Unbuckling the Bible Belt from the Legacy of Slavery

What is going on in the Bible Belt in this presidential year may be historic. Much media attention during the presidential primaries was paid to Mike Huckabee's success in the "Christian" states. The Reverend Governor Huckabee, we heard over and over again, was winning the "Christian" vote. "In the Bible Belt," MSNBC's Chris Matthews said of Huckabee, "he practically owns the place." Such comments obscured the fact that there are two very different versions of Christianity in this region, both of which are legacies of antebellum slavery.

The existence of another form of southern Christianity was reflected in a detail that no one addressed in the primaries: the intriguing fact that Barack Obama out-polled Huckabee nearly two-to-one in the Bible-Belt South.

The only state of the Bible Belt in which Sen. Obama did not win vastly more votes than Huckabee was the governor's home state of Arkansas. Looking at the total votes cast for the two candidates across the Bible Belt (including Missouri, which is a Border State in both Civil War and Bible Belt terms) before the Republican nomination was decided, Obama's margin over Huckabee was 66% to 34%.

Yet when Sen. Obama's success in the South was discussed during the long primary season, the section that is called the Bible Belt in Gov. Huckabee's case was described instead as a region with a large African-American population. Hardly anyone mentions that the "the Bible Belt" and "the Black Belt" refer to essentially the same part of the country. That easily overlooked fact is of enormous significance.

Is it mere coincidence that the Bible Belt is also the Black Belt? Why has biblical literalism held sway so powerfully in the region of the nation that used to practice and suffer under slavery on a large scale?

Martin Marty of the University of Chicago recalls a fellow historian once noting that the white southern Protestant clergy prior to the Civil War "came across as moral, devout, pastoral, learned, caring, informed, and generous preachers. And also to a person they defended human slavery, claiming that it was a response to divine mandates and divine will, biblically authorized."

It is a most noteworthy -- yet largely unnoted -- fact that the embrace of biblical literalism by whites in the American South in the mid-19th Century sprang from the common (and expedient) belief that the Bible provided a justification for slavery, a practice which undeniably is sanctioned on many of its pages.

None of those pages, however, is one that quotes Jesus. Their Bible-based defense of slavery led antebellum whites to enslave Jesus by tying his name to practices and beliefs that were antithetical to his teachings.

The legacy of slavery continues to weigh down this part of the nation in many ways. The most obvious of those deleterious effects, racism, is in remission, insofar as it is no longer explicitly practiced by the South's institutions and is fading on the personal level. But other toxic residues of the peculiar institution, such as stubborn and harmful resistance to change and the section's persistent poverty, especially but not exclusively among blacks, continue to harm the region.

Perhaps the heaviest burden of slavery that still holds down the section, though, is the yoke of a distorted biblical literalism that selectively emphasizes certain passages of what Christians refer to as the Old Testament while ignoring almost all of the teachings of Jesus.

The Jesus Thieves of this brand of "Christianity" preach from a 'Holey' Bible that cuts out all of the central teachings of Jesus, those difficult injunctions to turn the other cheek, help the poor, and love enemies.

There has, however, long been in the South an opposing concept of Christianity, one that emphasizes the Jesus of the Gospels along with the parts of the Hebrew Bible that speak not of slavery, but the escape from it. That was the Christianity of the slaves, of abolitionists of both races, and of African-American churches after emancipation. It was the Christianity that inspired both blacks and whites during the Civil Rights Movement. It was--and is--the Christianity that embraces what Jesus preached, instead of using him as a celebrity endorsement for such anti-Jesus positions as war, intolerance, and favoritism for the rich.

While Mike Huckabee alluded properly during his primary campaign to the teachings of Jesus on some economic issues, his appeal was principally to the sort of Christians who remain bound to the 'Holey' Bible they inherited from the Old South. It is those who still adhere to that hidebound version of the religion that were attracted by his fundamentalist talk.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, preaches from the texts of that other stream of southern Christianity, the one that follows what Jesus said. Adherents to that form of the religion seem to be going for Obama's talk of hope and change and reconciliation.

It won't be easy, but because Sen. Obama speaks a language that Christians of both brands in the South can understand, he has the potential -- beginning on Election Day but, if he is elected, particularly later as president -- to unbuckle the Bible Belt from those who have for so long been standing Jesus on his head. Maybe that Belt can at last be re-buckled to Jesus. Emancipation from a "Christianity" that was totally distorted by slaveholders would go a long way toward making the white South "free at last."

Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown). Among his other books is The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House).

