Human Slavery undermined the Bible, historian says By Richard N. Ostling

Human Slavery undermined the Bible, historian says

By Richard N. Ostling
The Associated Press
Posted October 7 2006ery, America's original sin, developed into a moral crisis, culminating in a Civil War that cost 518,333 lives. That exceeds the deaths in every other U.S. war, from the Revolution through Iraq.

Slavery also damaged the nation's religious underpinnings and the Bible's authority, says Mark A. Noll in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press). Noll is a leading evangelical Protestant historian.

Noll's theme: America was built upon the Bible as the sole moral authority. But slavery caused "an unbridgeable chasm of opinion" about what the Bible meant. Devout Bible believers reached starkly different conclusions, which undermined assurance that the Bible gives clear guidance readily available to all.

That's a pertinent point in 2006 as the religious left and religious right dispute what the Bible says about abortion and gay rights, among other issues.

The conflict about Scripture before the Civil War was "politically, socially, morally and culturally -- as well as religiously -- explosive," Noll writes. "The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by force of arms."

Noll remarks that it was left to Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman -- generals, not theologians -- to decide what the Bible meant.

America in 1860 was hugely pious. One-third to two-fifths of Americans were formal church members and those participating without membership doubled the total, the opposite of 2006 when little more than half of those on church rolls regularly attend worship.

Evangelical culture had "implicit trust that the Bible was a plain book whose authoritative deliverances could be apprehended by anyone who simply opened the covers and read," Noll writes.

This confident, culture-forming faith was destroyed when abolitionists said God's revelation demanded an end to slavery while defenders of the slave system said biblical peoples employed slavery and the Scriptures nowhere demanded eradication.

The anti-slavery arguments were powerful but required nuanced readings. To many, the anti-slavery approach threatened biblical authority and democracy. And black churches' compelling arguments were largely ignored by white society.

As a result, Noll says, Americans felt that serious commitment to the Bible was not only ineffective in shaping policy but had provoked war and greatly worsened the conflict's intensity. That caused an implicit agreement "not to base public policy of any consequence on interpretations of Scripture."

In "the more secular America brought on by the Civil War, it has been much harder for deep, religiously rooted moral convction to exert a decisive influence on the shaping of public life," Noll concludes.

Among other things, that meant a morally confused America lacked resources to combat excesses of white racism for a century after the bloody war concluded.