Fundamentalism and slavery.

History is littered with examples of how dogmatic, fundamentalist religion can make the human condition much worse than it needs to be. 

This was perhaps best expressed by the physicist Steven Weinberg, who said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”

He went on to give other examples where dogmatic religious belief had made people’s behaviour worse:

“Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will.”

In 2013, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, who is a Christian, was challenged by a Christian pastor for his liberal stance on equal marriage. The pastor objected to same-sex marriage because he believed the Bible taught that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Mr Rudd replied by reminding the pastor that the Bible treated slavery as a natural condition, and that St Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters. 

Now that slavery is considered an abomination rather than a natural, divinely-endorsed state in modern society, fundamentalist Christians tend to gloss over or ignore the many Biblical references that treat it uncritically or even approvingly. Perhaps, in the course of time, should Evangelical Christianity survive, Biblical homophobia will go the same way.

[Thanks to "Campaigns Worth Sharing", on Twitter as @campaignsworth, for drawing my attention to the Kevin Rudd statement after reading the first draft of this blogpost.]

© Gary Powell, 2013