Does the Bible Condone Slavery? Excerpts from Civil War Research

No scholar worth his salt says the Bible condones slavery. Any scholar who does say the Bible condones slavery is plainly not worth his salt. Rather, he or she is driven by a pop scholarship, usually atheistic, that opines jauntily on a topic it neither comprehends nor respects—if it gets something wrong, who cares? It’s only the bible to them.

An example of such is found at the National Historical Park poster at Harper’s Ferry.

Although slavery is often condoned in the Bible, [John] Brown believed that the ‘Golden Rule’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you implicitly condemned slavery.” Why is that statement weird?

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It’s because the words in themselves are directly contrary to the intended conclusion! That blanket statement, that the Bible condones slavery, is supported by nothing therein. If they are scriptures to the effect that it does, the reader is not made aware of them. On the other hand, there is a scripture embedded in the poster that indicates the contrary is true, that the Bible does not condone slavery—that of the Golden Rule.

To be sure, the Golden Rule is unaccredited—whereas if you quoted the words of the Park system’s own resident scholars without accredation, their screams of protest would shake down the halls of academia enough to make Samson’s knocking down the temple of the Philistines look like a mere application of sandpaper.

All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them. This, in fact, is what the Law and the Prophets mean.

It’s the Bible. Unaccredited. Matthew 7:12. Furthermore, it’s a key passage—it’s ‘what the Law and the Prophets mean.’ Do the National Historical Park scholars care if modern readers conclude some ancient practitioner of mindfulness—probably some Buddha-like figure—originated the saying, and not Jesus? It doesn’t seem to bother them. The same sloppiness that would never be tolerated in any topic they cared deeply about is left unmolested in a topic they do not.

They do good work, the National Historical Park system does. They bring history to life. They restore old venues. They recreate old dramas. They make their rangers wear hats when outdoors. I’ve many times referred to them in the course of Historical Park visits in Go Where Tom Goes. But they are not immune to pop scholarship; that is the point of the preceding—a conclusion also demonstrated in that they got wrong the religion of Eisenhower’s upbringing.

Moreover, were they to encounter the scholars that dig deep and do their research without regard for what’s trendy, they would never make such a shallow statement. Here I have read through Grant by Ron Chernow, and Team of Rivals [biography of Abraham Lincoln], by Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, and nowhere in any of these works is there a single mention that “the Bible condones slavery!”

It’s a little early to tell with the Douglass book, I admit, because I started with Part 2, commencing with Civil War days till the end of Douglass’s life, but there is not one mention in what I have read. Instead, there are abundant references in all of these works of how abolitionists drew their very inspiration from the Bible—and not one mention that “the Bible condoned slavery.” Frederick Douglass took as his mission statement the Acts 10:34-35 passage of how the apostle Peter “began to speak, and he said: ‘Now I truly understand that God is not partial, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’”

When visiting the Seward house in Auburn N.Y, [Willian Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State] with its preserved, well-stocked library, we learned that Doris Goodwin spend countless hours there researching the tomes. Did she issue any new-age blather that “the Bible condones slavery?” No. She researched with respect, as modern atheistic scholars are not inclined to do, how Christian faith firmly molded the notable players of that age, certainly that of the abolitionists. Lincoln, though not an overtly religious man, was as familiar and respectful of the Bible as anyone of the age—and more representative of its basic theme of ‘proclaiming liberty to the captives’ than all but the tiniest handful of them.

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And just how far do you think you would get were John Brown, the reason for that Harpers Ferry National Historical Park’ existence, were to stumble across that Bible-dishonoring poster. Oh yeah—try to explain it to that hothead how “the Bible condones slavery!” As is made abundantly clear in Good Lord Bird, [James McBride’s literary and TV adaptation of Brown’s life] nobody was as obsessed the the Lord back then as was Brown, and never did the Lord have to sit through so many interminable prayers as he did from that fellow.

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(https://www.amazon.com/John-Brown-Thundering-Jehovah)

Now, there are mentions of slavery in the Bible. They were misrepresented by Southern slaveholders to reinforce their hand with divine power. But they are so thoroughly lacking in historical context that any thorough and/or balanced researcher sees it promptly and knows enough not to extract from it biblical support of antebellum Southern slavery.

