Defending Slavery as the Status Quo

I read that Thornton Stringfellow, pastor of the Stevensburg Baptist Church in Virginia, had made one of the most popular arguments for slavery when Baptists in the mid-nineteenth century were deciding to secede from the American Baptist fold. In a university archive, I found a copy of Stringfellow’s A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery. I pored over it like a cancer patient might read her oncology report.

Stringfellow did what Christians have always done to justify injustice. He assumed that the status quo was normal. Abraham, the father of our…