Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans and Working Off the Nazi Past and the American Racist Past: A Report with Excerpts

In February, I blogged a number of times about Susan Neiman's book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). As I told you in one of those postings, one reason Neiman's important book caught my attention and made me decide to read it is that Susan Neiman grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era, as I did. Neiman is, however, Jewish, and she saw the struggles for African-American rights in Atlanta through the lens of her own marginalization as a Jew, an experience I did not have growing up as a white Anglo Southerner descended from slaveholding ancestors. 

Recommended: Ian Gilmour, Slavery to Civil Rights

I'd like to recommend to you a little monograph entitled Slavery to Civil Rights, written by my friend Ian Gilmour, a Presbyterian pastor in Edinburgh who is currently serving the Scottish kirk in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Ian's small book reflects years of research into the role that spirituals and music in general have played among African-Americans and in African-American churches, to sustain hope and courage as people battle prejudice and discrimination. I find Slavery to Civil Rights — which is engagingly and clearly written — fascinating from a number of standpoints.

Calling the Bluff of Those Who Maintain That Roots of Southern White Evangelicals Don't Run Back to Defense of Slavery

I'm not a white evangelical now, but I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, with two Baptist grandmothers (one Southern and one Missionary) — so I know more than a little about white evangelical culture in the American South. My father's brother and his wife spent their academic careers teaching and (in my uncle's case) doing administrative work in Southern Baptist colleges. Their two sons are Southern Baptist ministers, as was their maternal grandfather.

"The Same [Bible] Passage Sessions Cited Has Been Used to Justify Slavery and Nazism": Valuable Commentary on Sessions' and Huckabee-Sanders' Use of Romans 13

Dear Jeff Sessions, are you aware that the argument you made today from Romans 13 was a central argument of the German Christian (Pro-Nazi) movement over and against the Confessing Church? Im not saying you are a Nazi, but you’re interpreting the Bible like one.

— frsimmons (@frsimmons) June 15, 2018

Tara Isabella Burton, "The racist history of the Bible verse the White House uses to justify separating families": 

In the News: Wendy Vitter Refuses to Affirm Support for Brown v. Board in Federal Judgeship Hearing; Americans Display Appalling Ignorance of History of Evangelicals Vis-a-Vis Slavery

Two stories in today's news I'd like to share with you, both showing the effects of religious thinking and influence on the political and cultural life of the U.S. The first has to do with federal judge nominee Wendy Vitter of Louisiana, the second with recent findings about how little of the real history of American evangelicals and their relationship to slavery even well-educated and liberal Americans actually know.

"In Every Case, 'Wives Submit to Your Husbands' Appears in the Same Context As 'Slaves Obey Your Masters'": A Twitter Conversation for You

In every case, "wives submit to your husbands" appears in the same context as "slaves obey your masters." And yet I'm constantly told we need to consider context & culture with the latter but not the former...

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) May 9, 2018

I don't mean to shortchange this blog, but I sometimes find that, instead of making statements here, I'm using Twitter instead to engage in at-the-moment conversations about the kinds of issues that interest us at this site. 

In the News: "Religious Freedom" and "Right" to Discriminate; Roots of Evangelicals' Idolization of Trump; Shifting Religious Landscape re: LGBT Rights; SBC and Misogyny

Religion-themed news from the past several days that has caught my eye, and which I'd like to share with you:

Mark Labberton to Fellow White Evangelicals on Collusion with Trump: "Such Collusion Has Been Our Historic Habit"

The following is from a statement that Fuller Seminary President Dr. Mark Labberton gave to the "evangelical consultation" at Wheaton College on 16 April 2018. This event was a highly publicized invitation-only gathering of evangelical leaders to share concerns about what (white) evangelical Christians in the U.S. have done to themselves and the evangelical brand by hitching their star to one Donald Trump: Mark Labberton told those gathered for this meeting, 

Fred Clark on Gerson and Ladd: "Helpful Corrective to Gerson's Longer, Larger Piece Because Ladd Centers the Defining Facts of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights"

Yesterday, when I posted Twitter (and other) responses to Michael Gerson's recent essay on white evangelicals and Trump, I pointed you to an essay by Chris Ladd on the cruelty of white evangelicalism, about which Rachel Held Evans had tweeted, nothing that Ladd's essay fills in some of the missing pieces on evangelicalism and race that Gerson's essay had left out. I also told you that Ladd had published his essay as a blog post initially at the Forbes site, then Forbes removed it, apparently without explanation — and it would be interesting to know why Forbes took that step. Chris Ladd then reposted the essay at another site.