Comments

[madinirose]

I encourage all of you to take the Implicit Association Test:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

But, I caution you. I may reveal prejudices you may not know are there. For instance, despite my strong support for gay rights and gay marriage; I hold strong prejudices against gay men. However, I'm not sure if this prejudice holds for lesbians.

When the creators of this test performed it on white people; 64% showed a strong preference for white over black. When this test was peformed on black people; 51% showed a strong preference for white over black.

As a black people growing up in America; I can tell you that it is hard to overcoming this society's "default" position which is white. I remember daydreaming as a child; I always viewed myself as white; not black. Now, I don't mean to guilt-trip white people out, but I just wanted to let whites out there know that black sdon't view you the same way as you may view us.

[ConcernedAboutRFuture]

Only education can fix these ill thinkers..... and THAT's what we should be concentrating on in the next decade....or three. Fixin' the dumb folk who are just weighing down our society financially and intellectually, and preventing our nation from progressing and, once again, becoming a great nation.

[Jonahson]

I always wonder why Bush got voted in the second time. Despite his lying attitude, war mongering policy he still got more votes. It was the religious factor. It is in religion that you can find blind faith.
Another was because people still think they ought to be loyal to certain party because they believe their forefathers owe their freedom to it. Such factors throw away rationality.
Perhaps Obama can neutralize these two unfavorable factors because he is Black and also goes to church.

[PhantomAviator]

..

Jesus is Love.

..

I wonder WHY I keep getting deleted everytime I write that? Too sarcastic? Not sarcastic enough?

Hard to say.

.

[realpolitic]

Thank you Mr. McElvaine for a fascinating article. I often have wondered about the foundation of this biblical literalism in parts of the country. It may be found in many of the biblical defenses of the institution of slavery, as you suggest. So many evangelicals stress the old testament ideas of "eye for an eye" that leads oddly to modern conservative idea's of tax cuts for the wealthy and a strong, expansionary national defense. The social justice and concern for the poor of Jesus' teaching is lost. Obama comes from the tradition of concern for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. I am glad this concern is again being embraced. The evangelical concern for wealth building and individual morality is most often strangely isolating.

[LiberalLeftWingChristian]

Brilliant. My sentiments exactly. As a Southern Baptist Christian, I realize the hypocrsy of what their brand of Christianity espouses, and I am appalled that they do this in the name of Christianity/religion.

[ElBruce]

There is some discussion in the New Testament that Christianity would be subverted by its opponents at some point in the future. Many Protestants have folded these passages into "end times" scenarios, or even more disturbingly used them as justification to vilify Catholicism.

However, any clear reading of these passages points directly to the modern Fundamentalist/Evangelical movement as the Antichristian subversion of Christianity. They tell people to do precisely the opposite of what Christ preached, in Christ's name. It couldn't be more clear that this movement is precisely the sort of thing that early Christianity was warning people about.

[larmarch5]

This validates my repudiation of Christianity for the first 53 years of my life. Even as a young child living in the Texas Panhandle, I was appalled at the behavior of so-called christians in my small town. We were shunned for being poor. One time the most popular girl in high school came by my house, unannounced, to ask me to go with her to get a "coke." I said ok and went out to the car with her. There sat her boyfriend's mother, the Baptist Preacher's Wife, who couldn't bring herself to come into our house and say hello to my mother. I realized this was a "checklist to get into heaven" item -- go be nice to a sinner. That was 44 years ago and I still get a sick feeling in my stomach. I know now, since coming to Jesus six years ago, that this is an opportunity for me to forgive these folks. But I still wonder if they really know Jesus or if they are still just doing their checklists. I left that area three days after graduating HS and have only returned for my parents' funerals.

[MsLiz]

Write more. There's a book in there somewhere.

[kapo]

We have all fallen short of the glory. They were nuts, but they were doing the best they could, knowing what they knew

[formerprosecutor]

I had similar experiences growing up in foster care in Oklahoma; It is hard to believe in "churchs" when they don't believe in you.

[write2bheard]

Unless one had a burning wish to be a slave, Jesus did repudiate slavery "So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the Law and the prophets." (Matthew 7:12 RSV) Slave owners got around this by saying blacks were not humans, which is particularly interesting, since many whites raped black slave women. So either the women were human or the whites were practicing beastialty, very much against the law in the Bible.

[WmC]

McElvaine draws a distinction between believers in the "Holey Bible" (who adopt it selectively), and those who subscribe to the New Testament. I think a more useful distinction is between irrationalists and rationalists. The former group refuses to even acknowedge the obvious fact that the bible is contradictory. They can only continue to believe by denying reality.

How do you persuade people who deny reality and who deny the importance of logical, rational thought?

