The NXR Podcast - THE INTERVIEW - Slavery, Abolitionists, & The Civil War w Jon Harris from @ConversationsThatMatterpodcast

00:00:00.620 Applying God's Word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.

00:00:09.500 All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied. I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webin with

00:00:13.380 Right Response Ministries, and in this episode, I'm privileged to welcome back to our show

00:00:17.140 recurring guest, John Harris from Conversations That Matter. John, thanks for coming on the show.

00:00:22.820 Yeah, thanks, Joel. I appreciate it. It's good to be with you.

00:00:25.140 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.

00:00:41.520 For you, one of the controversies that it seems like for, you know, 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.

00:01:04.300 I mean, she did a great job, so I don't want to disparage her.

00:01:06.860 But a lot of the things that she pointed out were receipts that you had published and kept

00:01:11.160 over years, you know, before she ever even hopped on the train.

00:01:15.000 And so in order to discredit her, you know, and her work, because Big Eva, you know, wants

00:01:20.240 to self-preserve, they're saying, well, look at her connection to John Harris.

00:01:23.940 And what's the problem with John Harris? 0.96

00:01:25.620 John Harris, he's a racist. 0.88

00:01:27.380 He loves slavery and he's a Confederate, you know, apologist. 0.53

00:01:31.660 So that's, I wanted to have you on the show because this is something that's been happening

00:01:35.420 for me is theology is radical, it's indispensable.

00:01:39.260 It's radically important.

00:01:40.760 Ultimately, you know, the final arbiter of all truth is the word of God and our exegesis.

00:01:44.920 What does God's word say?

00:01:46.560 But it is also incredibly telling and influential, our views of history.

00:01:54.040 And I've noticed that, you know, that sometimes the friend-enemy distinction and, you know,

00:01:59.060 who you end up partnering with and what side you end up taking is not just exegetical. You don't

00:02:04.920 just arrive at those partnerships and conclusions based off of your theology, but also based off of

00:02:10.480 your view of history. Do you think that the entire world was evil with no good in it whatsoever until

00:02:18.080 1940s, you know, 1960s, you know, whether it be the post-war consensus or whether it be the

00:02:23.400 Civil Rights Act, like that, your historical view can influence ultimately your entire ministry

00:02:30.700 and your platform and what you say just as much as your theological view. And so I think for a

00:02:37.700 lot of guys, myself included, our theology remains intact and that's putting the horse before the

00:02:45.040 cart. The theology has been there for years now. We have our theological convictions,

00:02:49.300 But what we're beefing up in real time that we're realizing that we were behind on and deficient is our historical knowledge.

00:02:56.460 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.

00:03:11.280 It is not the way that our fathers and our mothers view the world.

00:03:15.180 And I'm talking about Christian fathers and Christian mothers.

00:03:17.420 So I wanted to have you come on the show and give us a little bit of a history lesson.

00:03:21.260 Explain to us the Civil War.

00:03:22.700 Explain to us the Confederacy.

00:03:24.280 Explain to us slavery, particularly in America, and why it was bad, and then what parts of

00:03:29.540 it, not necessarily that were good, but what parts of it really were defensible at some

00:03:38.620 level by the Word of God.

00:03:40.440 The Bible, we just have to acknowledge that.

00:03:41.820 I know people don't like hearing this, but the Bible does not blatantly condemn slavery.

00:03:45.760 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.

00:03:55.740 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.

00:04:11.300 So I wanted to have you on the show and give us a history lesson.

00:04:14.800 Yeah, that's a lot.

00:04:15.760 Thank you, Jill. I appreciate it. And where to start is the hard part. I think today,

00:04:21.300 maybe the best place to start is how people typically think of this today, including

00:04:26.020 Christians who are in charge of very influential institutions. I think there is a sheepishness 0.99

00:04:33.760 about our past, not just what the Bible says. Of course, there's the sheepishness about that.

00:04:38.500 The Bible, of course, in the Old Testament, there's a slavery system that's regulated by God

00:04:42.320 in which there's even elements of it that are perpetual.

00:04:45.900 People like to, when they go back and defend the Bible,

00:04:48.160 they want to make it out like that wasn't real slavery

00:04:50.320 because, look, you couldn't keep a Hebrew slave perpetually.

00:04:53.120 But, you know, look at the laws concerning pagan slaves. 0.66

00:04:55.620 You could.

