Happy Inbox Amnesty Month!

Last updated on: January 2, 2024 at 6:43 pm By Fred Clark

• January is Inbox Amnesty Month. Proclaim liberty throughout the land … it’s an inbox Jubilee!

You are henceforth free from any obligation to plow through the unread emails of 2023. Archive, recycle, delete, trash, or whatever other verb your set-up uses. Select all. Delete all. Start 2024 afresh with a blank slate, a clean page, and an empty inbox.

But what if there was something really important in that logjam of unread email? Well, if it was really that important, they’ll send it again. Or they would have followed up with a text by now.

And in any case, it’s their fault for sending something so important so close to January 1, which is — as everyone knows, or everyone should know — the first day of Inbox Amnesty Month, when all right-thinking decent people sweep their inbox clean of all unread email and start the new year free of the shackles of the old.

Your bosses can’t yell at you for doing what everyone is supposed to do this month. If they’ve never heard of Inbox Amnesty Month, that’s their failure, not yours.

• This clickbait article on the “10 Most Haunted Bodies Of Water Around The World” doesn’t include Lake Lanier, so I can’t trust anything else it says.

“The lake was created in the 1950s by flooding valley communities that contained a cemetery, fueling beliefs that it’s cursed. Historians say some unmarked graves and other structures were swallowed up by its waters.” That’s almost a perfect basis for ghost stories and legends. (Craig T. Nelson in Poltergeist voice: “You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!”)

The ghost stories of Lake Lanier are important not because they are “true,” but because stories like these are how we remember the history we otherwise are reluctant to remember. This is Georgia, and America, and part of how we manage to keep living here in places like Georgia and America is by pretending not to know about all the bodies down there that were covered up when we created this thing.

My favorite example of this dynamic of ghost stories as memory — as the history that endures when the facts of actual history are suppressed, erase, or deliberately “forgotten” — is a place just a few miles from here called Duffy’s Cut. That’s where the official records and official history said dozens of Irish railroad workers died during a cholera outbreak in 1832. This tragic event, historians said, was the true story behind the fantastical folklore of the local tales of the ghosts of Irish railroad workers haunting the woods near the R5 in Malvern.

But the ghosts in those stories hadn’t died from cholera. They’d been murdered. This was, the official history suggested, an embellishment from generations of storytellers seeking to make the tale more exciting and dramatic.

Those ghost stories endured for generations, retaining enough vivid detail that some 170 or so years later they were able to guide the archaeologists who went into the Malvern woods with ground-penetrating radar. That’s where they found the mass grave of 57 railroad workers whose shattered skulls and broken bones showed that they hadn’t died from cholera, but from the violent panic that accompanied the disease.

Lake Lanier is haunted because Atlanta is haunted because America is haunted. Not by actual ghosts, but by the memory of all the bodies we pretend to have forgotten are there.

• Depictions of Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie character like the one above are now in the public domain. So is a whole bunch of other wonderful stuff from the 1920s:

On January 1, 2024, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1923. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. This year’s highlights include Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and a trove of sound recordings from 1923.

Other songs entering the public domain as of yesterday include “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” “Mack the Knife,” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” So, OK then, here’s Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges performing that last one in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Tasting and grazing

Last updated on: January 16, 2023 at 1:42 pm By Fred Clark

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Here’s a strange sentence from a recent Christianity Today article: “The CCCU advocates a sexual ethic of marriage between a man and a woman.”

The CT writer and readers didn’t find that sentence extremely confusing because it aligns with their prior confusion. They’re accustomed to using the phrase “sexual ethic” to mean … whatever it might mean in that weird little sentence, where it can’t possibly refer to either ethics or to sex.

“Advocating … marriage between a man and a woman” does not present us with “a sexual ethic,” or even with a component of such an ethic. It has more to do with marriage licenses.

The folks at Christianity Today and at the evangelical universities of the CCCU think (and “advocate”) that a marriage license should only be made available to “a man and a woman.” And they think stating as much means they have said something about “a sexual ethic” because they think that marriage licenses ethical sex. If you have a marriage, you have license.

Here, again, we see white evangelical “sexual ethics” replaced by a useless binary. If “Married?” = “Yes” then ethical. If “Married?” = “No” then sinful.

This is what Libby Anne called the “Tale of Two Boxes,” and it provides no ethical guidance to anyone. The entire point of “advocating” this approach is to avoid having to think or to behave ethically. Married couples won’t have to worry about treating one another ethically because whatever they do is, by definition, declared to be “ethical.” And anything that anyone else does is, by definition, un-ethical, so they’ll need to abstain from … well, apparently, from everything and everyone and everywhere.

For an illustration of how this confusion begets further confusion, consider the recent news from Dave Ramsey’s sanctimoniously anti-Jubilee media empire.

If believers seeking ethical guidance are denied that, and given only two-box binaries instead, then they’re bound to start coming up with their own rules and folkways. The elastic “righteous living” standard Ramsey imposes on his employees makes formal a longstanding, informal ethical tradition shared by most white evangelicals and Catholics here in America — particularly among teenagers. This is the supposedly “biblical” doctrine that Oral Sex Doesn’t Count.

Extramarital sex will get you fired from Ramsey Solutions, but only if it’s P-in-V. Blow jobs are cool, though — or at least not grounds for termination. It seems Ramsey’s HR department has adopted a “technical adultery” standard based on the “technical virginity” folklore widely adopted by horny teenagers in white evangelical youth groups. As Garfunkel & Oates put it, they’re thinking outside the box.

Bob Smietana covered this earlier last year:

The company does not consider all sex acts outside of marriage to be unrighteous. While intercourse outside of marriage is cause for dismissal, oral sex is not, said Ramsey and other leaders in the depositions.

