Pastor Joel Webbin and John Harris dissect the controversy surrounding Harris's historical views, arguing that radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were irresponsible for lacking integration plans, which fueled resentment and the Civil War. They contend that slavery was not solely about race but involved state sovereignty, noting that many Southern leaders were gradual emancipationists who treated slaves benevolently unlike Greco-Roman systems. The discussion challenges modern narratives by citing Booker T. Washington's accounts of gratitude upon freedom and asserting that abrupt abolition caused starvation and poisoned race relations, urging Christians to embrace historical complexity over black-and-white judgments. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Biblical Views on Slavery00:14:39
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I'm privileged to welcome back to our show, recurring guest, John Harris from Conversations That Matter.
John, thanks for coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks, Joel.
I appreciate it.
It's good to be with you.
Great.
So there's been a little bit of controversy online, and really it's just, you know, The way that most controversy works, I know this has been your experience, it's becoming mine as well, but usually it's the same thing and it just gets recycled.
So it's like, you know, a year goes by and then, you know, the same thing pops up again.
For you, one of the controversies that it seems like has circled again and again and again, and what's kind of brought it to the surface, you know, this most recent bout is that, you know, that you were positively spoken in Megan Basham's book that's been making the rounds and really doing a number on Big Eva, but she positively references you, your friends with Meg Basham, and a lot of Her conclusions.
I mean, she did a great job, so I don't want to disparage her.
But a lot of the things that she pointed out were receipts that you had published and kept over years, you know, before she ever even hopped on the train.
And so, in order to discredit her, you know, and her work, because Big Eva, you know, wants to self preserve, they're saying, well, look at her connection to John Harris.
And what's the problem with John Harris?
John Harris, he's a racist.
He loves slavery and he's a Confederate, you know, apologist.
So, that's, I wanted to have you on the show because this is something that's been happening for me.
Theology is indispensable.
It's radically important.
Ultimately, the final arbiter of all truth is the word of God and our exegesis.
What does God's word say?
But it is also incredibly telling and influential, our views of history.
And I've noticed that sometimes the friend enemy distinction and who you end up partnering with and what side you end up taking is not just exegetical.
You don't just arrive at those partnerships and conclusions based off of.
Your theology, but also based off of your view of history.
Do you think that the entire world was evil with no good in it whatsoever until the 1940s, you know, 1960s, you know, whether it be the post war consensus or whether it be the Civil Rights Act, like that, your historical view can influence ultimately your entire ministry and your platform and what you say just as much as your theological view.
And so I think for a lot of guys, myself included, Our theology remains intact, and that's putting the horse before the cart.
The theology has been there for years now.
We have our theological convictions.
But what we're beefing up in real time, that we're realizing that we were behind on and deficient, is our historical knowledge.
And as I'm reading more about history and what's happened in our country and what's happened in Europe and these kinds of things, I'm realizing that a lot of ways that theologians, even good theologians, view the world, is a recent phenomenon.
It is not the way that our fathers and our mothers.
View the world.
And I'm talking about Christian fathers and Christian mothers.
So I wanted to have you come on the show and give us a little bit of a history lesson.
Explain to us the Civil War.
Explain to us the Confederacy.
Explain to us slavery, particularly in America, and why it was bad.
And then what parts of it, not necessarily that were good, but what parts of it really, really were defensible at some level by the Word of God.
The Bible, we just have to acknowledge that.
I know people don't like hearing this, but the Bible does not.
Blatantly condemn slavery.
You could say that it lays out the roadmap to eventually abolish slavery, but there was a case to be made, and yet there were abuses that absolutely happened.
And this topic of what happened in our country with the Civil War and slavery and the abolitionists, it seems like it's becoming every day increasingly relevant to some of the cold but heating up Civil War that's going on right now.
So I wanted to have you on the show and give us a history lesson.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Thank you, Joel.
I appreciate it.
And where to start is the hard part.
I think today, maybe the best place to start is how people typically think of this today, including Christians who are in charge of. very influential institutions.
I think there is a sheepishness about our past, not just what the Bible says.
Of course, there's the sheepishness about that.
The Bible, of course, in the Old Testament, there's a slavery system that's regulated by God in which there's even elements of it that are perpetual.
People like to, when they go back and defend the Bible, they want to make it out like that wasn't real slavery because, look, you couldn't keep a Hebrew slave perpetually.
But look at the laws concerning pagan slaves.
You could.
And there's a lot of things that are extremely against our modern Views on equality and really egalitarianism, I suppose.
So it's not just that, but there's all kinds of other things, obviously, in scripture that don't fit today's enthusiasm for equality.
But you go to the New Testament, you find a pagan slave system, and God, again, gives regulations for slave masters who are Christians on how they're supposed to treat their slaves and how slaves are supposed to respond to that treatment.
And then fast forward, though, and you have a group of Christians in the Western world who are participating on some level. in chattel slavery.
And in our context, specifically in America, you have a group of people that lived in the Bible Belt.
Today we still know it as the Bible Belt, who ended up being plantation owners.
And there ended up being most of the slaves eventually lived in that region for mostly economic reasons.
And how can this be squared with Christianity and Christianity being a good thing and a positive force?
And so I think that Christians try to get away from this.
They try to redefine it in the Bible, or they try to find general commands that supposedly will override these specific commands given by Paul or examples given by Jesus, or you could talk about men like Moses and Abraham and those who held slaves.
And then when it comes to the 19th century, there's a reframing where they try to take the abolitionists of the Northeast and say that they are the true, authentic Christians.
So we can kind of save Christianity here.
We can show that Christianity is actually.
A positive force because it's just been misunderstood.
In the South, that wasn't real Christianity.
And oftentimes, the Frederick Douglass quote about authentic Christianity not being existing or being attached to people who were involved in slavery gets brought up.
And the real Christians are those in the North who want to free these slaves.
And so it's a cartoon, really, if you actually dig into the primary sources and try to understand what the political context was.
But that's what we have.
And so anyone like myself, Or Doug Wilson's gotten the same treatment.
I know sometimes I've seen James White get a little bit of this treatment.
I know there's others.
When we, who have studied it maybe a little more, and we say things like, actually, the Confederacy, they had a constitutional point, we can learn some lessons from them, or that it wasn't all about slavery, or when it comes to the question of slavery, we try to frame it historically and show that the abolitionists were not on solid biblical footing for what they were trying to do.
And it actually led to.
A lot of negative consequences for our country and it poisoned race relations, the way the slaves were freed and the consequences of many of them dying and living in a war torn region and being dependent on the government and all these things.
We get labeled.
And it's unfortunate.
I'm used to it at this point just because it's one of, I'd say, the many things that people don't care for, especially if they're left leaning that I say.
But this tends to be the one I think that because I've written more on it and there's some optical things, like there's a Picture of me that was on my Facebook where I'm, I think, 13 years old, and I was dressing up at the Battle of Newmarket in a VMI uniform that was with a Confederate flag in the background, because that's what the National Park Service at that time, if you can believe it, let kids do.
