Slavery & Southern Baptistry

***QUOTE***

Comments:
"The question at issue is not is not the Baptist tradition in general, or the Anabaptist tradition in general, but the Southern Baptist tradition in particular.."

You mean that wonderful tradition that slavery was a divinely ordained institution?

Bad tree, bad fruit.

# posted by dan : 2/25/2006 3:12 PM

***END-QUOTE***

Honestly, you gotta wonder sometimes what, if anything, you’d find if you opened up the brainpan of these unbelievers and took a look inside. Cobwebs instead of synapses?

Slavery is not a S. Baptist tradition.

Does Dan think that S. Baptists were running the great antebellum plantations? Better question: Does Dan think at all?

Does he know anything about the standard of living of the average, antebellum S. Baptist? Clearly, historical economics is not his forte.

American slavery was a carryover from England. Affluent Colonists imported the institution from the other side of the pond.

It was basically an Anglican and later Presbyterian affair.

Nor was it distinctively a Southern institution—not originally.

Colonial England churchmen like Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, were in the forefront of abolitionism in America.

The leading figure in the abolition of slavery was the great Evangelical churchman William Wilberforce, inspired by the great Evangelical hymnodist, John Newton.

Unfortunately, slavery is a cultural universal. Slavery was practiced throughout the ANE and elsewhere, by Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Arabs, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, East Indians, North American and Meso-American Indians, to name a few.

Men of European descent have done more to abolish slavery around the world than any other people-group.