Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
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Because whites dominated society, they knew they would not be enslaved. Those antislavery advocates who argued for Christian charity and the Golden Rule had the imagination to think about how they would feel if they were enslaved, and they believed that Christian teachings on charity had broad application. They may even have imagined their own vulnerability, guilt, and complicity if they were to acquiesce to the continued existence of slavery in American society. But proslavery advocates did not give ground on the treatment of slaves, let alone on whether the institution of slavery itself was immoral. Advocates of white supremacy certainly were affirmed in their beliefs by the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court famously ruled that all African Americans were racially stigmatized and thus could be treated as “ordinary articles of merchandise.”17
American religious scholar Mark Noll has described in great detail the theological crisis surrounding the Civil War, slavery, and biblical interpretation. This theological crisis resulted, in part, in “an inability to act on biblical teaching about the full humanity of all people, regardless of race.”18 Christian white Americans’ attitudes were so deeply embedded in beliefs about the inferiority of African Americans that their interpretations of the Bible ensured the continuation of a racial crisis that was biblically justified long after the Civil War had ended.