It wasn't considered controversial when I was 13.
They used that as an optical thing of like, look how scary this is.
This kid reenacted in a Confederate situation.
And so people are, I think, very.
Programmed, at least some people, to look at that symbol or any symbol or uniform or really anything associated with the Confederacy and freak out and think this is the most horrible thing.
This is like Nazis.
And it's just not.
That's not the case at all.
And so I've stood my ground on this.
I have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.
None of them owned slaves.
They were poor.
They got invaded.
Their churches and so forth were burned.
And so they defended themselves.
And I stand up for them.
I stand up for what I think is righteousness and truth, acknowledging that.
Neither side is perfect in any struggle, and that certainly goes for the South as well.
And that certainly goes for the institution of slavery, by the way, which I don't think that they were primarily trying to defend in the war.
But I think even the fact that their society featured this labor relationship doesn't mean that the society was intrinsically, fundamentally bad and on this level of Holocaust, which is basically what we've.
The post war consensus basically made the Holocaust the worst thing ever, and now we're roping in all these other things.
Slavery, Is just another Holocaust that happened in the United States.
MAGA anti immigration is now apparently another, it's another Holocaust.
And so it's like this moral play that they keep doing.
And I just don't want to let them do it.
So talk to us a little bit about where do you see the error, if you see any at all, with abolitionists?
And then kind of a question tied into that if not slavery, what was the Civil War about?
And certainly, I mean, it was about slavery, but also, what also was the Civil War about?
Sure.
Okay.
So abolitionists first.
This is actually very relevant because a lot of pro life or anti abortion groups want to tie in their movement with abolitionism on some level by making a moral comparison between abortion today and slavery.
And I've argued that this is really what Karen Swallow Pryor does.
This is what Russell Moore does, where they try to take other issues that aren't directly murder and then make them pro life.
And so you shouldn't be surprised if anti smoking or pro BLM or pro environmental, you know, I don't know, anti greenhouse gases becomes a pro life issue because you're already doing it once you make that moral comparison.
So, this is directly relevant for that reason.
But we have to make a distinction before I think we arrive at abolitionism because the abolitionists, the name can be somewhat confusing if you are not a student of history.
They were a specific group located in the North who were pretty much radical.
In fact, I'd rather use the word radical abolitionists or immediate abolitionists to describe them because.
What distinguished them wasn't so much that they were against slavery.
You had a number of gradual emancipationists who were also against slavery.
What distinguished them was they wanted an immediate end to slavery because they believed the slave master relationship was intrinsically a sin in and of itself.
So there was no way that someone like Robert E. Lee, who inherited his slaves and thought that Christian civilization would eventually get rid of slavery, but he couldn't afford to free them and they wouldn't be in a good circumstance if he did try to do that, someone like him is in sin.
And there were varying degrees of what they wanted to do about that.
The most extreme.
Cases, I suppose, being John Brown and the Secret Six who financed him wanting to start slave insurrections and kill white people in the South and form even perhaps a slaveocracy, not a slaveocracy, but an empire or a region that slaves controlled, former slaves.
And these kinds of things obviously scared the South in many ways.
And there was a postal crisis in the 1830s where millions of Pamphlets from abolitionists went down south, and some of them encouraged this kind of thing to start an uprising.
You know, don't work for your masters, disobey really the Bible on these points, kill your masters.
And there's some actual minor insurrections that happened that were influenced by this kind of thinking.
And so that scared the south.
But these were the abolitionists the southerners didn't like.
And so if you look at the preceding the civil war during the federal period, so up through like the 1840 almost, you had way more.
Anti slavery institutions or organizations in the South and in the North.
And by the time the war happens, you have none.
And that's because the radical abolitionists start upping their rhetoric and vilifying the South in horrible ways.
William Lloyd Garrison is one of the big ones who does this.
But you also have Harriet Beecher Stowe and Reverend Ward Beecher and Albert Barnes and George Sheaver.
And there's all these guys who want to really vilify in inaccurate ways and portray the South as a horrible, horrible place where there's just a lot of.
Abuse going on, and that's what colors the whole entire thing.
And so there was a resentment produced by that.
And so they fomented, I would say, and really careened us closer to a war.
In fact, Abraham Lincoln later on said that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, he referred to her as the little lady who started the big war because she had no experience with slavery in the South.
She had never been down south, but she writes this novel, and this becomes a bestseller, and it portrays.
the South is this horrible, horrible place.
And so the abolitionists, I would say, were somewhat irresponsible.
They wanted to end it, but they didn't have a plan for compensating masters who had really, you know, ultimately, if you want to trace the supply chain back, they had received their slaves.
Causes of the Civil War00:05:16
They had bought their slaves from Northeastern merchants primarily.
They didn't get compensation.
There was no integration into society.
The constitutions and laws in many northern states prohibited black people from certain civil rights.
They couldn't even In some places, they live in those regions.
They had to contain it in the South, and they didn't want them in the Western territories.
So the South is supposed to free all these slaves who aren't necessarily all ready to take care of themselves, and they're supposed to just bear the cost of this.
And the South said, No, that's not a good deal.
And so I think that's on a broad level what people have to understand about this.
It's not that those in the South who were fighting for the Confederacy were fighting for the perpetuation of slavery or slavery in the abstract.
Most of them, I would say, were gradual emancipationists of some stripe.
They wanted to get rid of the institution.
And there's some proof I can go through if you want to know more about that.
But they just weren't radical abolitionists that saw a one size fits all solution to immediately abolish without compensation and integration.
So that's on the abolitionist front.
I'm trying to remember, what was the other question you asked?
Well, no, you kind of answered, I think, both.
The other question was just what was the Civil War, if not over simply abolishing slavery, what was the incentive?
Yeah, the Civil War is simple, actually, in my mind.
It's complex.
If you want to get into all the causes that led to separation of the states and so forth, but the war itself, and we're just talking about the war, it was a response to an invasion.
So you have deep southern states seceding, and one of the issues, the tariff was an issue, but one of the issues also was slavery in the western territories and being prohibited from taking slaves into the western territories.
And in context, you have to understand this isn't really about the extension of slavery because it doesn't change the number of slaves, it's just where they're located.
It's really about keeping southern elites. from gaining any control in these new states.
So if they can't travel to those states and live in those states and bring their slaves with them, and under the Kansas Nebraska Act, there was supposed to be popular sovereignty.
So you would have states decide for themselves whether they were going to be a slave or a free state.
Well, the Republican Party wanted to make it so you couldn't even bring slaves into these states.
And that was, they thought, a violation of the Constitution and a violation of their influence.
And this would make it so that the North and their industrial economy would be the preeminent force and not them.
And they saw that the agrarian society was doomed because of this.
So that was definitely part of the reasons for separation, not the only thing, but it was part of it.
But really the war itself wasn't that.
Because think about it this way.
The lower South could have left.
South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, they could have left the country and there would have been no bloodshed.
And what happened though was Lincoln made a call to arms.
And that's when you start seeing the upper South, like Virginia, and upper southern states, North Carolina, decide, you know what, we don't want to live in a country where you're just invaded.
