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 secularism. And we should rage. But there needs to be a theological response to it. There needs to be a genuine theology of Christian love to counter the theology of convenience. This has always been the case within Christianity.

The anti-religious stance of people like Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, Ricky Gervais (from the sublime to the ridiculous) tends to claim that religion spreads hate and leads to violence and, there being no God anyway, we'd be better off without the effects of religion. 

The question, as I've often said, cannot be put in these terms. The claim is that religion is in some sense the cause of all the bad things done by religious people in the name of their god while any good things must be ignored. The stance has no teeth unless you can show that those bad things would not have happened without the religious coloring and that it was in sincere service of god that those evil acts were undertaken: colonialism, slavery, subjugation of women and any other population. Is religion a convenient excuse or an actual cause?

All cases must be taken in their particularity. But we will find the whole range. Sincere people do awful things to themselves and others in pursuit of religious experience. Insincere people use religion as a cover for horrors. The latter would find another justification and do those things anyway. The former are the victims of bad theology. Their evils, if we can use the word, would be avoided by either atheism or good theology. The point is that they are not driven by faith but by hatred  or fear and bad theology.