“Our operating board chose sexual intercourse outside of marriage as the line at which a person must leave and the assumption is termination at that point,” longtime Ramsey board member and Human Resources Committee Chair Jack Galloway said at an August 2021 deposition. “Things short of that are more case by case and more at least open for discussion.”

Ramsey Solutions leaders admitted in a deposition that the company’s “righteous living” rules did not bar premarital sex in writing. While the rules are sometimes described as drawn from biblical standards, several company leaders were not able to cite any Bible verses to support their views on marriage and sex.

To be fair, there are not a large number of Bible verses that directly address the subject of oral sex. The practice is enthusiastically celebrated in several places in the Song of Solomon, but that book is a tricky thing to cite if you’re also intent on blanket condemnations of all extramarital sex.

I do think that the Bible offers some clearly applicable guidance on this subject, but none of that supports the Dave Ramsey/Newt Gingrich/Horny Evangelical Teen claim for an Oral Doesn’t Count loophole.

This ethical — and practical — guidance, alas, tends to fall into the category of biblical morality that wholly eludes Ramsey, a guy whose whole shtick is re-writing the Gospel as “All Debts Must Be Paid in Full.” (Theories of atonement are a mug’s game, but here I’ll just note that it’s possible — contra Ramsey — to believe in penal substitutionary atonement and still recognize that All Debts Have Been Paid in Full. But that’s a tangential matter to our discussion here of penile substitutionary at-one-ment.)

If you’re looking to the Bible for help with “righteous living” when it comes to oral sex, then you have to start where every biblical discussion of “righteous living” has to start: the Golden Rule. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is why the Song of Solomon includes both fruit-tasting and lotus-grazing. “Freely ye have received; freely give.”

Reciprocity, gratitude, magnanimity. Not that confusing, yet utterly confounding to someone like Dave Ramsey. This is why Ramsey Solutions also cites it’s “righteous living” standard as the basis for terminating employees who incur consumer debt. (Like Ramsey’s employees, I can’t be sure what else this oddly selective “standard” forbids, but I’m guessing it includes anyone praying the Lord’s Prayer who says “forgive us our debts” instead of “forgive us our trespasses.”)

Whenever I argue that “sexual ethics” ought to start with the Golden Rule, someone will inevitably argue that reciprocity/justice, gratitude, and magnanimity are not the only ethical principles involved. And, of course, that’s true.

For example, the ancient ethical framework of “virtue ethics” has much to teach us here. This roughly Aristotelian approach is quite popular among my conservative Christian neighbors who developed an enthusiasm for it when they read (or read about) Alasdair McIntyre back in the ’90s. It’s a helpful and clarifying form of ethical thinking for anyone concerned about “righteous living” and how it relates, specifically, to the matter of oral sex.

“Virtue ethics” emphasizes that morality is, among other things, a craft — something that needs to be learned and practiced and refined. It teaches that every craft involves an intrinsically moral component. The painstaking practice and application of care involved in learning any craft exemplifies the practice and process by which we learn to become moral people. Becoming a good person, in other words, is much like becoming a master bricklayer or woodworker. It takes practice, practice, practice to learn to do it well, and doing it well is a moral obligation.

I submit that this is as true for fruit-tasting and lotus-grazing as it is for bricklaying or woodworking.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Ramsey’s technical-virginity application of the Oral Doesn’t Count rule is the way that it appeals to this weird, separate category of “Sexual Ethics” that exists wholly apart from every other discussion or understanding of just-plain-non-sex-related ethics. That’s what allows them to reduce “sexual ethics” down to two binary questions: 1) Are you married? and 2) Did the P go in the V? Apart from those yes/no questions, every other ethical concern goes out the window — the Golden Rule, doing no harm, keeping promises, avoiding betrayal, and rejecting violent, emotional, or financial coercion. The theory, I suppose, is that all of those other ethical concerns are somehow covered by the categories of married/unmarried, even though this is not obviously — or obviously not — the case.

So please don’t mistake anything I’m saying here as agreement with this daft scheme of a separate, smaller, wholly distinct realm of “sexual ethics.” Sex is not a separate universe with a separate set of rules. If anything, all of those other rules become even more vitally important when we’re naked and at our most physically and emotionally vulnerable: Don’t be a jerk, don’t be mean, don’t treat people as things, love does no harm to a neighbor, etc.

The lawyerly constructs of “technical virginity” or of Ramsey’s technical adultery are efforts to escape those basic ethical obligations. If you’re forced to argue that you’re not technically being a jerk, or not technically treating people as things, or not technically harming your neighbor then we all know you’re probably doing the very thing that you’re claiming to be “technically” avoiding.

12/18 Flashback: Things the Bible used to say

Last updated on: December 18, 2022 at 8:24 am By Fred Clark

From December 18, 2014, “The Bible used to get a lot of things wrong”

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about “10 things conservative Christians got horribly wrong.”

Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God’s behalf.

I realize that Marcotte is both an atheist (gasp!) and, even worse, a feminist, and thus she’s not someone that conservative Christians are inclined to listen to. So let me point out that many politically conservative white evangelical men would agree with her on at least some of the items in her list.

For example, the first item on Amanda Marcotte’s list of “things conservative Christians got horribly wrong” is slavery. Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore agrees with her. Here’s what Moore recently said on that topic:

The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery. And the problem wasn’t just that they were on the wrong side of a social issue; they were on the wrong side of Jesus and the gospel when it came to brothers and sisters in Christ made in the image of God that they treated with injustice.

