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TechnoratiThat’s easy enough for Pastor Weaver to say, since he is white and would not be one of the three million African-Americans held in a horribly dehumanizing form of human bondage, and since he is a male and would not be a woman in a society where women couldn’t vote and were second- or third-class citizens in virtually every important way anyone could imagine.
Weaver’s views are the stuff of liberals’ worst nightmares, and they have good reason to object to his prejudices. I and millions of my fellow Evangelical and Catholic social conservatives object to it because it is an egregious error to conflate the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures with the cause of fallen human beings—a grossly dubious cause, at that. The “old ways” to which the prophet Jeremiah was calling God’s people were the ways of righteousness according to God’s holy standards, not the days of white supremacy.
During the Vietnam War era, the antiwar protests triggered a backlash reaction of “my country, right or wrong; love it or leave it.” But loving America doesn’t mean uncritically accepting everything this country does. It may mean that you don’t leave it, but you do have both the right and the responsibility to criticize and to seek to reform it. There are times when you criticize those you truly love. If you “love” your country so much you never believe it to be wrong, you have fallen into idolatry.
For example, some Christians were on the wrong side of slavery, and some Christians were on the wrong side of segregation. They claimed erroneous interpretations of the Scriptures to support their views. Christians in the South claimed that slavery is in the Bible and God condones it in the God-blessed order of things.
Some slavery advocates actually argued that slavery was a better system of labor management than the one that produced the industrial “wage slaves” of the North. As evidence to support their argument, they pointed to the desperately poor slums of New York and Chicago in the early Industrial Age.
In some cases, the pro-slavery advocates were accurate about the standard of living of some slaves versus that of some industrial workers in big-city slums, but that didn’t make their argument right.
Respected scholar Eugene Genovese, a cradle Catholic turned Marxist who returned to his Catholic faith later in life, provides a masterful analysis of how some Christians in the antebellum South mounted a defense of slavery on biblical grounds. Anyone who thought that slavery would wither away of its own accord needs to read Genovese’s The Southern Front, which profiles powerful and capable defenders of slavery whose erroneous understandings of the Bible led them to defend a status quo in which they were enmeshed.
I am not saying that there is always a clear right and wrong in every civil conflict. There were sincere Christians on opposite sides of the Revolutionary War.
But I think the clearest examples of wrongly conflating Christian faith with the American status quo are slavery and segregation. The first slaves came here in 1617. Slavery and racism have been defects in the American genetic code from our beginnings on this continent and led to our shameful treatment of Native Americans. The racism of European whites against African- and Native Americans has been an enormous blind spot where Scripture was either not applied or hugely misapplied. Continue »