The slavery in the Bible was a volunteer slavery—an impoverished Israelite as a last resort might sell himself into slavery. It was a humane slavery—slaves by law were not to be beaten. It was a temporary slavery—temporary unless that slave wished to make it permanent. And he was not to be put into such straits that he had no choice but to remain enslaved. At the end of the ‘temporary’ period—the seven year jubilee cycle, that slave was to be released with a gift from the owner he willingly subjected himself to—so that he could hit the ground with his feet running upon release from his time of slavery.

It’s so far from the slavery of modern times that all but the willfully blind ideological historians will realize you can’t extract from it support for Civil War era slavery. True, not all slaves were Hebrew slaves. It is possible a rich Jew might come to own non-Hebrew slaves, as spoils of war, as was universal practice at that time. There are few details in the Bible about this. But since the Mosaic law mandated kind treatment for animals, one can hardly imagine it condoned harsh treatment for humans—certainly not enough to prattle on about how “the Bible condones slavery” when the premiere historians of that age knew it did not.

To be continued. . . .

 

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Ulysses Grant and Wife in the Aquarium

Ha! Look what I have found in Grant, by Ron Chernow [large print edition]:

Chapter 40 begins with: “Upon quitting the fish residence in late March, Ulysses and Julie Grant conducted a sentimental tour of familiar haunts . . . “

It was the Fish residence, not the fish residence. What! Does the editor think they lived in an aquarium? Hamilton Fish was his Secretary of State. The two came to be close friends. 

I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this. Do you have any idea how devilishly hard it is to chase all blips and typos away in a manuscript, especially if it was your own writing and you read, not what is there, but what you think is there? I still have a few typos in ‘Go Where Tom Goes.’ Probably the blips I have would completely escape the notice of anyone but an obsessive, OCD, picayune, nitpicking person, but even so, there are some. Nothing as egregious at this, however! The ‘fish residence,’ indeed! And this is from a commercial outfit that is not a one-man show, as I am. Oh yeah, I am vindicated. 

I am all but done with Grant—not completely, but almost—and have expanded into some of Douglass’s writing. The feeling floated in the first post of this thread intensifies. Lincoln freed the slaves. Grant strived to complete the job. He was relentless in defending southern Blacks. He broke the back of the original Ku Klux Klan. He came to be known as a champion of human rights in general. The feeling grows that he would have completed the job were it not for Andrew Jackson sandwiched in between he and Lincoln. 

This is speculative, hardly a sure thing. The racism Grant faced in the South was fanatical, sustained, and virulent. No end of incidents occurred in which Blacks were attacked and murdered by white mobs, not clandestinely, but out in the open and with boasting.

Ten years into Reconstruction, the zeal of Northern reformers was waning. People will devote themselves to a cause for only so long until they get discouraged by reversals and go elsewhere. Time and again Grant would send federal troops South to enforce peace. The moment he withdrew them, anti-Black violence would erupt as before. The Black vote drove white Southerners apoplectic. Though a constitutional amendment guaranteed Blacks the vote, reigns of terror became the order of the day so that few of the former slaves dared exercise it. There are elections on record in which the Black vote numbered less that 10.

Meanwhile, Grant was increasingly undercut by his Northern base. The freed-slave sentiment had not been overwhelmingly strong to begin with—to some it was, but not enough—so that in the face of Southern intransigence, the sentiment in the North morphed into, ‘Time to move on.’ With his support eroding, once in a while—not routinely, but once in a while—Grant took his eye off the ball. Whenever he did so, violence unresisted took heart and became more entrenched.

So maybe the fact that history placed Johnson in between Lincoln and Grant doesn’t matter. Maybe racial hatred would have prevailed for 100+ years in any event. On the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the racist Johnson sandwiched in between represents the time you ceased taking your antibiotics after you started feeling a little better, instead of finishing the bottle like you were supposed to, and the sickness came roaring back, stronger than before. Had you finished the bottle straight off like the doc said, the plague might have vanished for good.

Some publication of ours that I no longer recall has described the Bible as a record of human history covering times when A) people paid attention to God’s will, B) people did not pay attention to God’s will, and C) people were oblivious or ignorant of God’s will.

With Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant we have history in the C category. Specifically, it was history before the wheat began to be separated from the weeds. It was history before ‘the true knowledge became abundant,’ per Daniel 12. People did the best they could. Lincoln and Douglass both cited scripture frequently. What! You expect everyone to patiently sit on their hands and say, ‘Maybe someday we’ll know exactly what to do but since we don’t now we’ll do nothing?’

