White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity

[no_hypocrisy]

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity


When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn't know some other details of the city's role in civil rights history.

The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a busload of Black and white Freedom Riders who had traveled defiantly together to Montgomery in a challenge to segregation. Over the next 15 years, Cross, who is white, would regularly take people to the old Greyhound depot in Montgomery to highlight what happened that spring day.

"They pull in right here, on the side," Cross said, standing in front of the depot. "And it was quiet when they got here. But then once they start getting off the bus, around 500 people come out – men, women and children. Men were holding the Freedom Riders back, and the women were hitting them with their purses and holding their children up to claw their faces." Some of the men carried lead pipes and baseball bats. Two of the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activist John Lewis and a white ally, James Zwerg, were beaten unconscious.

Though he had grown up in Mississippi and was familiar with the history of racial conflict in the South, Cross was horrified by the story of the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders. Montgomery was known as a city of churches. Fresh out of seminary, Cross had come there to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Why didn't white Christians show up?" he recalled wondering.

[dalton99a]

1. "It is not inconsistent with the will of God"

At an earlier point in American history, some Christian theologians went so far as to argue that the enslavement of human beings was justifiable from a biblical point of view. James Henley Thornwell, a Harvard-educated scholar who committed huge sections of the Bible to memory, regularly defended slavery and promoted white supremacy from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., where he was the senior pastor in the years leading up to the Civil War.

"As long as that [African] race, in its comparative degradation, co-exists side by side with the white," Thornwell declared in a famous 1861 sermon, "bondage is its normal condition." Thornwell was a slave owner, and in his public pronouncements he told fellow Christians they need not feel guilty about enslaving other human beings.

"The relation of master and slave stands on the same foot with the other relations of life," Thornwell insisted. "In itself, it is not inconsistent with the will of God. It is not sinful." The Christian Scriptures, Thornwell said, "not only fail to condemn; they as distinctly sanction slavery as any other social condition of man."

Among the New Testament verses Thornwell could cite was the Apostle Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he writes, "Slaves, obey your human masters, with fear and trembling and sincerity of heart." (Biblical scholars now discount the relevance of the passage to a consideration of chattel slavery.)

[Alacritous Crier]

2. Filthy, foul scum! -- nt

[ret5hd]

3. White xtians DID show up. (oops...spoiler alert!)

[I_UndergroundPanther]

4. The bible itself excuses slavery

That was one reason among many I have left Christianity behind personally.

Christianity being beliefs can be twisted around alot and the bible excuses horrible things,the preacher can embody those bad things because the bible is inconsistent and sometimes morally wrong. Cherry picking or no cherry picking of verses. Christianity is racist as the bible rationalizes it and opinion fills in the unclear parts.

The bible is as clear and plain spoken as pea soup,honestly.

Even the way to salvation is unclear in the bible so people fill it in with opinions. That's why there are so many denominations of christian's.

About time christianty got called out.

[LuvNewcastle]

6. You're right, the Bible excuses,

or at least doesn't condemn, all sorts of awful behavior. People use a lot of sophistry nowadays to smooth over the rough parts, but it's quite naked in its attitude of slavery and concubinage and all sorts of violence. The problem with evangelicals and /or fundamentalists is their insistence that the Bible is the absolute word of God and is without errors. That is the root of it all.

[bobbieinok]

5. Fred Clark has posted a grest deal about this. Also William Lindsay

Clark, raised Evangelical now terms himself 'progressive' on his blog slacktivist at patheos

Lindsay on his blog bilgrimmage.blogspot.com

Lindsay grew up SoBaptist in Arkansas. A year or so ago he posted some truly horrific articles about the history of lynching in his state. And about how tightly protestant ministers worked with the Klan, both in his state and nationally---holding sevices honoring the local members, etc

I've learned a lot from both

Never forget---the Southern Baptist convention started by breaking away from Baptists in the North---those in the North were oppsed to slavery, those in the South were slave-holders and interpreted the Bible to support their stance.

Clark has written several posts claiming that conservative christians demand a literal interpretation of the Bilble to support white supremacy---they view passages about slavery as supporting the idea that some are more superior to others

Don't forget the old claim that blacks are descended from Ham. He was a son of Noah---because he saw his father sleeping naked, he and his children and his childrens' children were condemned by his father to be slaves to his brothers and to their descendants

[I_UndergroundPanther]

7. Bible excuses slavery,thats

Why to at least me,among other things why I am not christian and will never go back to it.

Bible parts like the book of Joshua made me leave because parts of the bible that god sanctions are not moral or good at all.

I have rejected christianity and the bible and Jesus

I can't love a sociopath capricious abusive god. The cruelty of god is inherent in the bible. You're supposed to fear god.
You can interpret that book a thousand ways to suit any excuses.
But glossing over the abusiveness in the bible can only go so far until someone just says enough I can't accept this anymore..

If god made people and called it good,he allows the cruelty and futility of life, for it is in his image.

In the desire to make a bad god good some christians ignore and justify what evils the evil god sanctions in the bible and callthier rationalizations for it wisdom. It's psychologically harmful to me to be a christian.

[bobbieinok]

8. In the times we were taught about 'Joshua fit the battle of Jericho we were NEVER told what followed

When some blogs I read now and then started going into the passages where god commands horrific things, I started reading the complete passages, not just what was in the kids' Sunday School stories, the felt pictures the teacher put up on the board as she went through the story.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

9. When I was little and learned about Noah's ark

I was horrified,all I could think of is my sweet cat being drowned,my sweet rooster,my canary my dog Mikey all drowning because God thought they were evil.

I called god an asshole in the middle of Sunday school. Than I
ran out of the church in tears,sat in the cornfield nearby until my mom came to me and I got kicked out of Sunday school that day.

Lucky for me mom didn't push me back into the churches.