First Testament, and they would use the verses from Paul to show that slaves are to submit to their masters. This wouldn't have been a monolithic perception. In the early 1800s, people would say that slavery was a necessary evil. By the mid-1800s, they were saying slavery was a positive moral good. American society had a covenant with God to be the best society. Whites were put at the top of the hierarchy to oversee a millennial kingdom of Christ. God in his sovereignty had ordained that Blacks were inferior to the Whites and therefore were slaves. All of this perception was wrapped up in Southern American civil religion. They were trying to maintain order (God-ordained order), while the Northern Progressives saw the millennial reign of Christ coming with the equality that the Declaration of Independence offered. Both sides used the Bible to prop up their cause. However, the Northerners saw in the scriptural metanarrative that all people are equal (okay, all men, not women). The Southerners saw order in a hierarchy brought about by versejacking.

Another interesting point is how religion was meted out to the slave populations. There was always a debate about how much religion slaves should be given. If they were taught to read the Bible, they would get uppity. If they were baptized or educated, the economy would lose the benefits of slaves, because they would start to demand equal rights. Southern slaveholders felt varying levels of compunction toward salvation for slaves. If they weren't human, they didn't need salvation. If they were inferior humans, they might need to get to heaven. They would be given enough religion to "save" them, but not enough to let them feel the egalitarian impulse in Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (TNIV).

One thing the slaveholders never counted on was the fact that Judaism and the Christianity that sprang from it were primarily oral traditions. They kept the Bible and literacy from the slaves, but they didn't count on the narrative element of the faith energizing the slave populations. The slaves were able to tell the story of the exodus as their own story, looking toward heaven as the promised land. It doesn't seem like they held much hope for deliverance in this world. Ironically, the slaveowners held that they were the new Israel in the promised land subjugating the Canaanites and bringing about the reign of Christ. The slaves believed they were Israel waiting to be brought into the promised land and delivered from the tyranny of the Egyptians. America had two groups of people, both claiming to be the same group, one mature, one nascent. The slaves could look at the owners and say, "There's no way they're Israel." The owners didn't really think much about the slaves as long as they kept working, but even if they did. they probably didn't see the slaves grasping the narrative of Israel as their own.

It's very intriguing to me that this historical snapshot shows how different groups used the Bible so differently. And in the justice of history, the group that used the Bible badly had no concept that their slaves were gaining hope from the same Bible. Further, it appears to me that those with literacy and the written word emasculated the storied context of the Bible. The uneducated grasped the story. The story ended up winning (with help from some people who also seemed to grasp a larger story in the Bible, although they did their share of versejacking).

Mutiny

Today, a roll of paper towels was my muse as I . . . mused.

I wonder if the biblical "deceitfulness of riches" might be better expressed as the "mutiny of the bounty."

Super Bowl commercials

Here is my deliberately delayed list of faves. The way I see it, since most people are done talking about these sometime around Monday afternoon, I'm going to go against the flow by writing about them on Tuesday night. I appalled that I'm doing something in the interest of consumerism though. But they're funny!

There were two commercials that caught my attention enough for me to keep thinking about them. Oddly enough, they were separated by one other commercial. My favorite of the night was the Bridgestone commercial with dudes cruising (the moon?) and collecting rocks while jivin' to "Jump Around." At first I was infuriated that a tire company was the sponsor of the halftime show. What? Talk about a lame sponsor. (Here I go defending the consumptionplex again.) But they redeemed themselves with an extremely clever, well-executed commercial.

My second favorite was the monster.com feature of the moose in the boss's office. Then you pan around and see he didn't bother to just mount the head. The lackey gets to work straddled by the back legs of the moose. Nice!

I also chuckled at the Taco Bell commercial demonstrating all sorts of fastness when dude calls the girl who just gave him her number and has Taco Bell ready for her. At that moment his parents come to meet her. Clever.

On a sentimental side, I enjoyed the long "then-and-now" commercial. It was expansive and fun. Oddly enough, I don't remember what it was for. The main brands I remember were the VW bus and the Scion/Element vehicle of today.

I know there were others I enjoyed, but these were the ones that stuck in my memory, and that, after all, is what's important.