Then, too, someday I want to return to the sentiments of the Gettysburg Address—that ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.’ Why was that such a big deal, so that it would be the cause that would push the North into fighting mode against secession but the abolition of slavery would not?

Lincoln’s two-minute speech was not the highlight of that day. He had been invited almost as an afterthought, with no surety that he would even come; presidents didn’t travel much back then. ‘Maybe he’ll just tell jokes,’ was the attitude another of the GC professors attributed to him. The Grant book has some cabinet participant—I think it was Chase—grumbling that all Lincoln did was tell jokes during cabinet meetings. Of course, Chase was not one to joke himself; he wore his piety on his sleeve. Even from within Lincoln’s first-term cabinet, he promoted himself as the next president, which made other cabinet members livid. However, Lincoln said he still got the better use of him. Besides, he knew what it was to be smitten by the presidential bug. Besides again, he thought it well to apply the adage, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’

The main event was a two hour speech from a Harvard orator by the name of Everett. Two hours was standard fare for a speech back then; 3 or 4 hours was not unheard of. Lincoln’s speech was two minutes. He had worked hard on it;  it wasn’t jotted down hastily on the back of an envelope as folklore has it. He dismissed it himself as a pretty meager effort upon taking his seat. Many newspapers accustomed to tonnage savaged it. But Everett himself said, ‘You said more in two minutes than I did in two hours.’ So what is this ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ that carries the day? Why does it do that?

It’s because it is a breakthrough advancement in human rule, the issue that is on front and center burner from the days of Genesis 3. With the founding of the U.S representative democracy, here was something significantly new, a major advancement in the evolution of self-rule. It was the ‘human experiment’ that must be nurtured and encouraged to thrive at all costs. Slavery, on the other hand, was NOT at first considered a violation of ‘natural law’ (this, according to another GC professor) Steeped in evolution, the framers of natural law initially considered slavery an advancement. Historically, nations had killed those vanquished in war. Making them slaves instead was an improvement!

Up till that time, human government had consisted of straight-up monarchy. Some variation in the quality/durability/benevolence or malevolence of that monarchy, but one-person-rule it had always been. Supposedly, Jefferson succeeding Adams was the first peaceful transfer of power in history between opposing political factions; up till then it has always been ‘King of the Mountain,’ with one king prevailing only by violently shoving the previous king off. 

The ‘human experiment’ of government of, by, and for the people finds roots in Greece and Rome, before resurfacing in England, then blossoms full with the U.S. That’s the long tradition that Lincoln could draw on, as he could not with a straight-up abolitionist stance.

The early adherents to the Enlightenment were ecstatic at the American innovation. With it, ‘the people’ had revolted, thrown off their ‘shackles,’ and discarded ‘tyranny’ for something presumed better—democratic rule. Proponents of the Enlightenment cheered this development. They kept an embarrassed, even horrified silence, at the other product of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, which descended into mayhem and murder. Historian Guelzo makes a big deal over this fork in the road in his lecture series on the History of Freedom. You can envision him waving the flag, but it still seems the idea has merit. After the dust had settled in France, came Bonaparte, then the cradle of the first Communists, and in the modern day [it is just me who says this, not Guelzo] FECRIS and MULVIDES. The country is the birthplace of the current craze to stamp out as ‘cults’ those thinking outside of the box; it can be nothing but mainstream human thinking for them. Human rulership without God is the innovation to be nurtured. Throw God into the mix and you are a cult. If He knows His place maybe you are not, but if He doesn’t, you are.

Guelzo considers the American Revolution the triumph of emerging humanism, and the French Revolution the embarrassing defeat. However, one might note that the American Revolution did not get the job done. It would be some time before it became ‘self-evident’ that all men were created equal. The War that would press toward that goal, and succeed, before being reversed in spirit and often reality, would spill more blood than 100 French Revolutions. And the virulent racism that came to typify the Southern US had no parallel in France. In his seventies, Frederick Douglass toured Europe. He reports no instance of prejudice at all. Nor did anyone look askance on account of his second wife, a white woman.

