**WARNING: A GRAPHIC PICTURE IS AT THE END OF THIS NEWSLETTER.** I feel it is important to see for yourself what “God-fearing people” have done and justified in this country.
I really wrestled with this particular topic because you can’t really say anything. But I have been thinking about the ways people put forth religion as a justification, as a cover, almost as a shield. They use that shield to hide what is really behind it. Maybe they believe it.
Black folks in the South used to say that white Southerners would go to church on Sunday morning and by Sunday night would hang Black folks. That was the reality. And now, when this president and others talk about “make America great again,” about the so-called good old days, we need to remember what those days were. In those days, America was outwardly more religious; more people attended services, and more people identified with Christianity. But those same days were horrific. During Jim Crow, there was state-sanctioned terrorism against Black people. People in the North were not fully free, but in the South, they lived under a terroristic regime. Reconstruction briefly dismantled it, but in order to pull the country back together, the South was never truly held to account. The Lost Cause never died. We have never really finished the Civil War.
So here we are again, where religion is being used as a cover. People say those earlier generations were so pious and religious. These same people systematically raped women, children, and men. I hate to be blunt, but we cannot turn away from the fact, especially now, when people are aggressively trying to rewrite the story of slavery. I have heard people say that slave owners treated enslaved people well because they were property. Look at how people treat their property. Look at how some treat their dogs, their yard, and their employees. Imagine then how they treated humans with no recourse. This was a system of sexual violence and physical violence carried out by so-called God-fearing people. People who went to church, people who would give you the shirt off their backs, good, kind people who raped children, women, and men. That is who they were.
Henry Fonda once told a story from his youth in Omaha.1 His father worked at a newspaper, and they heard a commotion outside. From the rooftop, they saw thousands of people. White men had pulled a Black man out of jail, accused of a crime he said he did not commit. He was tortured for hours in front of a massive crowd, stripped, mutilated, and burned. There is a famous picture of his body. I include it here with a warning. If you do not want to see it, do not look. But you must know what God-fearing people have done in this country.
Do not be hoodwinked by people who use Christianity as a shield. They may be practicing a religion, but it is not Christianity from a Christian perspective. It is Christianity in the service of white supremacy, which has been with us far longer than this current moment.
There is an article on JSTOR, the digital library of scholarly journals, called How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery.2 Initially, most denominations opposed slavery. But when wealthy members of Southern congregations became slaveholders, the churches changed. They reinterpreted the Bible. They leaned on passages about women obeying their husbands or children obeying their parents. They turned slavery into a divine institution. Southern ministers wrote most of the published defenses of slavery. Slavery was described not just as acceptable but as a positive good.
That is how deep the corruption went. White men at the top, ministers included. White women and children were below them but still above enslaved people. And slavery was justified with scripture while everyone went to church and saw themselves as doing God’s work. Patriarchy and racism, non-fraternal twins, feeding off each other.
And it continues today. People say slavery was beneficial, that it gave Black people a chance they would not have had in Africa. Ignorant arguments. Africa is a continent that has shaped the world’s art, culture, science, and history long before this rewriting began. But still the arguments echo. Still, they try to hide the brutality, hide the evidence. How will they hide DNA? That blood is in me. I am living proof of the violence of slavery.
The system was everywhere. Even those who did not own large plantations often owned one or two enslaved people, like livestock. Overseers, often Scots-Irish or Irish, were infamous for their brutality. The entire economy was tied to it. And all of it cloaked in religion.
So I leave you with this caution. When you hear people today elevating religion, ask yourself, is it being used as a shield to hide something horrific? This is not the first time religion has been reshaped to accommodate political, racial, or capitalistic needs. Do not fall for it. As the old Black folks used to say, do not fall for the okie doke.
***WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT**** PICTURE OF THE LYCHING OF WILLIE BROWN.
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/turning-on-the-light-henry-fonda-and-will-brown
https://daily.jstor.org/how-antebellum-christians-justified-slavery/
