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Arkansas Pol: “Why Didn’t Jesus or Paul Condemn Slavery?”

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Last May, Dan Savage got into all kinds of trouble for suggesting that the Bible didn’t just condone slavery, but also provided instructions on how Christians could own slaves correctly. Only a little more than five generations ago, about half of American Christians — “good Bible-believing Christians” — read those very same scriptures the same way. Today, very few Christians do, and the very idea of one man owning another person and that person’s spawn to do with whatever he pleases is an odious moral outrage to Bible-beleiving Christians — now that they have set aside those particular verses and concluded (even if they won’t admit to it out loud) that the Bible simply got it wrong on one of the most critical moral arguments our country has ever faced. And if Bible-believing Christians can do that when figuring out whether slavery is moral or not, they can do that with other topics — the morality of nationalism, racism, women’s rights, and, yes, gay rights — that the Bible also got wrong.

Of course, if you absolutely cannot accept the fact that the Bible got anything wrong, then it seems to me that you would have no other recourse but to agree with GOP Arkansas state Rep. Loy Mauch, who in 2003 penned this letter to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Nowhere in the Holy Bible have I found a word of condemnation for the operation of slavery, Old or New Testament. If slavery was so bad, why didn’t Jesus, Paul or the prophets say something?

This country already lionizes Wehrmacht leaders. They go by the names of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, etc. These Marxists not only destroyed the Constitution they were sworn to uphold, but apostatized the word of God. Either these depraved infidels or the Constitution and Scriptures are in error. I’m more persuaded by the word of God.

It turns out that Mauch wrote several letters defending slavery and the Confederacy to the Democrat-Gazette, and in at least two of them he referred to the Bible to support his position, as did an extraordinary number of American Christians just 150 years ago. In 2009, he repeated himself here:

… If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?

The South has always stood by the Constitution and limited government. When one attacks the Confederate Battle Flag, he is certainly denouncing these principles of government as well as Christianity.

This places Christians’ approach to the Bible in sharp relief: Either the slavery is a moral failing and the Bible got it wrong, or the Bible is always right, and therefore Mauch is right and anyone who disagrees with the Bible’s instructions on slavery is at least anti-Christian and possibly in league with Hitler and Stalin. Most Christians have accepted the former position — including the Southern Baptists — even if they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what that means for the principle of Biblical inerrancy. But it is distressing to notice how often others find ways to agree with Mauch.


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