Civil War/Reconstruction Era consideration therefore makes a great platform for proclaiming how we need God’s Kingdom. If two of the most noble humans who have lived, with worldwide reputations to that effect,  both enjoying positions of foremost power, could have their best efforts so easily unraveled, what says that about human rule? At the very least, War/Reconstruction is the death-knell to those who insist God works through human rule, for He couldn’t possibly muck up the job more that was done in those handful of years. A decade after the Civil War’s conclusion, Grant would express misgivings that it had been fought in vain. Conditions had reverted to before. Slavery was gone, but the feudal system of sharecropping imposed by regional laws, later reinforced with Jim Crow policy, to replace it was little better and in some ways worse. 

You don’t have to regard Lincoln and Grant as noble, though most of the world does. In these days of revisionist history, there are those who label them butchers, for they both presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Both were frequently called butchers in their lifetimes, especially Grant.

It’s the best human rule can do. It did preserve the ‘human experiment.’ It did free the slaves—though just barely, and with myriad caveats.

When I was in college, before my Witness days, I took an elective course on public speaking. The professor ragged continually on the virtues of voting. Student elections were coming up. He would not let up on his insistence that all must vote. I got fed up. Though I was by no means a rebel, when it was my turn to make a speech, I chose to highlight all the reasons you might not want to vote—not just for the student election, but for any election. 1) the candidate might be lying. 2) He (or she) might be sincere but prove powerless once in office. 3) He/she might change his mind, making one’s vote pointless. I did not then add, 4) how many of them go down to corruption. (The professor was sporting about it, acknowledging valid points had been made, even though he disagreed with the thrust, and he gave me an adequate grade—not like one of those ideologue professors of today that you have to agree with or they flunk you.)

It only takes one torpedo of the four to sink the ship. Neither Lincoln nor Grant has serious problem with 1 or 3, but they both got stymied by 2. Lincoln did pretty well by 4, but Grant well-neigh lost his entire reputation to it. His administration was known for its corruption, even as he himself was always thought honest. He wasn’t the greatest judge of character. He would express shock when presented incontrovertible proof that ‘friends’ had betrayed him—a frequent occurrence. Other times he would stand by ones who anyone else would have abandoned because he had not yet been presented incontrovertible proof. One one occasion, his incontrovertible proof took the form of an empty bankbook. He had been sweet-talked into a scheme that proved fraudulent.

When faced with certain ruin at the end of his life due to crooks leading him astray, he at last steeled himself to dictate his memoirs. Some of these strutting generals started in on the memoirs almost the moment the Civil War ended. Grant had steadfastly refused. When on his post-presidency world tour, dignitaries would ask him to review their troops. Grant would reply that he had seen enough troops to last a lifetime; he didn’t want to see any more.

At the time, he was all but on his deathbed. He would die just days after completing them. It wasn’t for himself that he did it, nor for ‘posterity,’ but for his wife, so that she would not be left destitute. 

Mark Twain was a frequent guest and witnessed him at work. Twain was amazed that for hours on end, up to the entire day, Grant could dictate his notes just once and they would be near-perfect prose, with no need of revision. He would neither eat during this time, nor drink beyond the bare minimum, because his rapidly deteriorating health was aggravated by both, and he wanted to finish.

Both Lincoln and Grant were honest men who, when in office, did not line their pockets. The idea of a president having to sweat his financial future plays absurd today, but it was not so then. The problem was best alleviated by dipping one’s hand in the till, as is routine today—people emerge from government service with far more than their salaries would suggest.

In contrast, Mary Todd Lincoln (who spent heavily) complained that her president husband was “too honest to make a penny outside of his salary.” And Grant immediately felt the financial sting upon leaving office—though not enough to forestall a round-the-world tour so long as the money held out; he was not overly given to fretting about the future. Imagine! Grant’s memoirs of the Civil War would not exist had he not faced financial ruin at the end of his life.

All these ideas I hope to expand on some day.

 

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“The Crimes of this Guilty Land Will Never be Purged Away but With Blood—John Brown and the Civil War

(See Part 1)

On the day he was to be hanged, A09D9CAD-D6BD-47AB-BFFE-6688D27B3E39John Brown handed a note to a guard written the day before: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” 750,000-person’s worth of blood was spilled in that Civil War.” It was blood spilled in payment for a moral failing, is what John Brown was saying.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, the 16th and 18th presidents of the United States, came to hold and express that view. At Lincoln’s second inaguration, after four years of bloody war, the reelected president expressed hope that the fighting would soon end, “yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the [slaveholder’s] 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” He did not exempt himself from guilt. It was not an ‘us versus them’ speech. How could he condemn the South for not ending slavery when he knew of no easy solution himself?

