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   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
   But only in the south.   
      
   How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery   
      
   After Emancipation, some Southern Protestants refused to revise their   
   proslavery views. In their minds, slavery had been divinely sanctioned.   
   anti-abolitionist cartoon   
      
      
   Having split from co-denominations in the North over the theological   
   justification of slavery in the 1840s, southern Baptist, Methodist, and   
   Presbyterian churches refused to reconcile themselves to a new reality in the   
   1860s and 1870s. In 1874, for instance, the Southern Methodists’ General   
   Convention reaffirmed their “attitudes and actions in the antebellum period,”   
   historian Elizabeth L. Jemison writes in her exploration of proslavery   
   Christianity after Emancipation.   
      
   Baptist and Methodist churches had opposed slaveholding members in the early   
   years of the Republic. These denominations’ rapid expansion in the South,   
   however, meant abandoning this position “in recognition that upwardly mobile   
   members increasingly included slaveholders.” Justification for slavery came   
   with this growth and found its parallels in the biblical subordination of   
   women.   
      
   “Southern ministers had written the majority of all published defenses of   
   slavery,” Jemison reminds us. For these ministers, slavery not only had   
   divine sanction, it was a necessary part of Christianity. This was because   
   slavery was defined as akin to a marriage: the “power of slave owners over   
   slaves paralleled the power of husbands over wives and of parents over   
   children.”   
   As abolitionism gathered strength, white Southerners repositioned themselves   
   from an acceptance of slavery as a necessary evil to defending it as a   
   positive good.   
      
   The father/master was supposed to be a benevolent and paternalistic overseer   
   of all family (and property) members. After all, the New Testament’s   
   “injunctions for slaves to obey their masters appeared alongside instructions   
   for wives to obey their husbands.”   
      
   This hierarchy placed white men (including ministers) at the top, because   
   slaves (and white women and children) were incapable of ordering themselves.   
   Even northern theologians agreed on the necessary subordination of women:   
   Charles Hodge, who held an influential position at Princeton Theological   
   Seminary, wrote “We believe that the general good requires us to deprive the   
   whole female sex of the right of self-government.”   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)