Trump and the Civil War: "Belief That the Civil War Could Have Been 'Worked Out' Reflects the Influence of the White Supremacist Neo-Confederate Movement on the Republican Party"

Susan Rice says #Trump is trying to create smoke to 'distract or deflect' from #trumprussia. It is a threat to our institutions & democracy. pic.twitter.com/0V8bUs4Rb8

— Jonathan Beeley (@foreignpolicy77) May 1, 2017

I think Susan Rice is correct: the current president is seeking in every way possible to create smokescreens to deflect our attention from the probe into his probable knowledge of an probable collusion with Russia in that nation's project to subvert the electoral process in the U.S. in 2016. The video above is embedded in a tweet by Jonathan Beeley that says, 

"Why Was There the Civil War?" Mr. Trump Asks: Some Answers from Frances FitzGerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Since the president of the United States asked this morning, "Why was there the Civil War?," I thought I might take a stab at offering Mr. Trump some educational resources in the hope of helping him understand "why there was the Civil War." Unfortunately, coming to that point of understanding will require him to begin understanding the mentality of the white evangelical Christians, concentrated in the former slaveholding states of the American South, who are his strongest base of support.

No One Should Be Placed in the Position in Which Rakeyia Scott Was Placed: American Racism and the Heritage of Slavery

Last week, I finished reading Edward Baptist's book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (NY: Basic Books, 2014), a masterful work of history situating American slavery within the context of a global capitalistic economic system from which many people beyond slaveholders in the American South benefited — though the ties of many people outside the American South to the economic system of slavery that enriched them have seldom been acknowledged. Today, as I listen to Keith Scott's wife Rakeyia pleading with police to spare her husband's wife in the video she took on her phone of his fatal encounter with Charlotte police, the first thing that flashes through my mind was the countless number of mothers and wives that pled in anguish on auction blocks not to have their families torn asunder.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Catholic Church Cannot Alter Teaching on Marriage Because "There Is Explicit Teaching Over Centuries"

Michael Sean Winters writes that the Catholic church cannot alter its teaching on marriage because, "On marriage, there is explicit teaching over centuries."

Michael Coren: Not Only Did Some Christians Oppose Slavery — Many Christians Defended Slavery, Citing the Bible and Longstanding Tradition

As Michael Coren reminds us in his Epiphany: A Christian's Change of Mind and Heart Over Same-Sex Marriage (Toronto: Signal, 2016), p. 61, not only did some Christians oppose slavery and work for aboltion, but many Christians also avidly defended slavery. Noting as they did so that slavery was practiced by the biblical patriarchs, blessed by the bible, taken for granted by Paul, and had long been considered essential to proper social order in Christian societies — just as the subordination of women to men was essential if Christian social order was to be maintained in Christian societies. 

Claims of Persecution and Catholic Support for Trump: Need to Move Beyond Defensive Parochial Response to Engage Real Issues — Like White Catholic Racism

In a recent essay for Fortune, Matthew Schmalz, who teaches religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, suggests that Donald Trump resonates with some Catholic voters because "[t]here’s a sense among many non-college-educated, white, Catholic voters that they are doubly marginalized—by their economic status and by their religious identity." As Schmalz explains, though (white) Catholics have been assimilated in American society, many Catholics still carry "generational memories" of having been excluded from affluent mainstream Protestant-dominated culture in the U.S.

Quote for Day: "The Church's Position on Homosexuality Illustrates Why It's So Important to Link Ethical Claims to the Reality of Human Suffering"

At Salon, Sean Illing argues that with his comments about apologizing to gay people, Pope Francis did not go far enough in addressing the anti-LGBTQ effects of the institution he leads. As Illing notes, 

Treasury Department Announces Harriet Tubman Will Depose Andrew Jackson from Front of Twenty-Dollar Bills: Knickers Become Atwist

As Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan state, legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman would seem to many of us to be the quintessence of what American democracy is all about, at its best:

Peter Saunders, Member of Vatican Abuse Commission, Silenced, and I Finish Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's Silence: A Christian History: Making the Connections

Silences such as Christian involvement in child abuse, anti-Semitism, slave-owning, demand constant rupture. On such noise does the health of Christian society depend. 

~ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (NY: Penguin, 2013), p. 216.

Theological Roots of Bitter Battle of Some Christians Against LGBT Rights: The Bible Can't Be Wrong (We Can't Be Wrong, and Heterosexual Men Rule)

Here's a set of interlocking observations that, to my mind, share a common theme: 1) a comment an Episcopal priest made to me yesterday about why some streams of Christianity are so adamant today in their opposition to LGBT rights; 2) Diarmaid MacCulloch on the same topic and how it's all about shoring up the supremacy of heterosexual males; 3) David Marr's commentary on why the Australian Catholic bishops are bitterly opposed to legalization of same-sex marriage; and 4) Fred Clark's account of the baffling determination of some U.S. white evangelicals to continue, generation after generation, choosing the wrong side of the moral arc of history in battles for human rights:

A Reader Writes: "It Turns Out That It Was Obviously Stupid to Think That There Was Never a Time in Which People in the North Owned Slaves" — Slavery and Racism as the American Original Sin

I find Annika's comment in response to my recent posting about my Southern roots and the Confederate flag fascinating. Annika writes,