As I noted yesterday<\/a>, white evangelical megachurch pastor Louie Giglio recently proposed using the phrase \u201cwhite blessing\u201d as a replacement for the phrase \u201cwhite privilege.\u201d The goal, he said, was to switch up the terminology in order to reach white Americans upset at the term \u201cwhite privilege.\u201d The problem with this, I wrote, is that evangelicals\u2014including Giglio\u2014typically talk about blessings as things that are handed down by God, often as a reward for faithfulness. And this sets up\u00a0all sorts\u00a0<\/em>of troubling implications.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also worth noting that evangelicals have already<\/em> used the term \u201cblessing\u201d in another<\/em> way when they talk about slavery.<\/p>\n Let me dive in here for a second. Some years ago, my kids attended a private Christian school (white). One of their history books said something like, \u201cSlavery was a blessing because it introduced Africans slaves to Jesus.\u201d https:\/\/t.co\/fW2hS75kLd<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Aretha Grant <\/p>\n I\u2019ve heard that line too: that \u201cslavery was a blessing because it introduced African slaves to Jesus.\u201d Sure, bad things happened\u2014but in the end, black people got to live as free people in America, the land of opportunity,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>they got to learn about Jesus and become Christians who will live forever in eternity with the Lord!<\/p>\n It\u2019s like evangelicalism has broken<\/em> them. While acknowledging that there are progressive white evangelicals who speak for the impressed\u2014not to mention the Black church, which has done liberation work for as long as there have been Black Christians in America\u2014there seems to be something about white evangelical theology that twists adherents\u2019 ethics into terrible, terrible knots.<\/p>\n Imagine thinking that it was a blessing\u00a0<\/em>for\u00a0millions of people to be enslaved, tortured, killed, and torn from their families repeatedly generation after generation, because in the end,\u00a0they got to hear about their enslavers\u2019 religion.\u00a0<\/em>There are white evangelicals who believe exactly that, and, practical questions aside, the truly sick thing is that this claim almost\u00a0makes sense,\u00a0<\/em>within their parameters\u2014if hell is an eternity of torture in a lake of fire and every non-Christian will go there, you can justify\u00a0almost anything\u00a0<\/em>if it leads to people becoming Christians.<\/p>\n Of course, there are some practical questions to be asked even within these parameters. For example, what of the large number of Africans who died during the middle passage, without having a chance to hear the gospel? These presumably went straight to hell\u2014was that just collateral damage, to get to the \u201cblessing\u201d of enslaved Africans hearing the gospel? Also, in what world is mistreating<\/em>\u00a0people the best way to share the gospel with them?<\/p>\n Even if you accept the contention that all non-Christians will be tortured for eternity in a lake of fire after death, enslaving Africans does not make sense. White Europeans did not enslave Africans\u00a0to Christianize them,\u00a0<\/em>enslaving a group is a weird way to make them convert to your religion\u2014white evangelicals tend to hold that conversions must be individual and heartfelt, after all\u2014and white enslavers were quick to ban enslaved Africans from learning to read as soon as enslaved peoples started to find \u201csubversive\u201d passages in their Bibles.<\/p>\n In other words, the claim that \u201cslavery was a blessing because it introduced African slaves to Jesus\u201d is and has always been nonsense even within white evangelicals\u2019 theological constraints, which means of course that it has always been an intentional and calculated justification designed to exempt white people from feeling the full weight of guilt for what they and their ancestors have done to Black people in this country for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n Did you know that white Europeans enslaved Africans in part because, at that time, Christianity forbade the enslaving of Christians? Non-Christians were fair game, though. Some early enslaved Africans, realizing that there was a ban on the enslaving of Christian peoples, converted to Christianity and demanded their freedom. White enslavers responded\u00a0by changing the law\u00a0<\/em>and simply ignoring Christian doctrine against enslaving Christians.<\/p>\n\n