Autism is my super blessing! I'm a high-school valedictorian, college graduate, world traveler, disability advocate. I'm a Unitarian Universalist. I'm a Progressive Liberal. I'm about equal rights, human rights, civil & political rights, & economic, social, &cultural rights. I do servant leadership, boundless optimism, & Oneness/Wholeness. I'm good naked & unashamed! I love positive personhood, love your neighbor as yourself, and do no harm! I'm also appropriately inappropriate! My self-ratings: NC-17, XXX, X, X18+ & TV-MA means empathy! I publish shows at 11am! Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support
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episode 83: American Christianity's complicity in racism and sexual abuse!
- "White colonials “compromised the message of Christianity to accommodate slavery,” evangelizing slaves to fulfill Jesus’ mandate “to make disciples of all nations,” freeing their souls for heaven, but withholding liberation on earth. In this way, Tisby notes, “a corrupt message that saw no contradiction between the brutalities of bondage and the good news of salvation became the norm.” Even revivalists like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards advocated evangelization of slaves but with a gospel that “did not extend to advocating for physical emancipation.”
- The Bible was consistently utilized to lend divine authority to slave-holding culture, centered in the supposedly munificent intent of the “Christian master.” Tisby observes, “Under paternalistic Christianity, the slave plantation was seen as a household, with the male enslaver as the benevolent patriarch of both his family and his ‘pseudofamily’ of enslaved black people.” Chattel slavery was thus an early form of biblical “complementarity,” in which slaves and Christian (male) owners were assigned roles in the divine “order of creation.”
- As 19th-century evangelical sects became more embedded in American culture, many white denominations asserted the church’s “spiritual” calling to Christianize slaves while distancing themselves from the “political” debates over slavery or manumission. In 1790 the Baptist General Committee of Virginia voted “by a majority (after considering it a while) that the subject [of slavery] be dismissed from the committee, as believing it belongs to the legislative body.” Slave ownership thus became officially acceptable in Virginia Baptist congregations."