Student\u2019s Name<\/p>\n
Professor\u2019s Name <\/p>\n
Course<\/p>\n
Date<\/p>\n
Slaveholding as a Perversion of Christianity<\/p>\n
This topic interests me most in that slavery is seen as an acceptable act by Christians, showing some point of hypocrisy in it. In the bible, slavery is not condoned at all and actually existed in those times and was considered as a voluntary servant hood. Douglass in his book gives a clear difference between the true and false Christianity. He refers the false Christians as the \u2018Christianity of the land\u2019 who fulfilled their desires of brutality, a sign of hypocrisy all along. According to Douglass, slavery was part and parcel of the Christianity doctrine. This is evident through his description of how the white southerners, who were the most active in religious tasks, were the ones who treated the slaves in the worst manner possible. They used words in the scriptures to justify their wrong doing, for example, Thomas Auld who beat up a crippled man in defence that the word says \u2018he that knows his master\u2019s will and does not abide to it, shall be beaten with many stripes. This form of hypocrisy causes a lot of damage to the masters as this contradicts their own abilities of differentiating right from wrong. Douglass is a true believer as he says he loves pure and peaceful Christianity and hates the corrupt and hypocritical Christians.<\/p>\n
Literature Review<\/p>\n
According to David Goldensberg in his article \u2018The curse of Ham: race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam\u2019 he discovered that racist behaviours and attitudes are the ones that mainly contributed to slave activities many years ago before the Europeans discovered the sub-Saharan in Africa. He describes how black Africans were viewed in the bible as slaves by the interpreters of the bible who were mainly the Jews, Christians and Muslims. In his research, he reveals about race, color, and slavery that was revolving all over the centuries saying that the Africans had been cursed by God into total slavery. He moves further into investigating blacks as color and the attitudes the Jews had towards the dark skin color. He asks when the blacks became slaves in North East and to his discovery is that all this was from the influence of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thinking and was treated as a passage in the bible. He states that the Curse of Ham had the greater impact on developing the roots to the slavery and racism in his study.<\/p>\n
According to Travis Glasson in his article \u2018Mastering Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World\u2019 he explains how the Anglican Church which was in a mission, tried its best in 1701 to convert slaves to Christianity from the British colonies. The missionaries advocated for better treatment of the slaves but only a few embraced Anglicanism and many ended up rejecting conversion to Christians. Through their efforts to reduce the cruelty in slavery, it came to their disappointment that slavery and Christianity at the time were going hard to hard and was a mutual benefit in between. The society on seeing that slavery was becoming a trouble, they came up with stronger colonial codes for the slaves and continued embracing slavery as a tool among the missionaries. The Society worked together with the English slave traders in Africa, in building a mission at the castle in Cape Coast. They helped come up with a foundation for the black Protestants but this did not go well due to negative attitude of the people. The Society provided support morally and politically to the slaves in the British empires. In this article, Travis has a perspective that was unique in developing a pro-slavery idea, revealing how thinking of the English Christians contributed to more slavery.<\/p>\n
An article by Michael Hoberman\u2019 God Loves the Hebrews\u2019: Exodus Typologies, Jewish Slaveholding and Black Peoplehood in Antebellum America\u2019 talks about Judah Benjamin who was an American legislator and a statesman and Senator Benjamin who lead attack at the time. Jewish were into slavery and they tried to justify this through bible scripture derived by the Americans. He explained how the bible was no more of a record of the past events but composed of theological ideas and when Christians showed concern, Hebrew bible was there to give them a range of more typologies. Those who lived outside of Anglo-protestant fold they never came to endorse these typologies. Benjamin on reading the Hebrews bible, there was a range of other African American readings of the same text which had sets of ethnic with specified implications. As Henry Highland addressed on antislavery, the blacks who were enslaved knew that they no other way of survival other than to articulate with the rules in place.<\/p>\n
An article by the Havard Gazette, on Slavery alongside Christianity, talks of how in the first centuries slavery was justified even through the bible. It states that relationship between Christianity and slavery was not easy as it affected more than just the church. Several author books are analysed and there are works of authors who used biblical texts to justify their positions in engaging in slavery and some showed that there were in deed good Christians who actually helped the slaves. There an author by the name Angelina who advocated for anti-slavery and campaigned for equality of slaves and the women. There is also Josiah Priest\u2019s work that encouraged more slavery and his defence was from the book of Genesis, saying that the black people were meant to be slaves. <\/p>\n
According to Virgil Peterson et al. in their article-Slavery in Religion in the South- they say that the people who owned the slaves had a lot of justifications as to why they were carrying out the slavery act. In case, anyone tried to disagree with their business of holding people captives, they always found new ways dispute. Religion was used both in slavery and anti-slavery acts and was greatly supported by in the Old and New Testament. The slaveholders, were in beliefs that slavery would reduce the savagery in the black race and that would control the people who were into sin and evil-hearted. This article talks about how slave owners in the 1830\u2019s started allowing the slaves to attend church while being accompanied and allowed to form gatherings. Further says that some justified slavery with Jesus in that he did not question it during his time neither did Jesus refer to it as a sin.<\/p>\n
Works Cited<\/p>\n
Goldenberg, David M.\u00a0The curse of Ham: race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Vol. 33. Princeton University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n
Glasson, Travis.\u00a0Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. OUP USA, 2012.<\/p>\n
Hoberman, Michael. “God Loves the Hebrews\u201d: Exodus Typologies, Jewish Slaveholding, and Black Peoplehood in Antebellum America.”\u00a0The American Jewish Archives Journal\u00a067.2 (2015): 47-69.<\/p>\n
Thomas Virgil Peterson, Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy. \u2018Slavery, in Religion in the South (2005), 731-733<\/p>\n
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself<\/p>\n
Havard Gazette \u2018Slavery alongside Christianity\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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