Moore would probably (I think) agree with about half of Marcotte’s list. I’m guessing he’d also agree that conservative Christians who defended segregation were “horribly wrong.” And I’d guess he would agree that Prohibition was a mistake, and that opposing women’s suffrage was wrong (but not opposing women’s ordination). And I’m pretty sure he would say now that evangelicals’ hostile anti-Catholicism during the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was something that shouldn’t have happened.

But he would likely disagree — strenuously — with the other half of Marcotte’s list, which includes things like evolution, official prayer in schools, contraception and marriage equality.*

On all of those points, of course, Moore and his fellow “conservative” Christians would insist that their own opinions aren’t the issue here. What matters, rather, is what the Bible clearly says. It’s not that “conservative Christians” reject evolution, but that the Bible insists it’s wrong. And same-sex marriage is anathema not because “conservative Christians” think so, but because that is what the Bible clearly teaches. And contraception is wrong because the Bible clearly says so (right there in … um … I’ll have to get back to you with chapter and verse on that one).

These conservative Christians would object to Marcotte’s assertion that they are wrong on these matters. What she’s really saying, they would say, is that the Bible is wrong about such things.

The problem with that argument is that this is exactly what those earlier conservative Christians said about slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the Papist Menace. If Russell Moore’s Southern Baptist predecessors had been confronted with Moore’s claim that they were “wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery,” they wouldn’t have defended their opinion — they would have said it wasn’t about their opinion, but about the clear teaching and inerrant authority of the holy Word of God. And then they’d have viciously attacked Moore for his refusal to accept the clear and unambiguous authority of scripture.

This isn’t speculation about how they would respond. This is what they actually did. Those pro-slavery Southern Baptists were — regularly and repeatedly — accused of being wickedly wrong about slavery. And their response — documented in thousands of volumes — was always to attack their accusers for infidelity to the clear teaching of the Bible.

Anti-slavery Christians, in response, insisted they weren’t criticizing the Bible itself, only the way that pro-slavery Christians had chosen to interpret the Bible. The problem isn’t with what the Bible says, they argued, but with how the pro-slavery Southern Baptists were reading it and misusing it.

But that response only made those pro-slavery Baptists angrier. There can be only one way to read the Bible, they insisted. There can be only one way to interpret it. More than that, really what they were arguing was that the Bible didn’t need to be interpreted at all.

That claim is the identifying characteristic of the people Marcotte identifies as “conservative Christians.” They all share this idea that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous — that despite being a diverse collection of ancient texts written over a period of centuries in diverse contexts for diverse audiences, it never displays a diversity of perspectives. The Bible, they insist, never contradicts itself and never presents opposing views, and thus requires little interpretation for a contemporary reader.

Unfortunately, while this view of the Bible is horrifically misleading, it’s also widely accepted not just by conservative Christians, but by many of their critics. Thus we see things like Marcotte writing “the Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery” — uncritically accepting not just the illiterate anti-hermeneutic of the fundies, but even their favorite thought-suppressing adverb (“the Bible clearly …”).

The Bible does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that endorses various forms of slavery. That is undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, commended and commanded. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of God’s blessing.

But the Bible also does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that attacks slavery. That is also undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, condemned as contemptible. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of wickedness, disobedience and rebellion against God.

Such contradictory arguments can be bewildering if you haven’t got some way of determining which part of this biblical argument is the winning side. (Jubilee, people, it’s always about Jubilee. All of it.)

But there’s no way of doing that if you’ve decided ahead of time that such intra-biblical disputes cannot be allowed to exist. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Refusing to acknowledge their existence doesn’t make them vanish in a puff of smoke — no matter how much “conservative Christians” wish that it were so.

This is a huge problem for 21st-century white evangelicals. Like Russell Moore, they’re mostly convinced — now — that white evangelical support for slavery had been a terrible mistake. Yet they still want to cling to the pro-slavery Christians’ insistence that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous and that no interpretation is necessary to understand what it clearly says.

So while they’re pretty sure those earlier, pro-slavery Christians were wrong, they’re not able to explain how or why they were wrong. And thus, today, they are also unable to explain how or why they themselves are right about all the things they claim “the Bible clearly says.”

If those early Southern Baptists were wrong about slavery, then they were wrong about the Bible — wrong about how to read the Bible. They were wrong about slavery because they were wrong about how to read the Bible.

Contemporary white evangelicals want to retain the same approach to reading the Bible, but not the same conclusions about slavery. That doesn’t work.

If you want to retain the anti-hermeneutic of the early Southern Baptists while rejecting their pro-slavery views, then you can’t say, “The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery.” You have to say, instead, that the Bible itself used to be wrong and wickedly wrong on slavery, but somehow isn’t anymore (even though it never changed).

If you’re not willing to reject that anti-hermeneutic, then you have to say that the Bible itself used to be wrong about a lot of things.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* I’m a bit worried about mentioning item No. 4 on Amanda Marcotte’s list:

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let women have some relief. … Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing Christianity.

It’s true that this was once conventional wisdom — a widespread argument that shaped common practice. Childbirth was seen as something that ought to be painful, because Eve. Today, though, that argument is a mostly forgotten relic of history.

But today we also have a reflexively polarized religious right that trips over itself in a rush to oppose anything and everything that we evil liberals and baby-killers view approvingly. Just by mentioning stuff like this, we may be giving them ideas. If Amanda Marcotte approves of reliable pain relief in childbirth, that probably means that Barack Obama does too. And Sandra Fluke and Rachel Held Evans and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Brian McLaren and Planned Parenthood. Probably even Rob Bell.