Says Ron Chernow, author of Grant, the 18th president, as both general and president, also “deemed the war a punishment for national sins that had to come sooner or later in some shape and probably in blood.” I am reminded of how, at the Martin van Buren home, a National Historical Park site, the hatted ranger told me that no president after Andrew Jackson served more than one term because “the challenges leading up to the Civil War were thought to be unaddressed by those presidents.”

They were “addressed” in that war. Per Brown, Lincoln, and Grant, they were addressed with buckets of blood. As a punishment for sins? You’d get no argument on that from those men. There is such a thing as ‘community responsibility.’

That inaugural address of Lincoln’s was overall praised, though the non-religious persons grumbled at his “substitution of religion for statesmanship." He himself allowed that the address would wear well over time, but not immediately, since “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

Tom Pearlsnswine, the fellow who mortified me by muttering about the ‘wiles of Satan’ when I was dumb enough to invite him to tag along with us on a visit to the dinosaur museum, the fellow who puts the dog into dogmatic, was not at all happy with this above historical discussion. “What does this have to do with the Bible?” he spouted. “These men were all bloodguilty,” he fumed, as he took another bite of his Bible sandwich. “Stay on topic!”

Even given his confidence in preservation of the union, even given his confidence in emancipation, would Lincoln not have agreed with the ‘bloodguilty’ charge? North and South were appalled at the phenomenal loss of life—far eclipsing the walk in the park some had first envisioned the war would be—and Lincoln, a man with a conscience, was commander in chief. Couldn’t he have gotten the job done with less blood? Wasn’t it his fault if he hadn’t? “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln remarked, in the aftermath of a staggering slaughter under the leadership of a particularly incompetent general (Burnside), “I am in it.”

Ten days before his death, Lincoln related a dream to friend and bodyguard Ward Leman. He was in the White House. “There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. . . . I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.” At length, he came upon a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments, surrounded by mourners and guards. He asked who it was. “The President,” was the guard’s answer. “He was killed by an assassin.”

Ten days later Lincoln was killed by an assassin. Ones who regard such premonitions as impossible have denied the dream report, but Lincoln was well-known for relating portentous dreams.

 

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Sometimes Human Justice Gets in the Way: Lincoln and Grant

I’m no longer reading up on Lincoln. I’m reading up on Grant. Ted Putsch would like both, I think, and may already be well-versed. Both men were raised in lowly circumstances. Both were unusually humble and defenders of the lowly. Both were continually sneered at by elites. Both made emancipation of slaves their chief mission.  Both . . . wait for it  . .  found occasion to suspect habeas corpus. 

A younger relative of mine is libertarian. It motivates everything he does. The first factoid he ever learned about Lincoln was his suspension of habeas corpus. That was enough for him to permanently place Lincoln on his evil-person list. From there, he immediately bought into the invective that Lincoln didn’t give two hoots about freeing slaves—his sole concern was preservation of the union.

In fact, from the very beginning, Lincoln purposed that quenching the ‘rebellion’—such it was called at the time—would go hand in glove with destroying the

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institution of slavery. But he could not 
just outright say it. He knew he had to first build a consensus. Many were the northern abolitionists who did outright say it, and they were immediately marginalized into a minority camp. Minorities don’t win at the human game of government. William Seward (by far the front runner leading up to 1860–everyone supposed he would be president, not Lincoln) also did say it, giving a lofty speech invoking a “higher law.” Not only was he marginalized by those to whom the sole mission of freeing slaves was insufficient motivation, but he was also marginalized by those who supposed there was no higher law other than the human experiment of ‘government by the people.’

The only way Lincoln’s Emancipation would fly in all the North, not just with the abolitionists, was for him to sell it as a military strategy. White northern troops fretted over who would mind the household while they were gone. White southern troops had no such concerns; their slaves could keep things humming. Free those slaves and the playing field was leveled. In fact, it was more than leveled: those slaves would begin to conspire against their masters.

Two sacrosanct, as human principles go—standards of justice took front and center stage in the Civil War years: state’s rights and habeas corpus. I can see Putsch railing against any infringement of either:

”Tyranny …. in soft measured voices, done in secret, and with powdered silk gloves is STILL TYRANNY.”

