I majored in history in college.  I have always had a love for history, especially history of the American civil war.  I had an aunt [Anna Carter Revel] who was our family genealogist.  I once asked her for information about my relatives on my Father’s side of the family who fought in the war and I found out I had three great, great uncles who served.  That fueled my interest as I began to see that I had some tangible ancestral contact with this turning point in American history.

The war was devastating for the America. The breakdown of deaths by side is uncertain, but one common figure is that the Union suffered 360,222 casualties and the Confederacy suffered 258,000 casualties. However, these numbers may not include all the deaths from disease, captivity, suicide, murder and other causes.

The southern economy was wrecked.  The war essentially destroyed the infrastructure of the south; railroads, bridges, factories, farms and plantations.  The Union Army had a “scorched earth” policy where vast areas of the south were totally destroyed as Union soldiers marched all the way to southern coastal cities.   Of course slave labor was no longer legal so workers were not available to tend crops on southern plantations.   

The losses mounted as the way of life in one large part of the United States suddenly changed.

What is amazing is the statement by Peter Gomes in his book The Good Book when he says, “The chief victim of the Civil War was not the vanquished south, but the Bible” [Gomes, 96].

Why would he say that?

In my previous post [“The Hard Text of Slavery in the Bible,” St. John Studies, Sept 19, 2023], I discussed the justification for slavery that many southern slave owners proposed.  In short, they felt that Biblical Scripture allowed them to own slaves and still be Christians.  With the conclusion of the war, the righteousness of the southern case for slavery was dealt a blow.  It seemed like the whole southern Biblical worldview was defeated with the fall of the confederacy.

Gomes points out that the Bible suffered because so many people relied on it for guidance in morality.  With the war, the authority of Scripture was challenged.  How could northern abolitionists read the Bible one way and southern slave owners read it another?

Slavery was approved of in both the Old Testament and the New Testament so how could it be overturned on moral grounds?  However anti-slavery adherents felt they had the moral high ground: humans should not own other humans.  Chattel slavery was even more horrible; humans could be bought, sold and owned like objects.

Still at the end of the Civil War, southern minds were not totally changed.  Racism did not go away.  Segregation was born as a way to preserve the southern way of life.  Southerners still felt that the Bible supported their desire to keep African-americans from having the full rights of American citizenship.  It was there in the black and white type of the Bible.

One has to still ask, how did anti-slavery Bible readers enact change that resulted in slavery being overturned?  Gomes says it all came about by changing hearts and minds.  The text remained fixed but people changed their attitudes toward slavery.  “Scripture…may be the same yesterday, today and forever, but our capacity to read Scripture and to appropriate Jesus Christ and His teachings is not.  No one in contemporary America, except perhaps the most hard-bitten white supremacist would read Scripture with regard to race in the same way it was read a century ago” [Gomes, 99].  Antebellum slave owners saw Paul as the apostle of the status quo [slavery is ok].  Today Christians read the same Scripture and see Paul as the apostle of liberation.

Gomes thinks that Scripture has not changed as much as the “moral imagination” of America has changed.  What is this moral imagination that he speaks of?

This requires a complex explanation and we should not lose sight that Gomes is building a case for acceptance of the LGBTQ+ Christian to be accepted in the church.  It is all about context.  In the context of the ancient world, slavery was accepted as a basic part of life.  No one actually questioned its existence.  Gomes feels the Holy Spirit had a lot to do with changing attitudes.  He references the book of Hebrews citing the Scriptures as a two-edged sword.  He references the idea that Scripture is referred to as the “lively oracles of God,” the notion that God’s words are not dead letters, but living and powerful.

How can we explain the Southern Baptist clergymen who wrote Dr. Martin Luther King to explain that his actions to end racism and segregation were “unbiblical”?  How can we explain that a few years later another pastor named Floyd Bryant wrote an article in the Southern Baptist Review and Expositor that “God makes no distinctions in people whatever their race.  Segregation is not the work of man.  If it occurs at all, God does that in the final judgement.” Bryant admits that he has come to grasp the meaning of the Apostle Paul’s plea “Be not conformed to the world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God.”

The renewing of the mind is at the heart of many southern people changing their attitudes toward African-American citizens.

Billy Graham, a proud southerner from North Carolina pens the following thoughts:  “Our consciences should be stirred to repentance by how we have fallen short of what God asks us to be as agents of reconciliation….Of all people, Christians should be the most active in reaching out to those of different races, instead of accepting the status quo of division and animosity.”

Changing hearts and minds is hard to do, especially when Scripture supports institutions that uphold the owning of human beings.

Can hearts and minds be changed regarding the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ people in the church?  Can the acceptance of African-american people by southern white people signal that the same thing can happen for this group that Gomes refers to as “the last prejudice”?

He says yes, “it is about how we read the Bible, and about the creation of the moral imagination that allows us to do so.  In that same moral imagination, is it never too late to be right or to be good.”

Before we get to another chapter from Gomes regarding the need to change our minds about Scripture, let’s revisit Kevin DeYoung, a pastor who says “not too fast!”  What does the Bible really teach about homosexuality?  That is his focus and he is not ready to accept the idea that homosexuality is “the last prejudice.”  To him, homosexuality was and always will be a mortal sin.

Obviously, DeYoung does not have “moral imagination.”