Because at the time, secession was, by many, considered to be a constitutional right.
And we can get into that if you want.
There's many reasons for, and legitimate reasons people thought that.
But they wanted to respond to Lincoln's force.
So you don't see anything about slavery, for example, in Virginia's secession declaration.
It's really just a response to Lincoln has called up arms.
We're going to join the people who have left because we don't want to live in a country like that.
So, the war itself was about whether or not a state has the right to secede.
And you can go into the background and you can look at these other causes that cause division, even northern liberalism, northern higher criticism, unitarianism, all these things do factor in.
There's cultural clashes going on even before slavery, or I should say abolitionism really becomes an issue.
But ultimately, the war comes down to we're going to defend ourselves against an invasion.
Going back to something you said previously, who were.
Selling slaves?
You said like Eastern merchants.
Who were they?
Northeastern, yeah.
Well, so the main, this goes back to really the founding, and the Puritan society was a lot of it was based upon, they were seafaring people, right?
So they did a lot of trade, not just the slave trade, but that was certainly part of it.
And so it was peoples from that region who were going to the Ivory Coast and in what's called the Triangle Trade and selling rum and other things.
Molasses, and then getting slaves.
And then they would come to South America, but mostly places like the Caribbean.
And then, of course, the southern United States as well.
And they would sell their slaves at ports like Charleston.
But they'd also come to New York and come to Providence, Rhode Island.
And slaves would be shipped down the Mississippi River.
And so those who were making money the most off of this would have been that class of merchants.
And this was a huge thing that like Robert Louis Dabney talks about.
The Slave Trade Routes00:15:29
They all talk about this, really.
Jefferson Davis talked about this.
But Dabney has a line in the Defense of Virginia and the South where he essentially says, like, you know, the sons of New England didn't really have a problem with this when it's them.
But when it comes to their political enemies, us, you know, they want to vilify us for this.
And so there was a lot of resentment over that.
Right Response Ministries 2025 conference is a go.
This is three days, full, jam packed conference with eight main sessions, three to four hour and a half long panels, and an All star super based lineup of speakers, 15 speakers in all.
Who are they?
Steve Dace, Jeff Durbin, Orn McIntyre, Stephen Wolf, Brian Sauvay, Andrew Isker, John Harris, Eric Kahn, A.D. Robles, Dan Burkholder, the Christian Prince himself, Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, David Reese, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
Again, this is April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2025, and the early registration is open right now.
This is the longest conference with the most.
Speakers we've ever offered, and yet it is our all time lowest price.
The early registration available today is only a hundred and forty bucks for an adult.
So go to Right Response Conference.com again, that is Right Response Conference.com to register right now because the early registration will not last long.
Are you a Christian struggling to find companies that align with your values and beliefs?
Well, then Squirrelly Joe's has you covered for all your coffee needs.
All of their coffee is hand selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers.
Try them out and you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to following God's teachings and upholding truth and righteousness, ensuring that your hard earned money contributes to the growth of God's kingdom.
Stop giving your hard earned dollars to pagans who support evil.
Right Response listeners have access to an exclusive deal.
Your first bag of coffee is free.
All you have to do is cover the shipping.
So head on over to squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response.
Again, that's squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response to claim your first free bag of coffee today.
Visit the word soap.com today.
Again, that's the word soap.com.
Everyone needs soap, so wash yourself in the word.
Another question.
Like, you know, one of the.
You know, the arguments that, you know, abolitionists at the time would make and then, you know, and still is, you know, referenced today is, you know, that the entire, you know, slave trade, the slave, yeah, sure, the Bible doesn't outright condemn slavery, but, you know, the slave trade that occurred in America, the transatlantic slave trade was condemned outright by Scripture because Scripture condemns man stealing, kidnapping.
Right.
You know, I've read a little bit of Dabney on that.
It's not like he was ignorant and he wasn't deceptive in pretending that, you know, that like he fully, you know, acknowledged where slaves were coming from and how this was being perpetuated.
But he had a defense.
He makes, you know, biblical arguments for why not just slavery that's mentioned with Israel holding slaves, but even the slavery that was going on in America, you know, he would not have had slaves if he thought that it was against the scripture.
He was a Christian man.
So he had a way of justifying it.
Whether he was right or wrong is, you know, that's up to the listener to determine.
But he did have a scriptural argument for why even slavery in America, that was based on race, you know, like that it still actually met the Bible's standards.
Can you get in, like, what would you say to someone who says, well, you know, slavery in America, it was exclusively black people and all these black people were stolen.
And so therefore, not one single person in the South.
While claiming to be a Christian, had a leg to stand on, you know, in terms of a biblical defense.
How would you respond to that claim?
Yeah, a few things.
So, number one, this may seem minor.
And I think I accept the general premise here that you're mainly sourcing the slaves from the Ivory Coast because the slave markets were already set up there.
And that's where there's tribal warfare going on.
And it's Africans who are selling Africans into slavery to Europeans and also to Muslims.
So, these markets were already there.
It wasn't that the Europeans went and formed them, which is an important point, probably, to bring up.
But it wasn't strictly based on race.
If you think about it this way, and I know people are going to bring in all the justifications some did use.
In the North, by the way, also to justify not just slavery, but segregation and these kinds of things, that there is a racial hierarchy.
You can find these kinds of quotes.
But I would say that it's more based upon location in a way, like it's geography.
This is just where there were workers that you could get.
You know, it's capitalism in a way.
They're cheaper.
You can easily obtain them right on the coast there.
And so that's why it was so easy for them to ship them over.
But you did have white slaves.
And oftentimes we refer to them as indentured servants.
In fact, those who came over from Africa on the Dutch ship in 1619, the black ones even, were probably indentured servants most likely.
But they were treated oftentimes horribly, even if they were white.
And I remember.
There's an antebellum house in Lynchburg when I lived there.
And on their record, on their rolls, they have listed some white slaves.
And so there were some, and there were many, there were thousands of black people.
Well, I think I'm not off base saying thousands.
So there are at least hundreds of black slave owners as well who participated in this, who got out of slavery or bought their freedom.
There were sometimes mechanisms for them to do this.
And then they became slave owners and sometimes very successful large slave owners.
So it's a little more nuanced than that to say it's just strictly based on race.
But there is a book by Eugene Genovese, I think it's called A Consuming Fire, where he talks about Southern Christian preachers specifically and how they grappled with some of the things that did not quite meet a biblical standard in Southern slavery.
So you could think of anti literacy laws, which were really to prevent slaves from reading abolitionist literature that would maybe inspire them to kill and cause an insurrection.
They didn't want them to read that, so they had anti literacy laws, right?
They were neglected.
They were, very famously, Stonewall Jackson taught. slaves to read the Bible anyway, and it was just something that they didn't really enforce.
It was, they were on the books in many southern states.
You also had the fact that the slave trade itself, I think Dabney calls it an iniquitous traffic.
