The Institute on Religion and Democracy was pleased to host Dr. Paul Gutacker, director of the Brazos Fellows and lecturer at Baylor University, who discussed his book, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past, particularly with regards to how Protestants in America debated the issue of slavery.
Discovering that Protestants rarely resorted to arguments from “Scripture alone,” Gutacker noted that Protestants, of both abolitionist and pro-slavery views, were very likely to contend with Church history in discerning which was the more orthodox course of action.
Interested readers can watch the recorded lecture of Gutacker’s talk below.
Comment by Frederick Collins on April 4, 2023 at 4:55 pm
It was somewhat surreal listening to the arguments under reference. One got the impression that the slavery the protagonists were defending was the form of it legislated in Deuteronomy 15:12. A person could decide to put himself in slavery for economic reasons. And even that came to an end after a number of years. The decision was always the prospective slave’s.
At no point did it occur to the protagonists that they were discussing a virulent, one-sided, racially based and opportunistic form of slavery that was never contemplated in the bible. Of course the real test never occurred to them. Would you like your mother sold into slavery?
But most of all, the debates under reference appear to have omitted any reference to the real history where the Virginia legislators codified the racial form of slavery in the 17th century and the church simply said amen.