And once they realize that, they’re likely to start angrily opposing such pain relief as another evil symptom of women’s lib and the sexual revolution. After all, if bearing children isn’t as painful and dangerous as it was back in the Golden Age, then it’s like we’re giving these wanton hussies permission to go out and do the sex without the fear of pain and suffering that God intended to accompany such filthy behavior, etc., etc.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, keep in mind that this is exactly what has happened in recent years when it comes to the abruptly newfound white evangelical opposition to contraception — a position that has surged to prominence without any credible biblical, ethical, scientific or logical argument to support it.

12/10 Flashback: The Big Cheese

Last updated on: December 10, 2022 at 2:26 pm By Fred Clark

From December 10, 2014, “A really big wheel of cheese, Southern Baptists, the Bible, and slavery”

John Leland was not, technically, a Southern Baptist. He was born in Massachusetts, for one thing. And for another he died in 1841, several years before the Southern Baptist Convention split away from other Baptists in defense of slave-owners’ rights to serve as missionaries. But Leland also spent many years building churches and ministering in Virginia where he served in a leadership role as a member of the Baptist General Committee for that southern state.

Leland is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two events in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. He helped to found the Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, to which President Jefferson sent his famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists — the letter in which Jefferson wrote of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State” and reaffirmed “the rights of conscience” as a natural right of all people.

The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese Monument in Cheshire, Mass. (Creative Commons photo by Makeitalready)

More memorable, if less consequential, was Leland’s response to that letter, provided in the form of cheese. A lot of cheese. As an expression of gratitude to Jefferson for his shared commitment to religious liberty, John Leland organized the creation of the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese — a 1,200-pound, four-foot wide cheese wheel made from the milk of every cow in Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then serving as a pastor.

The big cheese had to be transported by sleigh, and it was John Leland himself who drove that sleigh the 500 miles from Massachusetts to Washington. The journey took three weeks, with the strange sight of the Mammoth Cheese drawing crowds at each stop along the way. As a Baptist preacher, Leland couldn’t resist such crowds, and he preached his way from Massachusetts to the White House, standing in the pulpit of his sleigh next to a ginormous cheese wheel which bore the inscription “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

But the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was only the second most audacious thing John Leland attempted.

His more audacious project was undertaken during his years of ministry in Virginia. In 1789, Leland authored a resolution put before the Baptist General Committee of Virginia. That resolution called for a “great Jubilee” and the abolition of slavery in the state. It also declared slavery to be a “a violent deprivation of rights of nature” and “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland’s resolution, remarkably, was initially met with some enthusiasm. Consider that for a moment — it’s more startling than even the image of a sleigh-riding itinerant preacher bearing a half ton of hand-crafted, revolutionary cheese. In 1789, in the state of Virginia, a gathering of southern Baptists who were not yet officially Southern Baptists entertained a proposal from a Massachusetts abolitionist that would have freed all their slaves and declared the practice of slavery in Virginia to be “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland wasn’t laughed out of the convention and sent packing back to New England. His fellow Baptists in Virginia took this resolution seriously. They considered this proposal as something they might actually affirm and embrace and do. Leland’s resolution was sent out to the various regional Baptist associations throughout the state.

That’s when the push-back started.

The good Christians of the Strawberry Baptist Association, near Lynchburg, did not explicitly dispute the resolution’s argument that slavery was incompatible with scripture and human rights, but they worried that Leland’s Jubilee would create a humanitarian crisis among all those abruptly unemployed former slaves. The pious devout of the Roanoke Association fretted that the General Committee’s resolution took too simple a view of what they saw as a “very abstruse … set of complex circumstances.” Surely such a complicated issue was best left up to local congregations to decide.

Leland’s resolution was returned to the statewide General Committee in 1792, which quickly voted to dismiss it.

The non-cheese-related history recounted above is taken from Garrett Ryland’s 1955 book, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926. Ryland says that this same pattern — initial support for abolition and Jubilee followed by local resistance and ultimate reversal — was repeated at the local and regional level in Baptist associations throughout the state. The Ketocton Association, for example, adopted a plan for the “gradual abolition of slavery” in 1796. Angry resistance from local congregations led to the repeal of that plan just two years later.

The resistance to Leland’s proposal from the regional associations shows that it probably never really had a chance, but this is still a tantalizing story. In 1789, the Baptists of Virginia came to a crossroads and saw that something else, some other way, might be possible. And they paused, for just a moment at least, to consider that before passing by on the other side.

Malcontents when the last are first

Last updated on: August 24, 2022 at 6:10 pm By Fred Clark

• “All the people in the church were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” — Luke 4:28-30

What had the mob in Nazareth so upset? Jubilee. Proclaiming good news to the poor and the year of the Lord’s favor. The forgiving of debts as we have been forgiven.

That invariably pisses some people off. But that’s OK. Those stunted, resentful people are telling on themselves — bragging about their incapacity to care about others. They are neither happy nor good and whenever they encounter happiness and goodness they want to drive it out of town and push it off a cliff.

Walk right through that crowd and go on your way.

Jesus chose not to waste any more time on people like that. He didn’t quite give up on them entirely — there’s a plate of fatted calf set aside waiting for them if they should ever choose to come in and join the party. But if someone prefers to manufacture bogus reasons for resentment and to prefer that resentment to grace and justice and jubilee and happiness … well, you can’t force them not to be like that.

Gratitude and ingratitude, crabs and buckets, clods and pebbles and olly olly oxen free. One way or another, it always comes back to Jubilee.

• Daniel K. Williams manages to discuss 20th-century white evangelical political allegiance without ever mentioning race, segregation, or the Civil Rights Movement: “It Wasn’t the Religious Right That Made White Evangelicals Vote Republican.”

