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.�

Pinkies are bitter.