And they, there was, even if maybe the Northeastern merchants or whoever, you know, European merchants who were bringing slaves over, they weren't maybe doing the kidnapping, but they were relying on tribal peoples in those regions to kidnap, or maybe it was just the result of tribal warfare.
It's a little hard to say, but certainly.
The beginning of the supply chain wasn't a good thing at all.
And so you're stuck with this situation where if you lived in that society, you're inheriting this.
It's not something that you're going out and with the force of the government, you're causing to happen.
You're not saying, let's go get some slaves.
I think a lot of people with modern state assumptions think that's how it worked, that the state could have come in at any time and just ended it.
But it was not like that at the time.
It was very organic and there wasn't a central authority capable of stopping it.
There wasn't even state authorities at the time really capable of stopping it when it started.
So, you do have, when we do have an authority that is capable of stopping it, you do have in the Constitutional Convention, they said, This is going to be phased out.
And by 1808, we won't have any more of it.
You do have in the Constitution of the Confederacy, because by 1808, there were still people smuggling in slaves, the Confederate Constitution outlaws the slave trade.
A lot of people don't know that, but it does.
And it allows states to free their slaves at any time they want to free them.
So, there's no sanctioning of slavery perpetually in that particular document.
You have at the end of the war, Jefferson Davis provides a mechanism.
It was too late, but there's a mechanism for slaves, if they join the Confederacy, to eventually gain their freedom.
So they had the moral capability and will to eventually get rid of this.
But it was a complex situation.
I think as Thomas Jefferson said, he wanted to defuse slaves in the Western territories, and he thought that's where they would gain independence.
They wouldn't suffer from some of the racial abuse or I should say, just being a different people, living among others who don't share everything in common.
They could go out to an area where they could claim it as their own and build their own society.
But that's what the Republican Party wanted to prevent.
So they were kind of like bottled up in the South.
And when you say the Republican Party, that is.
Yeah, the Republican Party, when the Republican Party started, that was one of their main planks.
If you look at.
But just for our listeners who may not be aware, that's the North.
That's Lincoln.
That's Lincoln.
Lincoln's Republican Party was all about internal improvements.
He's basically a Whig like Henry Clay, who believed in the American system.
Which means railroads and government expenditures for infrastructure projects.
And the Midwest sided with the North, even though they were more culturally with the South because of this.
They wanted that.
The South didn't want that.
They were for smaller government and they didn't want the tariff that funded these kinds of things because it hurt them and forced them to buy from manufacturers in the North.
So there's a lot of economic things going on.
But one of the things that was a main plank of the Republican Party, if you look at their state conventions, you look at early Republican leaders and quotations by them, they were very adamant.
That the Western territories, which are going to become states eventually, should be for free white labor, meaning we only want white people in these areas.
We do not want black people there.
And that was one of their reasons for excluding slavery.
They didn't want to be around black people.
And this is one of the things that doesn't fit the modern narrative, but it's just true.
I mean, so that creates a situation where it makes it harder to free slaves because where are they going to go?
And you have to deal with the realities at the time.
They didn't fare well in the North.
In fact, there's a debate between two Presbyterians.
Jay Blanchard and Reverend N.L. Rice in 1845.
And they're debating gradual emancipation, you know, Southern perspective versus basically the immediate abolition position.
And that's one of the things that comes up.
And Reverend N.L. Rice, who's taking the gradual emancipation position, says, in denying that slaveholding is in itself sinful, I do not defend slavery as an institution that ought to be perpetuated.
I desire to see every slave free, not nominally free, as are the colored people in Ohio.
And so he's slamming them and saying, You guys are calling for free, free the slaves, free the slaves.
You don't have any of them living near you.
And the few black people that do live in your states, you discriminate against very heavily.
And I don't want to see them in that situation either.
So putting them in the West, allowing them to go out West was one of the ways that they were supposed to, or in theory, gain more freedom and responsibility, but they were prevented from that.
Was Lincoln a white supremacist?
I mean, most people at that time were considered by today's standards to be white supremacists, Lincoln being no exception.
So, yes, yeah, he.
But he was against miscegenation.
He said that he directly said that he was in favor of the superiority of the white race, wanted all the slaves shipped back to Africa in a colonization effort.
So there's no question about that with Lincoln.
So, what would your argument be for, like, you know, if you're Dabney or if you're, you know, I just think of like guys like George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards or like they were like good Christian men.
Like, I think a lot of people are going to be surprised, you know, when you get to heaven and, you know, you're spending eternity worshiping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, you know, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr. in hell.
Like, I firmly believe that.
You know, I think a lot of people are going to be really frustrated when they realize that there were a lot of good men.
Well, and most of the abolitionists are probably going to be the prominent ones, they're not going to be in heaven because they denied things like the Trinity and the inspiration of Scripture and that kind of thing.
They weren't the good guys.
They weren't the good guys.
Which is crazy.
And that's something for me that, like, that's how I started off this episode by saying that, like, okay, get your theology squared away.
Like, I'm not saying that history or philosophy or anything, like, that it trumps theology.
Like, the Word of God, do your exegesis.
What does God's Word say?
That's our final arbiter of truth.
So that's the standard.
But, you know, so not as a substitute for that, but then around that in ways that are consistent with that final arbiter, the Word of God.
We do need to then beef up our understanding of history and philosophy, these kinds of things.
And as I have, and I have a lot more to learn, but as I have, what I've been realizing rapidly is the abolitionists were not the good guys.
Let me read for you, if you have a minute, just some brief quotes from abolitionists, just to kind of shock people a little bit who are just starting to get red pilled on this.
William Lloyd Garrison, okay?
He's started the Liberator newspaper, one of the big prominent abolitionists who I would say a lot of abortion abolitionists look to.
And I understand.
You know, why they do, but I think it's a very simplistic, like, well, he was against slavery, we're against abortion.
And he quoted the Bible at times.
All these guys did because they lived in a very Christianized society.
You couldn't really make an argument work unless you somehow used the Bible.
Even Thomas Paine used the Bible in common sense, right?
He had to appeal to Abraham Lincoln, who Herndon, his law clerks, you know, said he was probably an atheist and said blasphemous things and didn't really go to church regularly.
He had to use the Bible.
Everyone does.
That doesn't mean they're Orthodox Christians.
So, William Lloyd Garrison. paid homage to Thomas Paine for providing him with the intellectual resources for getting beyond the Bible,
and he said, quote, To say that everything in the Bible is to be believed simply because it is found in that volume is equally absurd and pernicious.
Yeah, so he radically denies the inerrancy of Scripture.
Reconciling Faith and History00:05:12
He makes Andy Stanley look like a conservative Christian.
It's basically a transcendentalist.
Yeah, that's terrible.
Harriet Beecher Stowe believed the Bible was easily manipulated to prove anything with regard to the problem of slavery that the readers might desire.
And I can give you quote after quote.
You maybe don't have time, but all these guys, it seems like the prominent abolitionists, have quotes like this.
So that's super helpful, John.
Thank you.
So then, the question that I was going to ask is like, all right, so there's a lot of good guys that you may not like them, but you're going to have to eventually get over it and reconcile with them in eternity because they're in heaven.
And if you want to be in heaven too, these are our brothers in Christ.
And that doesn't mean that our former brothers in Christ, our fathers and ancestors, that they were infallible.
They're humans, just like us, they sin.
But this is what I've been coming to realize.
For the longest time, the way that I would have said it and the way that others have said it is.
You know, there's the progressive, you know, progressive Christians, aka, you know, unregenerate people who aren't Christian at all, and they're actually going to hell, right?
So there's those guys, like Russell Moore.
I truly believe that Russell Moore is going to hell, and I hope he repents, you know, but I truly believe that.
And so, like, there's wicked progressive guys that, you know, use the Christian moniker, but I don't believe are Christian at all.
And they would just, because they don't have any dog in the fight, like, they're, you know, perfectly content and comfortable just saying, you know, that, you know, George Whitman.
Field is terrible and Jonathan Edwards was terrible.
That's their explanation.
But the good guys.
Let me briefly give you one other reason.
Russell Moore corrupts the gospel because he straps it to a political thing.
And these guys did too.
The abolitionists.
I can give you quote after quote of them basically saying that Southerners don't have the true gospel.
So, and I believe you.
But my point is this you've got the progressive, today's modern progressive Christians that I don't even think are Christians.
But the good guys, what I'm trying to get to is like the good conservative evangelicals, what they have said and what I would have said and what I've believed for a very long time.
Is they would have said, well, of course, Jonathan Edwards is a dear brother in Christ.
He was a good Christian man.
He's in heaven.
But every generation has its blind spots, right?
That's something that, like, John Piper would have said, because he loved Edwards.
And John Piper never said that Edwards wasn't a Christian.
He loved Edwards, but he would.
John Piper very much subscribed to the post war consensus.
And so he would have, the way he would have reconciled Jonathan Edwards being a great man, but also the fact that he had slaves was this terrible, terrible thing.
The way that guys like John Piper, You know, so not a progressive Christian, but you know, a conservative evangelical for the most part until COVID and vaccines.
But you know, a conservative evangelical would have said Jonathan Edwards is good, but also slavery is bad.
And these two things, you know, are reconcilable.
How, you know, guys had blind spots.
Every generation has its blind spots.
And what I'm getting at is what I'm starting to be, you know, increasingly suspicious of in my own heart, in my own life, is I'm wondering everything these guys, like, these aren't our peers.
Like Stonewall Jackson is not my peer.
Robert E. Lee is not my peer.
These guys are better than me.
They're my superiors.
They're not my peers.
It's not like, well, they had the blind spot of racism, you know, and we have the blind spot of materialism, you know, like we spend too much time at the mall, you know, and they also, you know, they hated black people.
I don't think it's that simple.
These guys, I don't think it's just like we have a blind spot in our generation.
They had their blind spot in theirs.
No, these guys are superior to us in virtually every single way.
They were better read, they were better studied, they were more disciplined, they were more pious in the good ways, like not pietism, but piety.
They were better men.
They were better men all the way around, from top to finish, A to Z.
And so I'm looking at the world now and I'm thinking, like, these guys, our fathers, they would have never allowed, never would they have allowed for transgenderism or LGBT or gay pride parades or indoctrination in schools, pornography for fourth graders, tampons, like with Tim Walz for fourth grade boys in their bathrooms, or abortion, the abomination of 50 million.
They would have never, ever, ever.
Allowed for any of these things.
So I don't just think like, well, they were racist and we're baby murders.
No, maybe they were good and we're bad.
And if it's that, and I'm starting to suspect it might be that, not perfect, they're not infallible, they're sinners.
But I think in general, in a general sense, it's not they were bad here, we're bad there.
No, I think it's generally they were good and generally our generation is bad.
They were better men, better women.
If that's the case, then what I'm starting to wonder now as I'm looking into history.
I'm starting to wonder, have we been plagued?
Like, has the whole Civil Rights Act, you know, I read, you know, Caldwell, you know, and, you know, that was, I think I read that in 2021, the, I'm blanking on the title.
What was Caldwell's Age of Entitlement?
Yeah, the Age of Entitlement, you know, and the Civil Rights Act, like, you can't get rid of the Constitution.
Applying Commandments to Business00:03:07
So, what do you do instead?
Well, you create a de facto Constitution and you don't get rid of the true Constitution because that's too obvious and people would revolt.
So, what you do is it's like a glass case of this de facto Constitution.
You put it Over the actual constitution.
So the actual constitution no longer is a hedge or a protection or a defense or even a threat to your progressive agenda because every time somebody defers to the constitution, it will be viewed through this progressive lens, the Civil Rights Act and blah, And so all these red pills happening for, and I know I'm not alone.
I just represent, I'm one small representation of like a million young men across the world, more probably, but across the world who are.
Who are waking up, you know, and unplugging from the matrix and realizing we're stupid, we're stupid, we're stupid.
And our fathers, they were right, they were right, they were right, you know.
And the more that I realize that, you know, like it's changing the way I think about everything.
And so, all that being said, what, so give me your best attempt of what Jonathan Edwards would have said, what Dabney would have said, what Whitfield would, like, what would they have said when somebody cites Leviticus, you know, or Exodus 21 and says, Wholesale,
there's absolutely no conceivable, biblically justifiable way that any Christian man can own a slave, period, in the 1700s and 1800s because it's kidnapping.
What's the alternative view?
What's the defense?
What do you say?
Are you desiring to change your financial trajectory and build multi generational wealth for your children and grandchildren?
Our sponsor, Private Family Banking Partners, invites you to join a growing number of like minded individuals.
Families and entrepreneurs who are working together to form a unique part of the parallel economy.
With Private Family Banking, you will learn how to establish a privatized banking system that will increase the value of the money and savings that you already have flowing through your life.
Join this growing community today as a part of putting Post Mill Talk into Post Mill Action by contacting a Private Family Banking partner today by emailing them at bankingprivatefamilybanking.com.
Also, see the show notes below to schedule a discovery call and get a free copy of the e book Protect Your Money Now.
How to build multi generational wealth outside of Wall Street and avoid the coming banking meltdown.
America is a country that was founded for the purpose of allowing Christians to do their duty before God, not to have their consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men.
Reese Fund exists in order to see the Ten Commandments properly applied, not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in business as though they're commandments from God that we're supposed to obey.
Our goal is to find businesses and to buy them and to build them up.
We want to find manufacturing businesses.
And use them to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here.
Reese Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.
Building Wealth Outside Wall Street00:14:57
Well, Dabney did address that in a defense of Virginia.
And I mean, in the debate that I just referenced with Jay Blanchard, it also came up.
And they essentially say that, you know, this is, we're downstream from this.
Like I said, Dabney said it was an iniquitous traffic.
And at the point in which we are now, we have to deal with.
Those who are sometimes generations into it.
And so you have slaves who they've only known life in the United States at the time.
And maybe their great great grandfather or something was the one who was sold in Africa.
What do you do?
What's the easy solution to that?