Oh yeah, I can easily see it! And I’d tend to agree, in a relative sense—but only a relative sense. Fact is, such lofty human principles stood squarely in the way of a far greater good: the liberation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Robert E Lee personally loathed slavery. He had never owned a slave. But he took up the call of what he considered even more sacred. ‘State’s rights’ became his clarion call. Consequently, he signed on to command Southern troops, enshrining slavery as the ‘right’ of the state to decide, not some meddling Union to impose their standards from afar.

‘Man is dominating man to his injury’—even (and in this case, due to) when they run by their own self-invented concepts of justice. In the greater removed picture, looked at from our time, only the elimination of slavery matters. One Union should split into two? It’s like what Bud said when he threw away the anti-rattle clip he couldn’t figure out how to reinstall—“What’s more rattle on a Ford?” So it is with human self-government. What’s one more division of mankind in a sea of many divisions?

Here the two bedrock principles of American justice, habeas corpus and state’s rights, stood squarely in the way of real justice for hundreds of thousands of Blacks—for Whites too, for that matter, since Jefferson wrote of the South: “The parent storms [in domination of his slaves]; the child looks on . . . puts on the same airs . . . and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” 

One is reminded (a bone for science-fiction aficionados) of ‘Childhood’s End, in which the alien overlords paid no attention whatsoever to ‘state’s rights,’ immediately and decisively ending the cruel spectator sport of bullfighting. 

Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was a measure he deemed essential to preserve the Union, which action would enable the freeing of slaves. Certain journalists were openly encouraging desertion from the Northern army. ‘I should shoot some guileless plowboy deserter and not the guileful propagandist who induced him to do so?’ he posed.

Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus during his presidency is more directly connected with the welfare of Blacks than was Lincoln’s. In the early days of Johnson’s presidency, the Ku Klux Klan arose. Reports were that it commanded the active participation of 2/3 of southern Democrats whites, and the tacit participation of the other third. By many measures, Blacks were worse off than during slavery. The white aristocracy manipulated them into situations just as oppressive but with no obligation to provide for them.

Unspeakable and well-documented atrocities became routine. Not only might Blacks be easily beaten or killed, but also white Republican southerners who aligned with them. Murderers could not be brought to justice. Witnesses were too intimidated to speak out, and with good reason; no jury of peers would convict Klansmen, and the retribution against witnesses would be severe. Grant sent in federal judges, and suspended habeas corpus in enough instances that Klansmen would turn upon each other in efforts to get off or gain lighter sentences for the crimes that a non-federal judge would excuse. Within a few years, he had broken the back of the Klan. It’s later reemergence is in name and ideology only (just as Baal worship kept coming back, even though guys like Elijah would clean it out from time to time.)

Habeas corpus and state’s rights—noble as far as human principles go, but not a guarantee that evil cannot, not only exist, but prevail. 

Anyone thinking that God works through America (or any other country—America being the only topic of consideration here) is invited to look at the Andrew Johnson administration. “Be Like Abe” flies, as does (to a lesser degree, but still doable) “Be Like Ulysses,” but not “Be Like Andrew.”

By the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln succeeded in bringing justice to Blacks. Andrew Johnson undid it all. Grant’s work was to undo the damage that Johnson had wrought and he largely succeeded, but only temporarily. What justice might have prevailed if Lincoln had been immediately succeeded by Grant, with no Johnson in between? 

Like Lincoln and Grant, Johnson too was brought up in lowly circumstances. He too was a self-made man. There the similarities end. Johnson was intensely racist. He was intensely vindictive (at first) to the former Confederacy, favoring severe punishment (akin to that imposed on Germany after WWI?) in contrast, Lincoln had been completely non-vengeful. Worse, vengeance was personal with Johnson. Vengefulness was a way of getting back at the aristocratic elites who had ridiculed and looked down upon him all his life. Northern abolitionists, who also (unlike Lincoln and Grant) favored harsh punishment for the South, at first thought they had found an ally in Johnson. But in fairly short order, he gave up despising the southern white aristocrats, and began kissing up to them, as though hoping to be anointed king of their club, his racist orientation a perfect match for theirs. 