[rixter1965]

If you are a liberal, progressive, and/or Democrat, and you want to do your part to counter the influence of those who use the Bible to promote a reactionary American government, the dismissing the Bible as irrelevant is a risky strategy. Poll after poll suggests that an enormous number of Americans self-identify as Christians, attend Church regularly, and many, many self-identify as some combination of evangelical and conservative. Part of the success of the true believers in the matrix of Christian fundamentalism, conservative politics and unfettered capitalism is their use of the Bible (which many Americans at least nominally revere) along with a healthy dose of historical revisionism (and many Americans are woefully ignorant of US history). Countering these arguments means exposing their selective, often tortured, and sometimes downright false use of Scripture along with pointing out a concerted effort to theocratize US history -- all but excluding the Enlightenment from the ideas of the country's founders, reframing the Civil War as a struggle of freedom-loving Southerners against tyrannical Northerners, and backreading the neo-Christian/anti-Communist policies and ideas of the 1950s/McCarthy era onto early periods in US history. The best weapons against this theological and intellectual dishonesty are knowledge, information, expertise, and articulate, thoughtful counterarguments.

[vjthedj]

That was a great post. Unfortunately, there are some that actually take pride in being ignorant and are influencing others to take pride in it as well. So knowledge, information, expertise did not work in 2004 election. Explains why fox news is so successfull. It panders to the ignorant. It wasn't until the whole economy started crashing in, and two wars were effecting the same misguided people, that the they were forced to change themselves. This is why I speculate the moderate center right republicans are abandoning the GOP, and what we are left with are the true "ignormous magnificus".

[MeiLing]

The scary thing is that there are a great many Americans who haven't attended church much and describe themselves as more spiritual than religious and who still jump onto this "America was founded by Christians" bandwagon.

[Midnightrain]

Great post. To enslave another human being is the worst abomination ever performed. Ever.

To enslave another human being, let alone an entire race and culture for centuries, is nothing less than pure evil. Make no mistake. No man-made book can rationalize away evil.

[kapo]

To enslave another causes some bad karma, but I think enslaving yourself is at least as bad. It is a bit like keeping bad feelings about someone long after the relationship is ended.

[BryantG]

The winner notwithstanding, when the history of this election is written, and if the outcome resembles the current polls, it will show that yet again the south has expressed itself as a bastion of anti-inclusiveness, and that region will continue to be looked upon by the rest of the country as rather backward-looking.

[MsLiz]

Bastion? "anything seen as preserving or protecting some quality, condition, etc."

Spoken like someone who doesn't live in and has never lived in the South.

If the rest of the country looks upon the entire South as "rather backward-looking," that just proves that bigotry knows no borders.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Southerner. William Clinton is a Southerner. I am a Southerner.

Huntsville (AL), Austin, Atlanta and Birmingham are Southern cities. These areas will vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

Ya'll come see us.

[ThePeacemakers]

Obama's version of faith based initiatives wasn't necessarily an attempt to appeal to right wing Christian base, but he was talking to the another part of the democrats base all along?

[Mayuki]

Jesus never explicitly condemned slavery.

In fact, he said in Matthew 5. 17-19 " Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." (TNIV)

To my understanding, this means that he did not repudiate the laws on slavery which are enumerated in the Old Testament.

I agree with an earlier comment that the Bible is just too contradictory to be taken literally by anyone.

[BryantG]

I agree with your conclusion.

Thou shalt not kill, or eye foe an eye, which is it?

[Midnightrain]

No man-made book can justify or rationalize away e.vil. That's just what that book is: ta-biblia. Meaning the book. Nothing particularly divine about it. More like a human creation; a manufactured product of the human imagination.

[Mayuki]

I agree. Unfortunately it will be many, many decades in the future when somebody running for President can say the same thing and still stand a chance of reaching the Oval Office. For that reason, all candidates will have to, at least publicly, state that they believe in a 'holy' book and we will have to continue to pay attention to what is written there, even if it is only to debunk it. I often wonder if peole who say they are Bible-believing have actually read it from cover to cover and subjected it to a critical analysis.

[kapo]

You are right that Jesus did not repudiate the law. But I think Jesus intended to fulfill the law which would bring about a new age when the righteous would get their reward. If he had been a simple conservative there would have been no martyrdom. His message was that the little guy or gal, those on the margins of society, were just as good as anybody else in spirit and he personally respected the humble. The bible is what you want it to be, but if you are seeking a revolutionary tract, you can find that there too.

[yngskywlkr]

What Jesus meant by the "law" were the ten commandments. And as I recall, nowhere in there does it mention anything about slavery.