faith: the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its headquarters in Independence, Missouri—where it remains to this day under the name Community of Christ. Next, when polygamy was officially denounced by the heads of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City in 1890 and 1904, this caused another schism between those who would now only practice monogamy and those who felt it was the Lord’s will to continue practicing polygamy. Some members of the Twelve Apostles resigned over the matter, believing that God still wanted the principle of plural marriage to be practiced, and other like-minded Mormons, dubbed “fundamentalist” Mormons, rejected the Church leaders in Salt Lake City, setting up their own breakaway congregations where polygamy could still be practiced. It was just such a community that John Stossel visited for his 20/20 exposé.
So, there you have it: a small, tight-knit, new religion—founded only some 190 years ago—full of fervent adherents who all believe in God, and all agree that Joseph Smith was God’s prophet, and all concur that living a moral life means obeying the will of God—and yet they simply can’t agree on whether or not God wants them to be in polygamous or monogamous marriages. And the spiritual stakes are pretty high: the fundamentalist Mormons believe that you can’t get into the highest level of heaven (the “celestial kingdom”) if you don’t practice plural marriage,9 while other Mormons, those remaining members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, believe that you can’t get into heaven at all if you do practice plural marriage.
And, thus, we come to the second major problem with any ethical system based on God: staunch theists claim that morality is based on belief in God and in following God’s will, and yet they can’t agree on just what God’s will is.10 Interpretation of God’s will becomes the name of the game. And what a deeply problematic, all-too-human game it is, with everyone interpreting differently, bringing his or her own interests, experiences, cultural lens, political leanings, tribalism, communal needs, and personal proclivities to the process.
Slavery, Anyone?
There are many other instances from throughout history that reveal the depth of this problem of theistic interpretation.
Consider, for example, the matter of slavery. Is it morally acceptable to forcibly enslave another human? Is it ethical to keep other humans in bondage, forcing them to work for your own advantage, and denying them not only the very fruits of their labor, but their basic right of personal liberty?
According to the logic of theistic morality, the first authority—indeed, the supreme authority—to consult in trying to decide upon this matter would be God and his commandments. According to God’s Ten Commandments, as recorded in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, God doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not enslave another.” There’s no such prohibition. He does provide other prohibitions, such as “Thou shalt not have any other gods before me” and “Thou shalt not make any images of anything that exists in heaven or on earth” and “Thou shalt not lie” and “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shall not commit adultery.” But nothing about slavery.
Well, that’s not quite true. There is that one significant commandment that does sort of seem to accept servitude as permissible: in Exodus 20:17, God declares, “Thou shall not covet they neighbor’s house, wife, male servant, female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.” So, what we have here is a list of things that can belong to your neighbor: including objects (a house), animals (oxen, donkeys), as well as people (wives and servants). God thus seems here, at least implicitly, to approve of servitude.
And then God’s approval of slavery goes from implicit to explicit. In Leviticus 25, God tells the people of Israel that they can in fact purchase other human beings and own them: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you . . . they shall become your property.”
Of course, the wording is crucial here. Does God condone servitude or slavery? Well, the original Hebrew word used in these biblical passages, written thousands of years ago by a culture dramatically different from our own, is ebed. And it is beyond difficult to definitively know just what this ancient Hebrew word ebed accurately translates to in our modern American verbiage.11 Does it correctly correspond to our word “servant,” or is it better translated as our word “slave”? We can surely appreciate what a world of difference the words “servant” and “slave” make when it comes to their moral meanings and ethical implications in our contemporary society. So, who has the final say on this matter of interpreting the true meaning of ebed—some balding, bespectacled professor in Boston or Jerusalem? Alas, how troubling that even the very translating of God’s commanding words must be based on linguistic and historical interpretation, and thus can’t ever be definitively, objectively agreed upon.
So is owning another person as a slave morally acceptable to God? According to the New Testament of Christianity, it seems like it definitely is. Jesus does not condemn slavery, and in Luke 12:42, he implicitly condones the practice. Paul, the founder of Christianity and its leading authoritative voice—second only to Jesus—definitely did not condemn slavery. Nor did he condemn slave owners. He did not say, “Free those you hold in bondage, as Christ has freed you.” Rather, in Ephesians 6:5, Paul declares, “Slaves, obey your masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” In Titus 2, Paul again teaches that slaves ought to be “subject to their masters in all things.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:22—just to make the Lord’s position on slavery as unambiguous as possible—Paul reasserts the imperative: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters.”
Such biblical injunctions are deeply immoral. Just like the deeply immoral injunction from Exodus 21:20, in which God explicitly declares that people can violently beat their male and female slaves, so long as the beating doesn’t end in death. It is nigh impossible to even fathom just how much pain and misery, how much violence and degradation, how much abuse and assault has occurred—just how much human enslavement over the centuries has been physically enacted and religiously justified—from such biblical passages. Perhaps this all helps to explain why Frederick Douglass, the great writer, orator, abolitionist, and former slave, experienced the worst cruelty at the hands of the strongly Christian. As he wrote in 1845:
Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.12
And yet despite such cruelty, the architect of Christianity, Paul, exhorts the unfortunate who are forced into bondage, through no fault of their own, to obey their earthly masters—with respect and fear, no less! So it goes, if you uncritically accept the New Testament as holy writ.
Or not.
Many Christians who uncritically accept the New Testament as holy writ have been, and are, antislavery. But how can this be? Don’t the Ten Commandments implicitly allow for servitude? Doesn’t Paul explicitly exhort slaves to obey their masters? What is ambiguous here?
A lot. Or nothing. Once again, it is all—and I mean all—a matter of interpretation.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American Christians—ardent and pious to a soul—were deeply divided over the moral question of slavery. A small number of theologians, preachers, and politicians, such as William Wilberforce, George Bourne, Charles Spurgeon, and John Wesley, condemned slavery as a grave sin and injustice. And the small Christian denomination of Quakers came to believe that slavery was immoral, working hard to undermine what they saw as a cruel,