God works through human governments? What if there had been no Johnson, and Lincoln’s ideals carried directly over to Grant. Shortly after the war, General Grant’s man told local transport companies in New Orleans that if they continued their practice of segregation, he would ban all that company’s cars from the road. According to Ron Chernow, author of Grant, “once the original hubbub over desegregated streetcars subsided, the locals had cheerfully adopted the new system and the excitement died out at once.” Chernow cites it as an example of the “startling early revolution in civil rights [that] would be all but forgotten by later generations of Americans.” What if Johnson had not come along to poison the well? Don’t you think if God ran the show through human government, he would not have?

A little bit on roll here. Sorry. I just wanted to kick back a little at those who think human standards of justice from the Founding Fathers are the bee’s knees. They're better than their absence, generally speaking, but sometimes they get in the way of true justice. 

To be continued . . .

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Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Why the Fall?

The speaker Sunday quoted Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) on the peaceful nature of the first-century Christians:

“It was impossible that the Christians, without renouncing a more sacred duty, could assume the character of soldiers, of magistrates, or of princes,” Gibbon wrote. I included that and three similar quotations in I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why in the Statecraft chapter. I chatted up the speaker after the program and he had about fifteen such quotes.

What he did not say is that Gibbon did not admire Christians for their course, as the out-of-context quote might suggest. It was not a plus for him, as it is for us. It was a minus. It is what he holds largely responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, that innovative development of human rule he champions and is sorry to see go.

Here are the other three quotes presented in Don’t Know Why:

“A careful review of all the information available goes to show that, until the time of Marcus Aurelius [121-180 C.E.], no Christian became a soldier; and no soldier, after becoming a Christian, remained in military service.” (Barnes: The Rise of Christianity),. “It will be seen presently that the evidence for the existence of a single Christian soldier between 60 and about 165 A.D. is exceedingly slight. . . . Up to the reign of Marcus Aurelius at least, no Christian would become a soldier after his baptism.” (Cadoux: The Early Church and the World). “The behavior of the Christians was very different from that of the Romans . . . Since Christ had preached peace, they refused to become soldiers.” (Platt & Drummond: Our World Through the Ages)

They’re not positives for Gibbon. They’re negatives. They sap the will of the country. Let people drop out and who’s going to fight for the Fatherland? Notice that Gibbon goes the farthest in uncovering what Christians would not do. It’s not just soldiering they abstained from. He extends their abstinence to being “magistrates” or “princes.” It ruined the Empire, he says, to have vast swaths of people turn their attention elsewhere, consumed no longer with the nature of the king but with the nature of God and Christ and of the interplay between them. They weren’t taking a stand against the government. They weren’t refusing to obey it laws—in fact, they were pretty good at obeying laws and not stirring up mischief. But they weren’t pulling for the then system-of-things, and this is what Gibbon laments. Rome would in time encounter invaders whose people were 100% behind the cause of human rule (theirs), and then it was goodby for Rome.

So Gibbon didn’t like Christianity. It torpedoed what he thought was the grander project of an innovative system of human rule. Of course, it soon morphed (apostatized) to become less of what he did not like to embrace more of what he did like. In time and by degrees, Christians veered from staying ‘no part of the world’ to decide that they were the ones to fix the world by any means possible. If political maneuvering and wars were among those means possible, so be it. Constantine converted to morphed Christianity, transformed it from persecuted minority to in-time persecuting majority. He did not get baptized until on his deathbed, after he got all that warring out of his system, so even then was the notion that Christians renounce the violence of the age. It was common at the time, says J. Rufus Fears (below), for persons to postpone baptism till the last moment and undergo it as a sort of final cleansing act—a far cry from churches in the present day who perform it on babies as a sort of introductory cleansing act.

2DA2789F-8898-4A8B-9DB8-B6DD38CA60BDGibbon’s condemnation of Christianity is found to various degrees in countries of the here and now. Western ones, by and large, allow religion to be religion. They grant freedom of worship as a fundamental right. But other governments are more machiavellian. Yes, you can have your religion, they say, but religion must know its place. It must not only be subservient to ruling powers, but must advocate for them. For many human governments, and many students of human government, it is not ‘he who is not against us is for us.’ It is ‘he who is not for us is against us.’ Anti-cultists in particular build upon the notion that it is wrong to depart from the mainstream of rule by human efforts. Any serious consideration of a ‘God’s kingdom’ that calls the shots is disagreeable to them and, they would have you believe, to you. The human experiment of self-rule is what must consume people. It’s wrong to sit it out, they maintain,

(A History of Freedom, J Rufus Fears, Lecture 11:  Gibbon on Rome’s Decline and Fall)

To be continued…here

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The Forest in Symbolism and History

Could this really happen?

