The Peculiar Institution

Slavery, as it came to be in the United States of America, was quite the "peculiar institution." Here lies the major place where preachers and theologians (both Northern and Southern) went wrong in their exegesis/hermeneutics (interpretation) per the Bible: Slavery in America was different than slavery in many ancient cultures (including Israel and Rome). Period.

The belief that God preferred America over all other nations (hence, many viewed America as the New Israel; Manifest Destiny)only complicated things. I'll save that discussion for another day.

The conviction that ancient slavery and modern American slavery are two completely different entities is true in (at least) three major ways.

First, slavery in America was for life. In most ancient cultures, slavery was a fixed sentence. In fact, in Israel's life, God makes his chosen nation release the slaves after a fixed period of time. In America however, once you were a slave it was virtually impossible to break out of the shackles that bound (save Frederick Douglas).

Second, slavery in America tore apart family systems. Marriages between slaves were not honored . . .children were torn apart from their mother's and father's as an afterthought. If you want to get a sense of the moral corruption this produces, read the Pulitzer Prize Winning novel, The Known World.

Third, slavery in America was primarily relegated to one race: Africans/Blacks. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Social/Religious life in America. This is what many "smooth" over, turning their privileged noses in apathy. The slave system that fueled southern life was based upon the belief that blacks were inferior to all whites. Blacks, in this epistemology, were non-human; animals despised by their superior counterparts.


The Civil War (and the Emancipation Proclamation) may have dealt with slavery but it did not . . . it could not . . . deal with the pervasive attitude that Blacks were an inferior being.

This is why Martin Luther King is such an important leader in American/World History. He reminded one of the greatest civilizations in the history of the world that her foundational documents declared every person equal under the eye of the all seeing God. He challenged America to live up the very ideals she dared to boast to the rest of the world. He called America to actually be who she thought she was: a land where all men and women are recognized as persons created in the image of God.

The question that keeps me up some nights: What will my children point out in thirty years, "Dad . . .how did you miss that? How did you not see God moving in that area . . . among those people?"

I'm told by many scholars today that there are more persons living in slavery (e.g. sex slavery in Asia) today then there were during just prior to America's bloody Civil War.