00:04:56.000 And there's a lot of things that are extremely against our modern views on equality

00:05:04.040 and really egalitarianism, I suppose.

00:05:07.600 So it's not just that, but there's all kinds of other things, obviously,

00:05:10.700 in Scripture that don't fit today's enthusiasm for equality, but you go to the New Testament,

00:05:17.140 you find a pagan slave system, and God, again, gives regulations for slave masters who are

00:05:21.620 Christians on how they're supposed to treat their slaves and how slaves are supposed to respond 0.75

00:05:25.720 to that treatment. And then fast forward, though, and you have a group of Christians 0.99

00:05:31.340 in the Western world who are participating on some level in shadow slavery, and in our context, 0.55

00:05:39.740 specifically in America, you have a group of people that lived in the Bible Belt. Today,

00:05:46.140 we still know it as the Bible Belt, who ended up being plantation owners, and there ended up being

00:05:53.620 most of the slaves eventually lived in that region for mostly economic reasons. And how can

00:06:00.340 this be squared with Christianity and Christianity being a good thing and a positive force? And so 0.90

00:06:06.580 I think that Christians try to get away from this. They try to redefine it in the Bible, 0.99

00:06:11.460 or they try to find general commands that supposedly will override these specific

00:06:16.160 commands given by Paul or examples given by Jesus, or you could talk about men like Moses and Abraham

00:06:24.180 and those who held slaves. And then when it comes to the 19th century, there's a reframing where

00:06:30.040 they try to take the abolitionists of the Northeast and say that they are the true,

00:06:35.720 authentic Christians. So we can kind of save Christianity here. We can show that Christianity

00:06:39.640 is actually a positive force because it's just been misunderstood. In the South, that wasn't

00:06:45.680 real Christianity. And oftentimes the Frederick Douglass quote about the authentic Christianity

00:06:50.700 not being existing or being attached to people who were involved in slavery gets brought up.

00:06:58.800 And the real Christians are those in the North who want to free these slaves.

00:07:02.040 And so it's a cartoon, really, if you actually dig into the primary sources and try to understand what the political context was. 0.54

00:07:09.860 But that's what we have.

00:07:11.100 And so anyone like myself or Doug Wilson's gotten the same treatment.

00:07:15.640 I know sometimes I've seen James White get a little bit of this treatment.

00:07:18.380 I know there's others.

00:07:19.460 When we who have studied it maybe a little more and we say things like, actually, the Confederacy, they had a constitutional point.

00:07:27.520 We can learn some lessons from them or that it wasn't all about slavery.

00:07:32.040 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.

00:07:44.040 And it actually led to a lot of negative consequences for our country.

00:07:47.480 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.

00:07:56.940 We get labeled.

00:07:58.340 And it's unfortunate.

00:08:00.440 I'm used to it at this point.

00:08:01.840 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.

00:08:09.720 But but this tends to be the one I think that because I've written more on it and there 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.

00:08:21.280 And I was dressing up at the Battle of Newmarket in like a VMI uniform that was a with a Confederate flag in the background, because that's what the National Park Service at that time.

00:08:31.580 if you can believe it, let kids do.

00:08:34.340 It wasn't considered controversial when I was 13.

00:08:37.080 They use that as like, you know, an optical thing of like, look how scary this is.

00:08:40.820 This kid reenacted in a Confederate situation.

00:08:44.740 And so people are, I think, very programmed, at least some people, to look at that symbol

00:08:52.940 or any symbol or uniform or really anything associated with the Confederacy and freak

00:08:58.640 out and think this is the most horrible thing.

00:09:00.220 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.

00:09:26.140 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.

00:09:35.540 But I think even the fact that their society featured this labor relationship, that wasn't that doesn't mean that the society was intrinsically fundamentally bad. 0.73

00:09:44.940 And, you know, on this level of, you know, Holocaust, which is basically what we've the postwar consensus basically made the Holocaust the worst thing ever.

00:09:53.540 and now we're roping in all these other things. 0.79

00:09:55.620 You know, slavery is just another Holocaust

00:09:58.240 that happened in the United States.

00:10:00.540 MAGA anti-immigration is now apparently another, 0.53

00:10:03.680 it's another Holocaust.

00:10:04.880 And so it's like this moral play that they keep doing. 0.88

00:10:07.720 And I just don't wanna let them do it.

00:10:09.340 So-

00:10:09.940 Talk to us a little bit about where do you see the error,

00:10:12.960 if you see any at all with the abolitionists

00:10:15.300 and then kind of a question tied into that.

00:10:18.660 If not slavery, what was the civil war about?

00:10:21.700 And certainly, I mean, it was about slavery,

00:10:23.320 But also, what also was the Civil War about?

00:10:26.520 Sure.

00:10:26.720 Okay, so abolitionists first.

00:10:28.660 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.

00:10:41.440 And I've argued that this is really what Terrence Swallow Pryor does.

00:10:44.940 This is what Russell Moore does, where they try to take other issues that aren't directly murder and then make them pro-life.

00:10:51.980 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.

00:11:07.900 So this is directly relevant for that reason.

00:11:10.020 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.

00:11:20.260 They were a specific group located in the North who were pretty much radical.

00:11:25.740 In fact, I'd rather use the word radical abolitionists or immediate abolitionists to

00:11:29.460 describe them, because what distinguished them wasn't so much that they were against

00:11:34.360 slavery.

00:11:34.880 You had a number of gradual emancipationists who were also against slavery.

00:11:39.720 What distinguished them was they wanted an immediate end to slavery because they believed

00:11:44.180 the slave master relationship was intrinsically a sin in and of itself.

00:11:48.860 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.

00:12:02.140 someone like him is in sin. And there was varying degrees of what they wanted to do about that.

00:12:09.840 The most extreme cases, I suppose, being John Brown and the Secret Six who financed him

00:12:14.980 wanting to start slave insurrections and kill white people in the South and form even perhaps

00:12:22.300 a slaveocracy, not a slaveocracy, but an empire or a region that slaves controlled, former slaves. 0.93

00:12:30.740 and these kinds of things obviously scared the south in many ways and there was a postal crisis

00:12:36.640 in the 1830s where millions of pamphlets from abolitionists went down south and some of them

00:12:44.080 encouraged this kind of thing to start an uprising you know don't don't work for your masters

00:12:49.800 disobey really the bible on these points kill your masters and uh and there's some actual

00:12:55.720 minor insurrections that happened that were influenced by this kind of thinking and so

00:13:00.420 that scared the South. But these were the abolitionists the Southerners didn't like.

00:13:04.900 And so if you look at preceding the Civil War during the federal period, so up through like

00:13:10.440 the 18, up till 1840 almost, you had way more anti-slavery institutions or organizations in

00:13:19.980 the South and in the North. And by the time the war happens, you have none. And that's because

00:13:24.440 the radical abolitionists start upping their rhetoric and vilifying the South in horrible

00:13:29.780 ways. William Lloyd Garrison is one of the big ones who does this. But you also have Harriet

00:13:34.120 Beecher Stowe and Reverend Warbeecher and Albert Barnes and George Sheever. And there's all these

00:13:40.060 guys who want to really vilify in inaccurate ways and portray the South as a horrible, horrible

00:13:46.760 place where there's just a lot of abuse going on. And that's what colors the whole entire thing.

00:13:56.340 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 Cab, and he referred to her as the little lady who started the big war because she had no experience with slavery in the South.

00:14:17.080 She had never been down South, but she writes this novel and this becomes a bestseller and it portrays the South as this horrible, horrible place.

00:14:26.340 And so, 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. They had bought their slaves from Northeastern merchants, primarily.

00:14:43.740 They didn't get compensation.

00:14:45.440 There was no integration into society.

00:14:47.260 The constitutions and laws in many northern states prohibited black people from certain

00:14:52.140 civil rights.

00:14:53.420 They couldn't even, in some places, live in those regions. 0.76

00:14:56.840 They had to contain it in the South, and they didn't want them in the Western territories. 0.84

00:15:00.920 So the South is supposed to free all these slaves who aren't necessarily all ready to 0.89

00:15:06.020 take care of themselves, and they're supposed to just bear the cost of this.

00:15:10.880 And the South said, no, that's not a good deal.

00:15:13.560 And so I think that's on a broad level what people have to understand about this.

00:15:18.880 It's not that those in the South who were fighting for the Confederacy were fighting

00:15:24.040 for the perpetuation of slavery or slavery in the abstract.

00:15:27.600 Most of them, I would say, were gradual emancipationists of some stripe.

00:15:31.700 They wanted to get rid of the institution.

00:15:33.940 And there's some proof I can go through if you want to know more about that.

00:15:36.780 But they were, they just weren't radical abolitionists that thought, saw 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?

00:15:50.420 Well, no, you kind of, you, you answered, I think both. The other question was just, you know, what, what was the civil war? If not, if not over, you know, simply abolishing slavery, what was, what was the incentive? Like why?

00:16:02.520 Yeah, the Civil War is simple, actually, in my mind, like it's complex. And 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.

00:16:16.480 So you have deep southern states seceding.

00:16:20.000 And one of the issues, the tariff was an issue, but one of the issues also was slavery in

00:16:25.020 the Western territories and being prohibited from taking slaves into the Western territories.

00:16:29.200 And in context, you have to understand this isn't really about the extension of slavery

00:16:33.360 because it doesn't change the number of slaves.

00:16:36.420 It's just where they're located.

00:16:37.820 It's really about keeping southern elites from gaining any control in these new states.

00:16:42.300 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.

00:16:56.940 Well, the Republican Party wanted to make it so you couldn't even bring slaves into these states.

00:17:01.380 And that was, they thought, a violation of the Constitution and a violation of their influence.

00:17:05.980 And this would make it so that the North and their industrial economy would be the preeminent force and not them.

00:17:13.060 And they saw that the agrarian society was doomed because of this. 0.55

00:17:17.140 So that was definitely part of the reasons for separation.

00:17:20.260 Not the only thing, but it was part of it.

00:17:22.340 But really, the war itself wasn't that.

00:17:24.880 Because think about it this way.

00:17:26.260 The lower South could have left South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama.

00:17:32.820 They could have left the country and there would have been no bloodshed.

00:17:36.760 And what happened, though, was Lincoln called made a call to arms.

00:17:41.480 And that's when you start seeing the upper South, like Virginia and upper Southern states, North Carolina, decide, you know what?

00:17:49.280 we don't want to live in a country where you're just invaded because at the time secession was

00:17:54.900 by many considered to be a constitutional right and we can get into that if you want there's many

00:18:00.380 reasons for and legitimate reasons people thought that but they wanted to respond to lincoln's force

00:18:06.480 so you don't see anything about slavery for example in virginia's secession declaration

00:18:10.660 it's really just a response to lincoln has called up arms we're going to join the people who have

00:18:17.060 left because we don't want to live in a country like that. So the war itself was about whether

00:18:21.820 or not a state has the right to secede. And you can go into the background and you can look at

00:18:26.960 these other causes that cause division, even Northern liberalism, Northern higher criticism,

00:18:33.720 Unitarianism, all these things do factor in. There's cultural clashes going on even before

00:18:37.900 slavery, or I should say abolitionism really becomes an issue. But ultimately the war comes

00:18:44.360 down to we're going to defend ourselves against an invasion going back to something you said

00:18:48.520 previously who who were selling slaves you said like eastern merchants who are they northeastern

00:18:56.180 yeah well so the main uh this goes back to really the founding and the puritan society was um a lot

00:19:06.080 of it was based upon uh they were seafaring people right so they had they did a lot of trade not just

00:19:11.860 slave trade, but that was certainly part of it. And so it was peoples from that region who were

00:19:17.500 going to the Ivory Coast and in what's called the triangle trade and selling rums, rum and other

00:19:24.960 things, molasses, and then getting slaves. And then they would come to South America, but mostly 0.97

00:19:32.400 places like the Caribbean. And then of course, the Southern United States as well. And they would

00:19:39.120 sell their slaves at ports like Charleston, but they'd also come to New York and come to Providence,

00:19:43.960 Rhode Island, and slaves would be shipped down the Mississippi River. And so those who were

00:19:49.180 making money the most off of this would have been that class of merchants. And this was a huge thing

00:19:54.040 that, like Robert Louis Dabney talks about, they all talk about this really. Jefferson Davis talked

00:19:59.600 about this, but Dabney has a line in the defense of Virginia in the South where he essentially says

00:20:04.380 It's like, you know, the sons of New England didn't really have a problem with this when it's them.

00:20:09.940 But when it comes to their political enemies, us, you know, they want to vilify us for this.

00:20:16.160 And so there was a lot of resentment over that.

00:20:21.560 Right Response Ministries 2025 conference is a go.

00:20:26.200 This is three days, full jam-packed conference with eight main sessions, three to four hour and a half long panels,

00:20:33.480 and an all-star, super-based lineup of speakers,

00:20:37.440 15 speakers in all.