“Absalom was riding on a mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a large tree, and his head got entangled in the big tree, so that he was suspended in midair while the mule he had been riding kept going.” (2 Samuel 18:9)

That’s one bad boy of a tree is all I can say!

Maybe the problem was the mule. 9966A8AB-262E-4143-B56A-46A12C52ABD9 “A mule will labor ten years, willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once,” wrote William Faulkner. Absalom’s mule may not have kicked him, but it sure did do him dirty, hanging him up so hit man Joab could off him.

Maybe it was was the forest. You ‘can’t see the forest for the trees,’ but in this case Absalom can’t see the tree for the forest. 20,000 combatants died and “the forest devoured more of the people than the sword did on that day,” says the verse just prior (8). Maybe it was one of those ‘Lord of the Rings’ forests.

‘Lord of the Rings’ forests are built on a solid tradition of forests being treacherous, even places where the Devil hangs out! 116BEC57-458D-4F1F-B90F-A5EF81889517Mistress Higgins is forever trying to lure folks into the forest for unsavory shenanigans with ‘the Black Man.’ (The author of the Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne, modeled her after a real person, Ann Higgins, who was executed for witchcraft in 1656.) That forest was one foreboding place, where “the boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come.”

But at the same time, push deeply enough into the forest and break freeeeee! or at least settle for that illusion.

Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!” Hester remonstrates with Dimmesdale. “Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white mans tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest …

Guelzo (without quoting Hawthorne—that’s mine) points to early writers of American history with this Janus-view of the forest. (Janus—the ‘two-faced’ god facing both left and right) Fearful, on the one hand, but promising on the other. Though the ‘promising’ is for an ‘unpromising’ reason. Press into the forest deep enough and you can escape your own screw-ups from the past! The early American view of history according to Guelzo? “Don’t have any, don’t need any, don’t want any.”.  In new America, the “human experiment” can begin anew!

(“Gimme that fruit!” Adam said. “Let the ‘human experiment’ begin!” ‘No, no, no,’ God tacitly says. ‘You’ll screw it all up! Trust me on this, you do not want to usurp the duty of telling good from bad!’ ‘Nah,’ comes the reply—what can go wrong?)

It’s not winners who came to America. It was losers, those driven out for religious reasons, crushed by financial reasons, or refugees from ‘man dominating man to his injury’ reasons. The first settlers “were radical Puritans who were looking for a way out from under the thumb screws of the Church of England. It was only after every other avenue of escape [was] closed off to them that . . . they turned to those vast . . . countries of America” (Guelzo) And “looking over the bow of the Mayflower what could they see [but a] hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men. Why, said [William] Bradford, even the air, diet, and drinking of water in America would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases.”

That forest was a dangerous place, make no mistake. It remained ever dangerous in waves of westward expansion, though fear was mixed with growing confidence as humans invented, and then led, with bulldozers Upon reaching the coast and finally conquering the forest, what remains?

“Space—the final frontier,” intones James T. Kirk, introducing a show that would have been dead on arrival were it not for Lucille Ball. The forests are all conquered, some trees rounded up for a ‘tree museum’ for which you must pay a dollar and a half just to see ‘em! (Joni Mitchell) Space is the new frontier. Boldly going where no man has gone before! What is discovered out there? Guys that look just like us, save for pointed ears. Is that evolution great stuff or what!? Pour me a double-shot of it!

What do aliens gain from their new contact with humans? “One damn minute,” Spock pleasantly responds to one of Captain Kirk’s commands. He’s learned to swear! He had just spent the entire 45 previous episodal minutes on 20th-century earth; he had time-traveled there for some reason and Kirk had told him to use profanity. Keep tuque pulled over ears, swear, and they’ve never know you’re not one of them, he tells the Vulcan.

What a stupid, brain-dead, ignorant stab at science fiction prophesy! How unrealistic! However, had he said, ‘One f**ken minute,’ the forecast would have been spot-on. That’s the course ‘evolution’ has taken.

They didn’t learn that in no forest. No way. They were in all their civilized glory when they adopted that new norm.

To be continued:

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Defending Jehovah’s Witnesses with style from attacks... in Russia, with the book ‘I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why’ (free).... and in the West, with the book, 'In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction'