Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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stigmatization

Box 3.1

This is the author’s signpost that gives the reader a sense of her article. She will start by looking at the manner in which white Christians interpreted key Christian themes (such as the Golden Rule) in the debates over slavery. She will go on to track the journey of a major Christian denomination (the SBC) and then look at how, despite a changing rhetoric, African Americans are still suspicious of the SBC.

(See Box 3.2.) The SBC and other southern denominations that separated from Northern denominations over slavery in the late 1830s and early 1840s wrestled not only with whether slavery was part of the divine order of God but also over the nature of Jesus’s teachings on love, charity, and the Golden Rule. One way religion has supported structures of oppression, such as slavery, has been to limit how the love of Jesus would be distributed and how the Golden Rule should be applied, based on a person’s or group’s racial or ethnic status. If these teachings applied completely and universally to African Americans, then slavery was a sin. However, if African Americans were not regarded as fully human, and therefore were valued less than whites, then these teachings had only minimal or no application to the enslaved.