Do you return this person to a place they have absolutely no connection to, except that's the land of their ancestors, but now they know it?
Right, just drop them off in the jungle on the other side of the world.
Yeah, and Liberia was a failed experiment, really, in this.
Trying to do that kind of thing.
And so you have to look at the situation on the ground.
What do you do?
So, what does that mean?
Okay, so these slaves may have had ancestors who were kidnapped.
Do you just free them into a vacuum?
They can't really take care of themselves.
Many of them, and this is hard for people to believe, the conditions of slavery are not what we are led to believe.
There were bad conditions for some people, there's no doubt.
But if you look at the slave narratives, Fogel and Ingerman show that about 60 to 80% of them.
Don't have anything negative to say about their life in slavery.
And there's a, you read like Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington.
He talks about they were freed and they go to the plantation house and they just cry with their master because this is the person that they're attached to.
This is, it's the home in which they've raised kids and made meals.
And when they were sick, their master took care of them.
And there's this, people can't conceive of this today.
And it's one of the, you know, Eugene Genovese, who I think is probably one of the best, he is the best historian of slavery, shadow slavery in the United States in the 20th century.
He came to recognize this and writes about it in Mind of the Masterclass.
That, and he was a recovering Marxist, by the way.
And he came to see that the mechanization of modernity, whether Marxism or capitalism, it makes you a number and you end up getting enslaved civilly somehow.
And that there was something, he didn't like every aspect of slavery, but he knew that there was just something that bound these many of these Christian slave masters to their slaves in a caring kind of way that you just did not see in these other systems.
And there was something worth learning from there.
Maybe not even preserving the institution in every way, but learning from the way that they got along with each other.
And so this is the context we're talking about.
This is the context where foreign observers who came over said, like Tocqueville even said, that, hey, the racism in the North is worse.
Or I don't know if he used that term because that term wasn't invented yet, but the racial animosity is worse in the North.
And in the South, they've learned to live with these people.
Now, there is kind of a structure where there's a subordination going on, but it's a very delicate thing that was developed organically over time.
And you got to be careful disrupting those things because the cure can sometimes be worse than the disease.
And this is the kind of thing Dabney acknowledged that.
You have to be very gentle when it comes to trying to overturn social structures because what ended up happening in this case is about a million of them starved, died, got diseases after the war, and it poisoned race relations to this very day.
And we're still dealing with the consequences of the way in which slaves were freed.
And it's terrible.
And the consequences, when you talk about abortion and dependency on welfare and crime rates and all the rest of the things that we see today, you have to wonder could it have been different?
Could we have been like every other Western nation that freed slaves without a war?
We are the only ones that had a war to do it.
And was there a better way to do this?
I think there was.
And I think many Southerners saw a path to immediate emancipation, but they were blocked by abolitionists who were, frankly, irresponsible.
That's, yeah, that's the conclusion I'm coming to.
Love your neighbor.
Love your neighbor.
I mean, that's what this is.
This is love your neighbor and make sure that you're going to have an actual plan for him to take care of himself if you're going to disrupt the mechanism that currently is taking care of him.
Right.
So, with everything you said about, you know, arguing, like, what was some of Dabney's reasoning for?
Why it's permissible.
And permissible doesn't mean like, hey, so let's have slaves forever.
Like you already said, that the South had a plan and was resolved.
Well, yeah, it's very simple.
Scripture talks about this and gives us direct commands about how to deal with this.
Think of the Greek Greco Roman slave system for a moment.
Let's get off the Hebrew slave system, although we can talk about that.
But the Greco Roman slave system is much worse because you didn't have gladiatorial arenas in Alabama, you did not have the kinds of horrible mistreatment.
It was just very common in Roman slavery.
To have slaves that you just abused, young men who you had just abused.
And it was accepted socially.
That wasn't accepted in the South.
In fact, to be a slave trader was not a noble profession.
You were looked down upon if you were in that profession, even though it was a society that had slaves.
And it's probably worth mentioning that it was the upper elite.
It was probably 5% of the Southern whites who actually owned the slaves.
If you're talking about families, maybe 15%.
It was the majority of.
Southern whites did not own slaves.
But their economy relied on this in many ways because there were a lot of slaves and a lot of these big plantations and so forth.
And so, anyway, all that to say, you look at the Greco Roman slave system, it has many abuses.
It's horrible.
What does Paul say?
What does Jesus say?
Jesus gives parables that include slavery and he doesn't denounce it.
He even talks about many lashes.
In one of his parables, he says that the slave who doesn't follow essentially what his master told him will receive many lashes.
It's like, What?
Jesus said that?
Yeah, he did.
Paul talks about the responsibilities of slaveholders many times.
In fact, there's a whole book, Philemon, which some modern, like reading the Bible while black.
I remember I read that book by Esau McCauley.
He twists it beyond recognition to try to make it an anti slavery book.
Just read it.
That's not what's going on at all in that book.
Just read it in context.
He nowhere goes against the social systems, but there is a reforming element that happens here because we're not going to operate in the sinful way.
That those in our pagan society are operating when it comes to this.
We're not going to violate the commands of God.
We're not going to throw slaves to lions in a Coliseum for sport.
They're your Christian brothers.
When they convert, they're the mission field.
And when they convert, they're your Christian brothers.
And you need to treat them that way.
And there is a revolutionary, I suppose, you could say, element to that that eventually perhaps did lead to the overturn of slavery in a way.
I'm open to that.
I think William Wilberforce, by the way, you mentioned him, he is someone who is ardently against the slave trade.
And that was, I think,.
Unquestionably, a Christian thing to because you look at this, and the conditions on those boats were horrific.
The just the way that it's the whole thing started and the way it was sourced was horrible.
And he was taking a stand against a great evil and wanting to end it.
Wanting, you know, if you're in a leak, a boat that's sinking, you try to stop the leak, and that's what he was doing.
And so, yes, a lot of the guys, Dabney included, were against that as well.
But once you're downstream from that particular problem and you are left with a very real, tangible situation like a Greco Roman slave system.
That has many wickedness, many wicked things attached to it.
What do you do?
You live the way Paul said to live.
And that's what Dabney said.
That's what pretty much, I mean, I can give you quote after quote of Southern denominations and publications that Southern Christians put out that essentially say, this is your duty to educate masters on the way they're supposed to treat their slaves and slaves on the way they're supposed to treat their masters.
And that's our goal.
Yeah.
So all that's really helpful, John.
What I would add to it in some of my reading of Dabney and thinking about this is also one big factor that I think.
Modern Christians just don't account for enough is providence.
So, for instance, in terms of authority and princes and kings and civil authorities, so many countries are established because one people conquers another.
And very often, especially historically going back centuries, it's not that this country invaded that one and they adhered to all seven different principles of just war theory.
It was corrupt, the war was not justified in a biblical sense, and yet somebody fights, somebody wins.
So, for You know, if you're thinking of, you know, Hebrew slaves and servants in Babylon, you know, and then Babylon is overtaken by the Persians and the Medes.
Like, we have this in scripture.
