and righteousness; it also robs the slave of his or her personhood.5 As important, slavery is contrary to “the great law of love.” He wrote, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord,” Lev. 19:18. By neighbor every man is meant for the same injunction is given in regard to strangers.”6 All are to act justly toward others as if they were our own children whom we “would never enslave from birth or refuse full liberty when they are grown.”7 To practice the Golden Rule is to acknowledge gratitude for God’s goodness by imagining the plight of others as if you were in their circumstances and they in yours.8 Since nothing could cause a slaveholder to take the place of his or her slave, that slaveholder does not practice the Golden Rule because “No man desires slavery.”9
Woolman, Benezet, Cooper, Elliott, and other Christian antislavery leaders viewed people of African descent as human beings worthy of value and applied the Golden Rule universally to the circumstances of slaves in order to help their readers imagine themselves in the position of the enslaved. This was a radical appeal at a time when ideas of white superiority and other forms of social hierarchy dominated the American social order.
Proslavery Arguments Concerning Christian Charity and the Golden Rule
(See Box 3.4.) Biblical scholar Allen Callahan notes that nothing was more troublesome for proslavery ideologues than the Golden Rule. Some believed it simply was wrong. Other prominent proslavery advocates, such as Richard Furman, minimized its meaning.10 An influential South Carolinian whose organizational ideas ultimately helped create the organizational structures of the SBC, Furman endorsed slavery as part of divine law. He argued that the Golden Rule was never meant to go against the “order of things, which the Divine government has established.”11 Furman believed that if slavery was legal and in accordance with the Bible, then a slave master was not obligated to do any more than what he or she as a slave would wish to be done to them.12 Furman’s views represented a stance taken consistently by proslavery advocates. The Golden Rule only applied in a limited way, and social status determined how an individual or class of people should be treated. This was especially so because slavery was in accord with divine law.
Box 3.4
This is important historical research. The author will bring together the ways in which proslavery Christians managed to evade the simple logic that the Golden Rule makes it impossible for you to support slavery.
James Henley Thornwell argued in 1850 that the scriptures demand only that slaves and servants be given that which is equal and just. The Golden Rule, then, “simply requires, in the case of slavery, that we should treat our slaves as we should feel that we had a right to be treated if we were slaves ourselves.”13 Jesus’s teachings on charity and the Golden Rule were seen as having only limited application based on social status and were not universal.
Because many white Americans had stigmatized African Americans racially as inferior, it is not difficult to understand why they would not desire to extend Christian charitable teachings to them in a universal way. Many white Christians did not see people of African descent as similar to them. Instead, they saw them as alien, foreign, and subhuman. Martha Nussbaum notes that people show compassion to those to whom they feel have possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to themselves.14 According to Nussbaum, “One makes sense of the suffering by recognizing that one might encounter such a reversal; one estimates its meaning in part by thinking what it would mean to encounter that oneself; and one sees oneself, in the process, as one to whom such things might in fact happen.”15 But if a white person could not imagine being mistreated and reduced to slavery in a society that identified with white superiority, then it would be very difficult for many to imagine having sufferings and vulnerabilities “similar to the sufferer.”16
Because whites dominated society, they knew they would not be enslaved. Those antislavery advocates who argued for Christian charity and the Golden Rule had the imagination to think about how they would feel if they were enslaved, and they believed that Christian teachings on charity had broad application. They may even have imagined their own vulnerability, guilt, and complicity if they were to acquiesce to the continued existence of slavery in American society. But proslavery advocates did not give ground on the treatment of slaves, let alone on whether the institution of slavery itself was immoral. Advocates of white supremacy certainly were affirmed in their beliefs by the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court famously ruled that all African Americans were racially stigmatized and thus could be treated as “ordinary articles of merchandise.”17
American religious scholar Mark Noll has described in great detail the theological crisis surrounding the Civil War, slavery, and biblical interpretation. This theological crisis resulted, in part, in “an inability to act on biblical teaching about the full humanity of all people, regardless of race.”18 Christian white Americans’ attitudes were so deeply embedded in beliefs about the inferiority of African Americans that their interpretations of the Bible ensured the continuation of a racial crisis that was biblically justified long after the Civil War had ended.
Southern Baptists and Racial Stigma in the Jim Crow Era
(See Box 3.5.) The intense southern disdain for African American citizenry following the end of slavery in 1865 became enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed Jim Crow segregation, a totalistic system of racial, political, and social subjugation. Just as many southern Protestant denominations had used the Bible to support the architecture for racism and slavery, after slavery ended they continued to support Jim Crow segregation based on notions of white superiority and a particular view of a godly social order. Southern white culture and religion appended itself to a system of segregation in which whites dictated the terms of engagement with African Americans. Many, if not most, southern white Protestants never questioned the structures of racial hierarchy that became a seamless part of southern culture. They had no inkling of the negative consequences for themselves of continued support for a system of racial inequality because they assumed that they would never find themselves in a reverse situation of subjugation. Their limited imagination and their sense of racial superiority made it difficult for white southerners to take any responsibility for African Americans’ inhumane plight. While southern denominations like the SBC often acknowledged the difficult circumstances of black life in the South, they seemed indifferent to the ultimate consequences of their support for racial oppression.
Box 3.5
Having operated a level of generality (and having shown that the implications of the Golden Rule are evaded by the assumption that African Americans are inferior), the author now wants to take a case study and provide a more detailed analysis. She turns to the SBC in the Jim Crow Era.
In his dissent in the Plessy case in 1896, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote famously that although whites see themselves as the dominant race in America, in the view of the US Constitution, there is no such thing as a ruling class of citizens. He argued:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.19
Justice Harlan eerily predicted the tragic consequences of Jim Crow segregation in American life. He believed that Plessy would permit “the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law” and create distrust between the races.20 Justice Harlan had the foresight to understand that the social and political inequalities legally enshrined in American society through Jim Crow segregation would have logical but tragic consequences: racial hate, racial distrust, and