Williams really, really wants to reassure himself that people like Randall Balmer are wrong about the central role that race and racism have played in shaping white evangelical politics (and, thereby, in shaping white evangelical religion). And so he embraces and accepts all of the coded language of the Southern Strategy, but treats it as good-faith, surface-level, naively innocent face-value references to red-blooded virtuous American values.

Why did white evangelicals support Nixon in overwhelming numbers in 1972? Williams says it’s because “opposed secularization and advocated returning a Protestant-style moral regulation to American politics to confront the sexual revolution and the cultural changes of the preceding decade.”

Ah, yes, “the cultural changes of the preceding decade.” Whatever might that refer to?

John Ehrlichman, after he got out of prison, frequently half-confessed and half-bragged about the way Nixon crafted his pitch to the white voters Williams discusses in order to make a racist appeal that would still (partly) allow such a voter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.” It’s pretty wild to read the same euphemisms crafted by guys like Nixon, Ehrlichman, Lee Atwater, and Frank Rizzo employed as a defense against the charge that racism has ever had anything to do with white evangelical politics.

“The cultural change of the preceding decade.” Jeez Louise. May as well have just said that they had a principled dedication to states’ rights.

At Adventus, rmj responds to a similar claim about some pre-Trump innocence in white evangelical politics. He mostly does so by citing a contemporary primary source from the midst of “the cultural change” of the 1960s. It’s a passage that I have long argued should be regarded as biblical canon:

I have been disappointed with the white church and its leadership. … I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

That epistle affirms Williams’ secondary assertion that white evangelical reactionary politics was not created ex nihilo by Jerry Falwell in 1980 (which is also not an honest or accurate representation of Balmer’s argument). But it obliterates Williams’ larger claim that this politics has a centuries-long pedigree and, therefore, must be deemed innocent in its intentions and its effects.

The attempt to look back at two centuries of American white evangelical politics is daunting, in part, because it requires a constant category over time that has not, in any clear sense, been a constant category over that span of time. On that point I’ll just refer back to the Adam Kotsko piece that we discussed last month in which he notes that “[white] evangelicalism as we know it did not exist before the late ’70s,” clarifying in an impatient footnote provided for folks like Williiams that:

This claim may seem extreme. On the level of substance, however, it is impossible to understand contemporary evangelicalism as anything but a reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s. And on the level of style, it was only in the 1970s that the idea of a Christian counterculture — led, as always, by Christian music — really began to take off.

About which I wrote:

I think that’s right. White evangelicalism “as we know it” changed in both substance and style in reaction to the social upheaval of the ’60s just as surely as America as we know it did. (And, again, we should understand that “the ’60s” always means, primarily, the Civil Rights Movement and feminism, not the Beatles and Woodstock.)

• Also at the Anxious Bench, Philip Jenkins looks at the correlation between climate crises and plague, “These Are The Ways The World Ends.” It’s pretty grim, but it’s also fascinating:

Something very bad was happening around 2200BC, during what is called the 4.2 kiloyear event – that is, 4,200 years before the present. Far from being a transient episode, that great third millennium event – the snappily named “4.2ka BP” – is now acknowledged as marking a decisive shift in global climate. … It is quite conceivable that volcanic action or changing levels of solar energy might have been involved – or at least, something sufficient to transform the world’s oceanic currents. Just maybe, what about some extraterrestrial event, like a meteor impact?

We have one really infuriating problem here, in that we can easily find a very plausible candidate for the culprit, but the date as it stands just does not work. I am referring to the invaluable records preserved in the bristlecone pines of the US West. These map particularly severe years very effectively, and show us for instance that the globe was suffering particular horrors in 43BC, in the 530sAD, in 626AD, and other key dates. Almost certainly, the Something in question was some kind of volcanic action that darkened the skies, ruined crops, and induced far reaching famines. In these long biological arches, one date stands out very clearly as an utterly dreadful time to be alive, and that was 2036BC. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the trauma wrought on those Western trees was volcanic in nature, something at least on the scale of mighty Mount Tambora in 1815. If that was correct, it is scarcely surprising that civilizations would topple like dominoes. But in terms of explaining the collapses we have noted around the world, the date is just wrong, and it is off by two centuries.

Jenkins’ deep dive into the mysteries of the past is delightful. Or, I suppose, it would be if we had the luxury of studying all of this without also finding it urgently relevant. As Jenkins says, “The connection of climate-related disasters to plague, pandemic, and pestilence is very strong indeed. Understanding that dimension is vitally important for approaching our past, our history – but also, our futures, in an era of rapid climate change.”

• Here’s another track from Daniel Amos’ Buechner album Motorcycle. The title of this post comes from the lyrics to “Grace Is the Smell of Rain,” which, in turn — like most of the lyrics on this album — come directly or indirectly from Frederick Buechner.

May 30 Flashback: Always with you

Last updated on: May 29, 2022 at 10:04 pm By Fred Clark

From May 30, 2013, “Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jack wagons who misquote the Bible“:

The authors of both Gospels, like Jesus himself, expected that everyone reading or hearing that phrase — “For you will always have the poor with you” — would recognize it and know where it comes from. Jesus was quoting scripture. Jesus was quoting scripture and counting on his disciples knowing that he was quoting scripture.

Fincher is quoting Jesus and counting on his listeners not knowing that Jesus was quoting scripture. Because anyone who knows that will instantly recognize that Fincher is twisting Jesus’ words into the opposite of what they mean.

Jesus was quoting from the Torah, from Deuteronomy 15. That’s another one of those Jubilee passages. The chapter starts with a quick rehash of the laws regarding the Sabbath year. Every seven years, debts must be cancelled. Thus saith the Lord.

Yes, the Bible says that. It says that over and over and over again. Every seven years, debts must be cancelled.