00:20:39.160 Who are they?

00:20:40.040 Steve Dace, Jeff Durbin, Orne McIntyre,

00:20:43.120 Stephen Wolfe, Brian Sauve, Andrew Isker,

00:20:46.480 John Harris, Eric Kahn, A.D. Robles,

00:20:49.480 Dan Burkholder, the Christian Prince himself,

00:20:52.080 Dusty Deavers, Ben Garrett, David Reese,

00:20:55.120 and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webin.

00:20:57.760 Again, this is April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2025,

00:21:01.520 and the early registration is open right now.

00:21:05.520 This is the longest conference

00:21:06.920 with the most speakers we've ever offered

00:21:09.740 and yet it is our all-time lowest price.

00:21:12.820 The early registration available today

00:21:15.320 is only 140 bucks for an adult.

00:21:18.560 So go to rightresponseconference.com.

00:21:21.360 Again, that is rightresponseconference.com

00:21:24.860 to register right now

00:21:26.600 because the early registration will not last long.

00:21:29.480 are you a christian struggling to find companies that align with your values and beliefs

00:21:35.040 well then squirrely joe's has you covered for all your coffee needs all of their coffee is

00:21:40.540 hand selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers try them out and

00:21:46.520 you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to

00:21:52.300 following god's teachings and upholding truth and righteousness ensuring that your hard-earned money

00:21:58.640 contributes to the growth of God's kingdom.

00:22:01.580 Stop giving your hard-earned dollars to pagans who support evil.

00:22:05.540 Right Response listeners have access to an exclusive deal.

00:22:09.380 Your first bag of coffee is free.

00:22:12.120 All you have to do is cover the shipping.

00:22:14.460 So head on over to squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response.

00:22:19.020 Again, that's squirrelyjoes.com forward slash right response

00:22:23.860 to claim your first free bag of coffee today. 0.84

00:22:27.280 visit the wordsoap.com today again that's the wordsoap.com everyone needs soap so wash yourself

00:22:35.980 in the word another question um like you know one of the um you know the arguments that that

00:22:47.380 you know abolitionists at the time would make and then you know and still is you know referenced

00:22:51.140 today, um, is, you know, that, uh, the, the entire, you know, slave trade, the slave, yeah, sure.

00:22:58.180 The Bible doesn't outright condemn slavery, but you know, the, the slave trade that occurred in

00:23:02.580 America, the transatlantic slave trade was, uh, was condemned, um, outright by scripture because,

00:23:08.240 uh, scripture condemns, uh, man stealing, kidnapping. Right. Um, what, you know, I, I've

00:23:14.200 read a little bit of Dabney on that because he was, it's not like he was, uh, ignorant and he

00:23:18.660 wasn't deceptive and pretending that, um, that, you know, that like he, he fully, you know,

00:23:24.480 acknowledged, uh, where slaves were coming from and how, and how this was being perpetuated.

00:23:29.080 But, um, but he had a defense. He makes, you know, biblical arguments for, um, why, uh, not just

00:23:37.000 slavery that's mentioned with Israel holding slaves, but even the slavery that was going on

00:23:41.200 in America. Um, you know, he, he would not have had slaves, um, if he thought that it was against

00:23:47.400 the scripture he was a christian man like so he he had a way of justifying it whether he was right

00:23:52.100 or wrong is you know that's that's up to the listener to determine but he did have a scriptural

00:23:57.100 argument for why even slavery in america that was based on race um you know like that it still

00:24:04.300 actually met the bible's standards can can you get in like what would you say to someone who says

00:24:09.680 well you know slavery in america it was you know it was exclusively black people and all these black

00:24:15.600 people were stolen. And so therefore, not one single person in the South, while claiming to

00:24:21.400 be a Christian, had a leg to stand on, you know, in terms of a biblical defense. How would you

00:24:26.320 respond to that claim? Yeah, a few things. So number one, this may seem minor, and I think

00:24:33.160 I accept the general premise here that you're mainly sourcing the slaves from the Ivory Coast,

00:24:39.240 because the slave markets were already set up there, and that's where there's tribal warfare

00:24:43.620 going on. And it's Africans who are selling Africans into slavery to Europeans and also to 0.55

00:24:49.480 Muslims. So these markets were already there. It wasn't that the Europeans went and informed them, 0.99

00:24:56.240 which is an important point probably to bring up. But it wasn't strictly based on race.

