Are you suggesting that the only way to honor the memory of Martin Luther King and the abolitionists is to ignore, or perhaps conveniently revise, history? My precise words were "in a great many cases," and you cannot ignore the fact that "aggressive, scripturally based arguments to the contrary" were indeed mounted in connection with, for example, the institution of slavery and the extension of voting rights to women. These arguments were not instantly dismissed or easily rebutted.
You can pretend that such arguments were not made, just as you can pretend that the institution of slavery was swiftly and painlessly abolished as patently anti-Christian, but that would be, of course, nothing more than convenient fiction.
The Biblical arguments of the abolitionists were mounted in large part as a direct response to easily articulated (if patently superficial) Biblical pro-slavery arguments. The abolitionists arguments are to this day a case study in hairsplitting apologetics and hermeneutics.
Indeed, I think it is a fair argument that social norms derived from non-Biblical concepts of justice and equality informed and shaped the carefully constructed Biblical interpretations employed by the abolitionists much more than did explicit Biblical language.
No, of course not. I want only to blunt your attempt at distorting history by presenting only the dark side of it, and to use this as a means of belittling and minimizing Christianity and its profound influence on the abolitionist movement.
My precise words were "in a great many cases," and you cannot ignore the fact that "aggressive, scripturally based arguments to the contrary" were indeed mounted in connection with, for example, the institution of slavery and the extension of voting rights to women.
I am keenly aware of what your precise words were, which is the problem. You did indeed choose your words very carefully. You chose them ("in a great many cases") in such a way that to someone unfamiliar with history it would appear that the majority of American Christians in 19th century favored slavery -- and you did this without actually using the word "majority" so you could get off on a technicality with someone like me who knows a little history so you can say, 'Hey, I didn't say "majority" did I? You're putting words in my mouth.'
Your general point seems to be that because you can always find in history some who called themselves Christians who favored any bad thing, no matter how evil, Christianity is on the whole worthless at best. (Yet even you admit that the pro-slavery arguments given by Christians were 'patently superficial'.)
These arguments were not instantly dismissed or easily rebutted.
For the reasons given above, these arguments are a red herring.
You can pretend that such arguments were not made, just as you can pretend that the institution of slavery was swiftly and painlessly abolished as patently anti-Christian, but that would be, of course, nothing more than convenient fiction.
I am pretending no such things. You seem to be trying to propagage the fiction that because some Christians used scripture to argue in favor of slavery, then therefore all of Christianity is bad.
It would have been impossible to stop the South from seceding if the majority of Christians in the North saw no problem with slavery. Again you're setting up a straw man -- slavery was in fact abolished as patently anti-Christian, but the fiction you're accusing me of is that I said it was "swift and painless". Four years and 600,000 dead is neither swift nor painless, even leaving aside the many decades of the American abolitionist movement prior the the war.
The Biblical arguments of the abolitionists were mounted in large part as a direct response to easily articulated (if patently superficial) Biblical pro-slavery arguments.
That's true, and the abolitionists won, so what does that tell you?
The abolitionists arguments are to this day a case study in hairsplitting apologetics and hermeneutics.
Please give an example. That great word mincer, John Brown maybe?
Indeed, I think it is a fair argument that social norms derived from non-Biblical concepts of justice and equality informed and shaped the carefully constructed Biblical interpretations employed by the abolitionists much more than did explicit Biblical language.
You are putting the cart before the horse. The influence of the Bible is abundantly clear in the very wording of the Declaration of Independence and its natural law arguments that justice and equality stem from God and not from social norms.
Moreoever, the history of my own denomination, American Baptists, directly contradicts this notion. It split off from the Baptist denomination well before the Civil War over slavery:
The issue of slavery reached a peak in 1845 when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society determined that it could not appoint any candidate for service who held slaves and when the American Baptist Home Mission Society decided separate northern and southern conventions were necessary. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in response.
(We were the Northern Baptists for awhile before the name was changed to American Baptists.)
This was not anything peculiar to Baptists and shows that the motivation of abolitionists had nothing to do with secular "social norms", which is a silly notion anyway when you consider that slavery was the social norm throughout world history up to that point.
Of course, even if you insist on pursuing the pop psychology angle, no-one gets fired up and passionate enough to risk life and property over some vague, fuzzy notion of "social norms" -- they catch on fire when they see what they perceive to be a wrong so horrible that letting it continue is a price too high to keep even their own lives.