Jubilee and the cancellation of debt are kind of a major theme in the Bible. This tends to escape the notice of most American Christians — particularly those who most loudly proclaim themselves to be upholders of “biblical” morality. Years of painstaking conditioning have rendered this major biblical theme invisible to the eyes of American readers, so much so that people like Dave Ramsey have been able to create an industry out of teaching the opposite of Jubilee.

Every seven years, Deuteronomy 15 reminds us, “every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it.” Follow all these rules for Jubilee, Deuteronomy says, and there will be no such thing as poverty:

There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.

Got it? Obey the rules, Deuteronomy says, and no one will be poor. So if anyone is poor, it’s because you’re disobedient. That’s implicit in the verse above, but Deuteronomy makes it explicit in the verses that follow:

If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account theLord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

That is the context for Jesus remark in the Gospels. “For you always have the poor with you” is Jesus’ direct quotation of Deuteronomy 15:11, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth.”

That statement is followed by a “therefore” — “I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor.’” In reciting the first part, Jesus was invoking the second, the “therefore.” He didn’t need to recite all of Deuteronomy 15 for his disciples because he knew that they, unlike American Christians like Rep. Stephen Fincher, were not biblically illiterate.

For Jesus, it was impossible to cite the first part without reinforcing the second part. The two are inextricably linked — hence that “For ..” and “Since …” in our English translations. People like Fincher who invoke the first part as a denial of the second part are mangling the Bible in obscenely perverse ways, turning Jesus’ words into their opposite and turning Christ into antichrist.

Don’t miss the rebuke there in Deuteronomy 15. That’s the key point here — it’s why Jesus chose to quote this particular passage, applying its rebuke to Judas.

“If only you will obey the Lord your God,” Deuteronomy 15 says, there will be no one in need. And then, six verses later, “Since there will never cease to be some in need …” Ouch. That passage just comes right out and says “you’re all a bunch of disobedient disobeyers who will never cease to disobey disobediently.” And in the context of the Pentateuch, that’s not good. (Do you know what Deuteronomy says should happen to the disobedient? It isn’t pretty.) In that context, that’s far harsher than anything Southern Beale had to say to Rep. Fincher.

Whenever you hear some blowhard quoting “the poor will always be with you” in the backwards, antichrist way that Fincher invoked it, there really is nothing more true, more appropriate, or more necessary to be said than just exactly what Southern Beale wrote: “You are a horrible person who uses the Bible to selectively justify your greedy, selfish ways. Woe unto you.”

And “Repent, asshole,” is actually charitable — an extension of mercy, offering Fincher, et. al., a last-gasp shot at escaping their otherwise certain fate of “You are accursed, depart from me.”

Read the whole post here.

May 28 Flashback:

Last updated on: May 28, 2022 at 2:29 am By Fred Clark

From May 28, 2012, “Slavery, seafood, sexuality and the Southern Bible“:

I’ve written many times here about Peter’s vision of the treyf smorgasbord in the book of Acts (most recently here, and earlier here).

I love that story, which is why I’ve linked to those chapters from Acts, reprinted them here, and summarized them many times. It’s a terrific story from the Christian Bible and I want everyone to read the whole thing. For some reason, that leads my conservative friends to accuse me of desperately wanting to hide this story and to prevent people from reading it. Please go read it.

(Seriously, click the link there with the words “go read it.” Or click this link here. Read it. Read what it actually says rather than just what these alleged “conservatives” pretend it says. Go read it.)

Part of my fascination with that story, yet again, is that so many modern American readers of it insist that the apostle Peter was some kind of disobedient jerk who could not be trusted to report honestly on the meaning of the vision that God gave to him alone and that he alone witnessed. …

They don’t say this explicitly, in exactly those words. But they want to tell you what Peter’s vision means. And what they tell you it means is not at all the same thing as what Peter himself said it means and what Peter himself showed it to mean.

Don’t listen to Peter, they argue — Peter cannot be trusted to tell us what Peter’s vision means. And don’t listen to Luke. Both of them pervert the obvious meaning of Peter’s vision, refusing to stick with the obvious literal interpretation of this divine revelation.

So, OK, here, for the um-tiddly-umpteenth time, is Peter’s vision as described in Acts 10:11-16, quoted here in the approved conservative formulation that surgically segregates those five verses from the whole story as told in Acts 10:1 through Acts 11:18 in which it reinforces the themes, also, of the larger story told in Acts 1:1 through Acts 28:31, inclusive:

He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.’ The voice said to him again, a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

This vision, Team Mohler says, correctly, is very specific. It’s about food and diet and doesn’t mention anything else — nothing about sexuality or gender or ethnicity or liberation or Jubilee or reconciliation. God speaks in the imperative and God’s words are clear, direct and specific: “Kill and eat.” This imperative applies specifically to that which is shown in the vision, to “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.”

The voice of God speaks in this vision and Team Mohler notes that the voice of God is unambiguous and explicit. We have a verbatim quote from God: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

That’s God Almighty talking there. God Almighty, the source of this vision, explicitly states the meaning of the vision and sets a clear, unambiguous boundary on that meaning. To miss that point or to try to change God’s words would be to contradict the explicit, verbatim words of God Almighty.

That’s a powerful argument there from Team Mohler. Seems conclusive. They’ve cited chapter and verse and the authority of the very words of very God.

And yet some of us — obstinately — refuse to accept that this is all that this vision meant or all that it means or ought to mean. Worse than that, some of us who insist that this vision meant something more than that have the audacity to put other words into the mouth of God. We insist on changing the words that God Almighty spoke to Peter and, thereby, vastly altering and expanding the meaning of this revelation.