00:25:01.600 If you think about it this way, and I know people are going to bring in all the

00:25:04.580 justifications some did use. In the North, by the way, also to justify not just slavery,

00:25:11.760 but segregation and these kinds of things, that there is a racial hierarchy.

00:25:16.000 You can find these kinds of quotes, but I would say that it's more based upon location in a way,

00:25:20.980 like it's geography. This is just where there were workers that you could get. It's capitalism

00:25:26.520 in a way. They're cheaper. You can easily obtain them right on the coast there. And so

00:25:33.740 that's why it was so easy for them to ship them over. But you did have white slaves and oftentimes 0.97

00:25:41.720 we refer to them as indentured servants. In fact, those who came over from Africa on the Dutch ship

00:25:46.400 in 1619, the black ones even were probably indentured servants, most likely. But they 0.96

00:25:51.840 were treated oftentimes horribly, even if they were white. And I remember there's an antebellum

00:25:58.040 house in Lynchburg when I lived there. And on their record, on their rolls, they have listed

00:26:02.520 some white slaves. And so there were some, and there were many, there was thousands of black

00:26:07.720 people. Well, I think I'm not off base saying thousands. So there are at least hundreds of

00:26:12.980 black slave owners as well. So who participated in this, who got out of slavery or bought their

00:26:20.400 freedom. There were sometimes mechanisms for them to do this. And then they became slave owners and

00:26:25.020 sometimes very successful, large slave owners. So it's a little more nuanced than that to say

00:26:29.300 it's just strictly based on race. But there is a book by Eugene Genovese. I think it's called

00:26:34.840 the Consuming Fire, where he talks about Southern Christian preachers specifically and how they

00:26:40.700 grappled with some of the things that did not quite meet a biblical standard in Southern

00:26:47.200 slavery.

00:26:48.560 So you could think of anti-literacy laws, which were really to prevent slaves from reading

00:26:53.300 abolitionist literature that would maybe inspire them to kill and cause an insurrection.

00:26:58.300 They didn't want them to read that, so they had anti-literacy laws, right?

00:27:01.280 They were neglected.

00:27:02.200 They were, you know, very famously Stonewall Jackson taught slaves to read the Bible anyway,

00:27:06.920 and it was just something that they didn't really enforce, but they were, it was, they

00:27:12.000 were on the books in many Southern states.

00:27:13.780 You also had the fact that the slave trade itself, I think Dabney calls it an iniquitous

00:27:19.360 traffic. 0.91

00:27:20.720 And they, there was, even if maybe the Northeastern merchants or whoever, you know, European

00:27:26.760 merchants who were bringing slaves over, they weren't maybe doing the kidnapping, but they

00:27:31.400 were relying on tribal peoples in those regions to kidnap, or maybe it was just the result of

00:27:37.660 tribal warfare. It's a little hard to say, but certainly the beginning of the supply chain

00:27:43.060 wasn't a good thing at all. And so you're stuck with this situation where if you lived in that

00:27:50.400 society, you're inheriting this. It's not something that you're going out and with the force of the

00:27:56.300 government, you're causing to happen. You're not saying, let's go get some slaves. I think a lot

00:28:00.700 of people with modern state assumptions think that's how it worked, that the state could have

00:28:04.380 come in at any time and just ended it. But it was not like that at the time. It was very organic,

00:28:09.000 and there wasn't a central authority capable of stopping it. There wasn't even state authorities

00:28:14.420 at the time really capable of stopping it when it started. So you do have, when we do have a

00:28:20.140 authority that is capable of stopping it, you do have in the Constitutional Convention, they said,

00:28:24.600 we're going to, this is going to be phased out, and by 1808, we won't have any more of it.

00:28:28.500 You do have in the Constitution of the Confederacy, because by 1808, there were still people smuggling in slaves.

00:28:34.500 The Confederate Constitution outlaws the slave trade.

00:28:37.380 A lot of people don't know that, but it does.

00:28:40.000 And it allows states to free their slaves at any time they want to free them.

00:28:44.860 So there's no sanctioning of slavery perpetually in that particular document.

00:28:49.420 You have at the end of the war, Jefferson Davis provides a mechanism.

00:28:53.000 It was too late, but there's a mechanism for slaves if they join the Confederacy to

00:28:57.880 eventually gain their freedom.

00:28:59.860 So they had the moral capability and will to eventually get rid of this.

