God and Slavery and the GOP
It's worth pointing out that behind both sides of the Civil War like both sides of today's massive cultural divide, are religious people, an America that mostly means Christians or at least people who think about the world with a biblical vocabulary--or see through a biblical lens--or whatever your metaphor wants to be. It's worth pointing out because those who disparage religion tend to use the same logic the gun lobby uses to advance their cause. They look at instances where religion failed and generalize from them. The theology of Southern slave owners and those whom they pulled into their vision is almost universally understood today as bad theology. It doesn't matter whether some of them held it sincerely. But this bad theology could not be opposed by atheism. It had to be opposed by good theology. We can sigh and rage all we want about the Evangelical embrace of small mindedness, hatred, and racism because it serves some aspect of their grievance against secular