Let me note yet again that this vast alteration of the explicit words of God wasn’t my idea. If you want to blame someone here for changing the words and misquoting Almighty God, blame Peter and Luke. They started it.

They started it almost instantaneously, seconds after Peter received the vision, with the explicit words of God still ringing in his ears. In that instant, Luke writes, Peter reveals the confusion that would lead to his changing the words God spoke. Here is the very next verse: “Now while Peter was greatly puzzled about what to make of the vision that he had seen …”

What is that all about? How could he possibly be “puzzled”? How could Peter fail to understand the very explicit meaning of what he had just seen, of what he had just heard God Almighty say, verbatim, three times?

This puzzlement separates Peter from Team Mohler. Mohler et. al. read the account of Peter’s vision in Acts 10:11:16 and they are not puzzled at all. They know exactly what it means and what it doesn’t mean and don’t see any basis for Peter’s confusion. It’s obvious. It’s clear. God spoke and all we have to do to understand is to listen to the literal words that God literally said: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” The “four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air” that had previously been forbidden as un-kosher were now fair game.

But the apostle Peter doesn’t listen to those verbatim words from God. Instead he listened to something else — to the knocking at his door. That knocking heralds the arrival of the two-footed, warm-blooded, un-feathered gentile servants from the household of the Roman centurion Cornelius. With the arrival of these visitors Peter arrives at a new conclusion about the meaning of his vision. He arrives at a conclusion that Team Mohler insists is the wrong conclusion — one that contradicts and changes the very words God Almighty has just spoken to him.

And make no mistake about it, Peter does exactly that. He changes the words. He misquotes God. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” God said. God said it, Team Mohler believes it, and that settles it. But Peter unsettles things by changing those words, saying instead that, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

That’s not what God said. God didn’t say “who,” God said “what.” God was talking about “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air,” and saying that un-kosher food is no longer forbidden. Peter’s formulation is radically different — it’s sweeping and universal in scope, going far beyond what God actually said in the vision. “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

Rebellion. Sin. Apostasy. Peter is putting words into the mouth of God. New words, different words, incompatible words that directly contradict what God Almighty had said, verbatim, just a few verses earlier.

To make matters worse, Luke plays along with Peter’s alteration of the words of God. The following chapters of Acts treat Peter’s perverse paraphrase of the words of God as authoritative, denying and defying the clearer, more obvious, less expansive literal meaning of the words God spoke.

This rewriting of divine revelation, this putting strange new words into the mouth of God Almighty is, alas, not unique to Peter and Luke. It happens all over the place in the Bible.

Isaiah did the same thing Peter did. It’s an even more egregious case, actually.

In Isaiah 58, the prophet directly contradicts and alters the clear and unambiguous words of God as revealed in the books of Moses. God ordained and commanded feast days. God decreed particular sacrifices and offerings. These were not optional. This was the word of God Almighty.

But not only does Isaiah dismiss those explicit, verbatim words of God, he has the gall, like Peter, to put new words into the mouth of God. Isaiah brazenly interprets his own vision from God as a contradiction of what is clearly and explicitly established as God’s will. It’s not just that Isaiah makes God ridicule and dismiss those earlier divine statements about feast days, fast days and sacrifices, he also puts words in the mouth of God that deal with a much larger subject. Isaiah 58 changes what God had to say about the singular theological question that has shaped American history, American culture and American Christianity more than any other theological question: the matter of slavery.

The laws of Moses did not condemn slavery. The laws of Moses permitted, regulated and condoned slavery. In the books of Moses, the people of God were sometimes commanded to take slaves and to keep slaves and to punish slaves. Abraham, a righteous man blessed by God, owned slaves. Abraham’s owning of slaves did not adversely affect his standing with God as a righteous man or cause him to lose God’s blessing. On the contrary — Abraham’s owning of slaves is portrayed in the books of Moses as a sign of God’s blessing. We know that Abraham and others were righteous and blessed, in part, because they owned so many slaves.

That’s in the Bible. That’s canon.

And yet here comes Isaiah to turn all of that upside-down. Here comes Isaiah to put new words into the very mouth of very God — words that contradict the canonical words God spoke to Abraham and to Moses. Here comes Isaiah, like Peter, to suggest that the clearest, most straightforward and literal obvious meaning of those words of God is wrong — that the literal face-value meaning of those words is inadequate, that it’s not nearly big enough or expansive enough or inclusive enough.

Rebellion. Sin. Apostasy, etc.

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

That’s in the Bible too. That’s also canon.

So here we are: Scripture vs. scripture, the Bible vs. the Bible. How are we to make sense of this?

That’s a difficult problem for any subject in any context. But we’re not talking about just any subject or just any context — we’re talking about the subject of slavery in the context of America. And that takes things to a whole other level.

The question of slavery was the foremost theological controversy in America in the 19th century, but it was never simply an abstract question for scholars in ivory towers to debate abstractly and disinterestedly. There was way too much money at stake for that.

It may seem crass to suggest that any amount of money at stake would influence a theological dispute or the way that Christians relate to and interpret the Bible, but you really need to appreciate the amount of money we’re talking about here.

No, no, no — much more money than that.

I’m not sure how much money you were thinking about when you read that phrase “too much money at stake,” but you’re underestimating the sheer, vast, mind-boggling size of the pile of money at stake in this dispute. Whatever amount you were imagining, the amount of money at stake in this controversy is bigger than that — even if you’re taking into account that the amount is bigger than what you’re imagining. Here’s Yale historian David Blight:

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society — slave population — in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. … In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

So it’s hard to imagine that the pro-slavery side of America’s epic theological dispute over slavery could have been wholly disinterested.