Like, I taught through Ezra, you know, recently, and all of a sudden you get Cyrus, you know, and he's actually a better.
Well, is Cyrus, is he a rightful ruler?
Did he invade Babylon justly?
Like, did, we don't know.
Did Babylon were the aggressor, you know, was, you know, was Cyrus, you know, just defending, you know, his own people?
And, but, but what you see is that, um, The Hebrews, you know, all these people, whether it's Zerubbabel, you know, who rebuilt Zerubbabel, rebuilt the rubbable, you know, is how I remember how to pronounce his name.
But like these guys, you know, or Ezra the priest, they speak and regard Cyrus with the kind of honor that the Christian faith mandates to civil rulers without necessarily establishing an A to Z path for why Cyrus is a legitimate, so to apply it in a modern sense, make it relevant for us.
I believe that Joe Biden, not him personally, I don't think that he can tie his own shoes, but his administration, his team, I believe that Joe Biden stole the election in 2020.
And yet I also believe that Peter's first epistle and how Christians should honor the king applies these past three and a half years to us as Christians and how we should regard Joe Biden.
That doesn't mean we call him out, we correct him where he's doing things that are wicked.
But I believe what I'm trying to say is I believe that Joe Biden, for these past three and a half years, has been the sitting president of the United States, and that all the Bible verses and all the principles that we have for how Christians should regard civil rulers have applied to Biden, even though I think he stole an election.
My point is that there are degrees, like Dabney argued, degrees of separation at a certain point that what I would call the providence factor begins to kick in.
And at a certain point, this country may have wrongfully invaded that country and didn't, you know, and didn't keep to, you know, just war theory principles and blah, blah, blah.
But at a certain point, it's like so and so is the king.
This is the country.
I would say this with Israel.
Okay, so the modern nation state of Israel.
I don't think it was a good idea.
I do not think it was a good idea to plop Israel in a sea of Muslims.
I think it was a recipe for indefinite, unceasing wars.
I don't think it was a good idea.
However, that said, so even though I'm not a Zionist, and I don't think it was a good idea in the 1940s to do all these things, all that said, The providence factor kicks in.
So, what does that mean for us today?
It certainly doesn't mean that as Americans we should be sending billions of dollars to Bibi.
But what it does mean is that I absolutely believe that Israel does not have some supernatural divine land right, but they, like any other nation, that they are a legitimate nation state.
They have a right to self defense.
They don't have a right to other entities giving them billions of dollars, but they have a right to their own people, their own protection as a nation state.
I don't think they have a supernatural divine land right into perpetuity.
But as of right now, so long as they're there within the sovereignty and providence of God, they are a legitimate nation and they are afforded all the rights that legitimate nations have.
That's just the reality.
So, my point is back to Dabney and slavery, you know, because I'm just thinking of the devil's advocate, you know, an abolitionist who's listening to this episode and saying, well, you know, Joel, you forgot to mention that Exodus and Leviticus, they don't just mention the man stealer, but also anyone found to then hold.
That slave.
So it could be not just the man stealer.
I think of like Joseph and his enslavement.
That it's, I forget exactly who it might have been the Chaldeans or it was something, you know, but then he was stolen by his brothers, technically, would be the man stealers, and then sold to the Chaldeans and then eventually sold to Egypt, right?
So you have three degrees of separation by that point.
Like, so here's the question Was Potiphar in sin?
I think Potiphar was probably in sin for being a pagan and worshiping Egyptian gods, but was Potiphar in sin for owning Joseph?
As benevolent, his wife, she was trash, but Potiphar himself, he was a benevolent master.
He treated Joseph well.
Joseph rises.
Joseph has more, probably is eating better and has more provisions as Potiphar's slave than he had back with his father Jacob, you know, when they were suffering, you know, and weren't quite as rich and weren't quite as wealthy and didn't have some of the modern comforts of Egypt and blah, blah, blah.
And so my point is was Potiphar in sin?
Was Potiphar in sin?
Joseph's brothers were in sin.
Because they wrongfully sold their brother into slavery.
They stole him, enslaved him, and sold him.
And then maybe even the first degree of whatever it was, the Chaldeans or whoever first bought Joseph, knowing that his brothers were selling him.
Joseph wasn't indebted.
He wasn't in slavery because of debt, he was just stolen by his brothers and sold for silver.
And so maybe there's imputed guilt.
And I think you could argue from Leviticus and Exodus that the immediate buyers of Joseph, that there was an imputed guilt there.
But then what about Egypt?
And then what about Potiphar?
And then what about later on?
And so, my point is this.
I think that the providence factor kicks in.
Joe Biden, you know, I don't even know if he's alive, but at a certain point, Joe Biden, regardless of means, regardless of whether it's rigged or stolen or legitimate or whatever, at a certain point, all the Bible verses for us Christians and how we should regard rulers, they eventually begin to kick in with Joe Biden.
This is how you can call him out.
He's wrong.
Call him to repentance, but you should pray for him.
And on what basis?
What basis should I pray for Joe Biden?
Because he is a civil ruler.
Well, wait a second, but I don't think he got there legitimately.
Yeah, but.
Regardless of how he got there, for all intents and purposes, God in his providence established him.
He is the sitting president.
And so, all the Bible verses that teach you, tell you, instruct you for how to regard them, that's how it works.
Mercy in Historical Records00:11:14
And I think that's what it was like in the South.
That eventually, it's these are the Bible verses for how you treat masters should treat slaves.
And it's been 30 degrees of separation by this point.
And you've got the great grandchildren of a guy who was sold.
And even the guy who was sold, he could have been the great grandchild of.
Who was his great grandfather, who was initially captured, who was actually stolen by this tribe in Africa.
And even with that, we don't even know if the war was just.
It could be that you had an invading tribe, and then one tribe simply defending, they held their own in the province of God and were able to win the battle against the invading tribe.
And those that they didn't kill in self defense, they enslaved the others so that they wanted, you know, neutralizing future threat.
And then they sold it.
Like it's just the point is, it is not this black and white, ooh, you just hate black people and you're racist.
That I'm just realizing more and more as I grow up, part of it's maybe just getting older and growing up and not being, you know, a little boy and being immature and stupid anymore by God's grace.
But as I grow up and as I read history and as I learn, and I'm just realizing things are not nearly as simple as we like to make them out to be.
That was a really, really good point.
And I would say that the reason I brought up the story of Booker T. Washington and his family crying when they were freed with the plantation owners is because there was this mutual love that often took place and happened.
It's a reality.
And you can see it.
With the slave narratives, you could see it with foreign observers and what they saw.
You could see it with even Census Bureau data, which shows that families seem to thrive in the South, slave families, more than free blacks in the North.
And so all this stuff paints a picture that's very different than the picture that we have.
And I'll tell you a story about my grandfather.
He died this year at 101 years old.
When he was a child growing up in Mississippi, rural Mississippi, that's my Confederate connection, I guess.
He had a slave, an ex slave who lived down the road, and an ex Confederate soldier who lived down the road that he would talk to.
This blows your mind that, you know, I knew him and he knew a slave.
