The Bible and Slavery: 2 Opposing African-American Takes

Douglass and Garnet were African-Americans contemporaries with completely different understandings of what the Bible leads believers to practice in regards to slavery, in this their 1849 New York City debate documented in Allen Dwight Callahan’s The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible:

• "Douglass and Garnet were both African Americans. Both had escaped slavery from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But their respective experiences of slavery, literacy, and religion—and so their respective experiences of the Bible—were profoundly different, and those differences crystallized in diametrically opposed views of the Bible's liberating power…. Garnet saw the liberating power of the Bible as self-evident. It was so for him: he assumed it would be so for slaves in the South who might manage to read or have read to them a contraband copy of the holy scriptures that he knew so well” (page 22).
• Callahan reminds us that "the abolitionists of the North and the planter class of the South read from the same Bible. Long before Lincoln, Douglass had learned that the Bible was the highest authority of American slavery and the strongest link in the chain of oppression and violence that warranted slavery as the sacred basis for the Christian culture of what would become the Confederacy” (23).
• "Bitter experience had taught Douglass and other slaves and former slaves that the master class of the United States bore a whip in one hand and a Bible in the other. It was this Bible that Garnet and his colleagues were now proposing to send to the South” (23).
• "Douglass anticipated that the Bibles sent to the South would become raw material for proslavery propaganda” since he "knew intimately what Garnet's limited experience with slavery could not teach: that the justice of the Bible was not self-evident. Douglass had begun to learn the Bible as a slave, and he knew that some people reading the Bible under the slave regime remained tone-deaf to its message of justice” (24).

One of my professors at Gordon-Conwell, Dr. Ciampa, discussed this book and this issue on a return trip from a Bible Translation Studies meeting in Italy.

He asked the important question: How can we work to make sure that it [the Bible] serves as a weapon of justice rather than an accessory to injustice?  Read Ciampa's article for his thoughts.