And the anti-slavery side, of course, wasn’t disinterested either. Frederick Douglass, for example, never even tried to approach the theological and hermeneutical controversy over slavery from a vantage point of impartial abstraction. His personal interest in the controversy was unquantifiable — it was priceless.

So both sides had more at stake than can be easily imagined and the theological battle-lines were drawn.

On the one side were the ancestors — in every sense — of Team Mohler. They defended slavery by citing chapter and verse from the Bible and by arguing that this is how the Bible must always be read and understood, by citing chapter and verse. They listed dozens of biblical passages that unambiguously permitted, condoned or commanded slavery. Such passages, they said, must be interpreted literally. That was the only acceptable way to read the very words of very God. “Literal” became a rallying cry, a battle cry that shaped one faction’s theology throughout the 19th century and, thereafter, on through the 20th century and into the 21st.

But the other side quoted the Bible, too. They had a few passages, such as that chapter of Isaiah, that were no less explicit and unambiguous in condemning slavery. But this side didn’t rest its case on a literal reading of those literal words. Instead, they stepped back to look at the bigger picture, at the trajectory of the Bible, at the character of God portrayed in that Bible and the characteristics it taught for any people who sought to be God’s children. They sometimes cited chapter and verse, but they also sought to put verses into the context of chapters, and chapters into the context of books, and books into the context of a larger whole. For them the big picture was clear, and no single chapter-and-verse data point from one location along the grand trajectory could rightly be interpreted — “literally” or otherwise — as contradicting the clear meaning and direction of the whole.

So who won this theological argument? In a sense, the big-picture people did, but they didn’t really win on theological grounds. They argued that their hermeneutic was more consistent and more respectful of the whole of scripture, but that contention didn’t turn out to matter quite as much for the outcome of this debate as did, say, Gen. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta. They came out on top in the theological dispute because they were aligned with the side that came out on top in the Civil War.

Before that war, slavery had also been the subject of a fierce secular controversy over the meaning of the text of the U.S. Constitution. That conflict precisely mirrored the ongoing theological dispute. On the one hand there was the pro-slavery side, arguing for a literal interpretation of the literal text. And on the other hand was the anti-slavery side arguing for a big-picture consideration of that text’s larger trajectory. Victory in the war allowed the anti-slavery faction to settle that matter by subsequently rewriting the Constitution to include the revolutionary 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The dispute over the interpretation of the text of the Constitution thus was resolved — in theory — by amending the text to make it support the winning side.

Alas, this textual dispute settled by the lethal violence of war was quickly unsettled by the lethal violence of terrorism, with mass killings, night riders, lynchings and mob rule rendering the text itself — literal or otherwise — largely irrelevant throughout most of the country for a century afterward.

It may seem like I’ve drifted far, far afield from my original subject. I started out by discussing Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and somehow I’ve wound up at the Colfax Massacre.

Well, yeah. Because it’s all the same subject. The question I’m exploring about Peter’s vision is how we go about understanding what that vision means. Can we accept Peter’s interpretation of it, even though that requires us to change the literal words that God spoke to him? And there — at the intersection of biblical literalism and meaning — I as an American must also come inevitably and inexorably to Colfax and terrorism and the Klan and all the cruel violence of a history shaped by slavery.

These things are inseparable here in America. Here the claim of a “literal interpretation of scripture” is bound up, warp and woof, with the central, defining American dispute over slavery. American biblical literalism arose to prominence in defense of slavery and has shaped itself for centuries in pursuit of that one contention. American biblical literalism retains that same shape today, even when it is applied to diverse other subjects, from sexuality to origins to eschatology.

American biblical literalism has not changed. It preserves its essential fear of and antipathy toward any consideration of the bigger picture or the larger trajectory. It reflects its instinctual sympathy for siding with the deepest pockets. It reflexively strikes back against any hint of liberation or of Isaiah’s redefinition of Jubilee.

If you really want to understand Team Mohler, you have to appreciate that it is the heir to, and the latest incarnation of, Team Calhoun.

Read the whole post here.

May 26 Flashback: Break every yoke

Last updated on: May 26, 2022 at 3:46 am By Fred Clark

From May 26, 2007, “Giving the moon the finger“:

It seems whenever the question of slavery and the Bible comes up, everybody starts to get their fundie on. Even people usually far-removed from the fundamentalist and evangelical subcultures start using some of its more dubious tools — like the vivisection-by-concordance approach to Bible study. Yes, concordances are helpful, and this can be a fruitful approach, but only if studying the index is not seen as the equivalent of, or a substitute for, reading the book.

In this case, actually, you’d be better served by reading the Table of Contents than by reading the index: “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num …”

Wait, what was that second one?

Right, Exodus. The title of that book is the first and last biblical word on the subject of slavery.

Exodus definitively establishes the motif and the trajectory. Liberation starts here. But it does not end here.

The Exodus story provides refrains that echo all through scripture: “You were once slaves in Egypt,” “the Lord brought you out of slavery in Egypt.” This refrain is the basis for much that follows in the law and the prophets. You were once slaves in Egypt, so we’re going to practice liberation every Sabbath year and every Jubilee. You were once slaves in Egypt, so breaking every yoke is what religion is all about. And further along this trajectory, You were once slaves in Egypt but I brought you out, so you’re going to love your neighbor and even love your enemies.

The Exodus is, to borrow an image from Buddhism, a finger pointing at the moon. Measuring the length and the limits of that finger misses the, well, point. Woolman and Wilberforce understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Bob Marley understood this.

So if you’ve an interest in this subject — what the Bible says about slavery — you need to do more than study the finger. You need to look where it’s pointing.

Read the original post here.