But the slave that lived down the road told him the story of being captured in Africa and coming to the United States.
And he lived in harmony.
He was friends with my grandparents' family.
Would it have been right or just to take that slave and say, we're shipping you back?
We're going to just drop you in Africa somewhere?
Obviously not.
He had made his life in the United States at that point.
And, you know, When you look at slavery itself, John Thornton talks about this in his book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World.
The supply chain started with Africans in tribal warfare.
We don't have records about this.
We don't know exactly what happened.
We just know that they were sold to Europeans at some point and brought over.
But you don't know.
It could be that there was a war that happened between tribes that happened all the time, and it wasn't the exact kind of kidnapping the Bible mentions.
There's a lot of ignorance about this.
The point is, downstream from it, What do you do with real tangible people with real tangible needs and who have connections that they've developed in this country?
And this, real quick, just to interject, John, this is where I just, you made me think about it.
I've been thinking the whole hour we've been talking, so I got to get it out.
But this is one of the problems with some of the modern theonomist guys who I'm a general equity theonomist.
I love those brothers.
But as they speak about slavery and those kinds of things, this is what I've realized the operating default assumption is they're going to say, because Israel, there were particular guidelines if you had your own Hebrew brother as a slave.
But as it pertained to the The other nations, like if you had a slave from Assyria or a slave from Babylon or a slave from whatever, from pagan nations, here's the deal.
A lot of, even the, and I'm talking about the conservative Christians today, Theonomists being one of them, they operate underneath this assumption that the only foreign slaves that Israel ever owned, that every single one of them was initially put into slavery because of financial debt.
Oh, yeah, no.
Here's the question.
So the requirements that God gives through Moses, God's A law word for Israel about man stealing being a capital offense and the one who owns, who takes possession.
And I take that as the immediate buyer who knowingly is buying a slave that they know was captured and stolen wrongfully, man stolen, that that person also is a capital offense.
That's what the Bible says.
Beyond that, we don't have all these other, and 17 degrees of separation later, it's still, nope, that's going beyond the biblical text.
So that is a capital offense.
But here's the deal.
That is God's law word to Israel as it pertained to owning slaves.
But the idea is there's a difference.
When God's word says man stealing, there's a difference between in a vigilante type and an individual household, right?
Separated from a civil power, separated from a national sense.
If an individual is just going around, like on the black market, you know, going around, like Taken, you know, Liam Neeson, you know, if you have an individual crime syndicate just going around capturing girls or capturing young boys.
And stealing them.
I think that is what is in view.
But if you have an entire nation as a civil entity going to war with another nation and in that war winning, conquering the nation and killing some and enslaving others, then the others that they enslave, if they're up for auction, I think Israel is actually allowed to buy them.
I do.
I do.
I don't think Leviticus is applying to that.
And that's what was happening, from my understanding, that's what was happening in the South.
That's often a mercy to not kill those who you're warring with in the ancient world and even in the pre modern world.
Slavery was the option you wanted if you were in that situation because you don't want to die.
And I think it's worth pointing out that many of the slaveholders, we have records of this, there was a mercy that they had in there.
I think of John Randolph, I mentioned earlier, who freed his slaves and sent them to Ohio and they came running back.
They wanted to be with him.
And Robert E. Lee had an affection for his slaves.
There was a willingness and a wanting to take care of them.
Jefferson Davis, even, he basically adopted a young black boy as his slaves.
And after the war, when they lost, his ex slaves took him in to live with them.
He was the one that fought in Congress so slaves could have patents, so they could actually make money on their own.
I mean, the color that these things are being painted with is just not accurate.
He was the one who led the Confederacy.
So there is a love that existed there and a wanting to be a mercy to these people.
In bondage at times.
To land the plane, just for the listener, we are, John and I, neither of us is saying that the South was without sin.
We're talking about people.
It's just, it's not that simple.
It's complex.
All people are sinners.
So, we're not saying that all these people were perfect saints with pure spotless records and that they had never done anything wrong.
But we are saying that the political propaganda narrative that's been played for decades now in our culture, in our nation, in our politics, that says that it's just black and white, South bad, racist, and North good, abolitionists good, that that is just not true.
And understanding the history and understanding some of the nuances and the dynamics and what was actually going on.
It really does matter because, in some sense, I feel like culturally and politically, we've just been rehashing out the Civil War again and again and again on this soil.
And one of the reasons why we keep having the same fights and we keep losing the same fights, where it's like we're losing the same battle again and again and again.
And every time, every year that goes by, we fight this battle again and we lose, conservatives lose this battle again.
You lose more of your country.
You lose more of your income.
You lose more of your chance to own a home, more of your chance to like, And I don't think it's ever going to get fixed unless we do two things.
One of them is yes, we do need people to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of their sins.
We need to preach the gospel.
We need to see more people to become Christians.
But that's not the only thing because what we've realized is you can be Christians and still be deceived about history and what happened.
So we need Christians.
We need the gospel, but we also need to reopen the history books and show.
There are some massive cover ups and some massive lies and some massive propaganda that's been going on in our nation for a long time.
If you think that Martin Luther King is a good guy and Stonewall Jackson is a bad guy, you've been liked to.
And until we have both faithful gospel preaching and more local churches and more converts, but also a faithful rendition of history that honors the fifth commandment by honoring our fathers, we're not going to get out of this mess.
Any final thoughts from you, Jay?
Yeah, in the last 30 seconds, if I could just plug this in.
1607 project because you set me up for it.
1607project.com.
I'm the director of the documentary, and there's also a book that my friend Brian McClanahan has put together that will really help you, I think, understand true American history and where some of the things that we've learned that aren't true went off the rails.
And I think it's a, I mean, I obviously biased, I made it, but it's a great documentary.
And the last thing I also wanted to say is that the moral complexities that we're talking about, Joel and I, we recognize these are moral complexities.
Not everything is cut and dry, but if you, Put yourself in modern situations, like if you're a Christian social worker in an evil system that allows, enables people to eat without working, you know, that's a horrible thing.
And there's generational dependency, but we wouldn't want to get rid of it right, like immediately.
There's to approach that.
And you can be assault and light in that system, even though there's evil attached to it.
We want to phase it out in a gradual way.
I think it's a similar parallel.
Same thing with prisons.
I don't think that we should have prisons the way we do.
That's a form of slavery.
But if you're a prison guard and you're a Christian, you can be assault and light.
You can shop at Target.
And buy clothes and electronics that are made with slave and sweatshop labor.
It is possible to do that.
You can pay your taxes to a government that's engaged in civil slavery as well.
So we're involved in all these ways that we don't see.
We don't categorize them as slavery because that was those evil people back then.
And they would have looked at us and thought, oh my goodness, you guys are evil.
Look at all the evil things around you.
And I mean, grossly wicked forms of slavery, like sex slavery.
So don't think that you're so superior.
And I think that humility is important, even historical humility.
And that's why I'm thankful for you, Joel.
Your last words there.
Thank you.
Thanks, John.
So go and check out, where do they go to check out the 1607project.com?