00:29:06.480 And but it was a complex situation.

00:29:08.500 I think as Thomas Jefferson said, he wanted to defuse slaves in the Western territories.

00:29:12.040 And he thought that's where they would gain independence.

00:29:14.020 They wouldn't suffer from some of the racial abuse or I should say just being a different

00:29:20.800 people living among others who don't share everything in common uh they could go out to

00:29:25.960 an area where they could claim it as their own and build their own society but that's what the

00:29:29.760 republican party wanted to prevent so they were kind of like bottled up in the south and when you

00:29:34.660 say the republican party that is yeah the republican party when the republican party started

00:29:39.680 that was one of their main planks if you look at but just for our listeners who may not be aware

00:29:43.440 that's the north that's lincoln that's lincoln lincoln's republican party was all about internal

00:29:48.740 improvements. He's basically a Whig, like Henry Clay, who believed in the American system,

00:29:52.940 which means railroads and government expenditures for infrastructure projects in the Midwest sided

00:29:58.280 with the North, even though they were more culturally with the South because of this.

00:30:00.960 They wanted that. The South didn't want that. They were for smaller government and they

00:30:05.700 didn't want the tariff that funded these kinds of things because it hurt them and forced them to buy

00:30:11.980 from manufacturers in the North. So there's a lot of economic things going on. But one of the things

00:30:15.780 that was a main plank of the Republican party. If you look at their state conventions, you look at

00:30:20.900 early Republican leaders and quotations by them, they are very adamant that the Western territories, 0.97

00:30:26.320 which are going to become states eventually, should be for free white labor, meaning we only

00:30:31.820 want white people in these areas. We do not want black people there. And that was one of their 1.00

00:30:36.460 reasons for excluding slavery. They don't want to be around black people. And this is one of the 1.00

00:30:41.100 things that doesn't fit the modern narrative, but it's just true. I mean, so that creates a

00:30:46.840 situation where it makes it harder to free slaves because where are they going to go? And you have

00:30:52.540 to deal with the realities at the time. They didn't fare well in the North. In fact, there's a debate

00:30:56.660 between two Presbyterians, Jay Blanchard and Reverend N.L. Rice in 1845, and they're debating

00:31:02.820 gradual emancipation, you know, Southern perspective versus basically the immediate abolition position.

00:31:10.180 and that's one of the things that comes up

00:31:14.000 and Reverend N.L. Rice

00:31:16.560 who's taking the gradual emancipation position

00:31:19.860 says in denying that slave holding

00:31:23.960 is in itself sinful

00:31:25.640 I do not defend slavery as an institution

00:31:27.840 that ought to be perpetuated

00:31:29.320 I desire to see every slave free 1.00

00:31:31.760 not nominally free 1.00

00:31:32.980 as are the colored people in Ohio

00:31:34.960 and so he's slamming them and saying 1.00

00:31:38.200 you guys are calling for free free the slaves free the slaves you don't have any of them living

00:31:42.500 near you and the few black people that do live in your states you discriminate against very heavily 1.00

00:31:47.300 and i don't want to see them in that situation either so putting them in the west allowing them 0.94

00:31:52.500 to go out west was one of the ways that they were supposed to or in theory uh gain more freedom and

00:31:58.140 responsibility but they were prevented from that was lincoln a white supremacist i mean most people

00:32:03.020 at that time were be considered by today's standards to be white supremacists lincoln being

00:32:06.900 no exception. So yes. Yeah. He, but he was against, uh, miscegenation. He, uh, said that he

00:32:13.940 directly said that he was in favor of the superiority of the white race, uh, wanted all

00:32:18.040 the slaves shipped back to Africa in a colonization effort. So, uh, there, there's no question about 0.53

00:32:23.500 that with Lincoln. So what, what would your argument be, um, for like, you know, if, if

00:32:29.480 you're Dabney or if you're, you know, I just think of like guys like, um, George Whitefield

00:32:35.840 or Jonathan Edwards. They were good Christian men. I think a lot of people are going to be

00:32:42.420 surprised when you get to heaven and you're spending eternity worshiping Christ next to

00:32:47.620 Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and Martin Luther

00:32:54.120 King Jr. is in hell. I firmly believe that. I think a lot of people are going to be really

00:32:58.680 frustrated when they realize that there were a lot of good men.

00:33:03.800 Well, and most of the abolitionists are probably going to be, the prominent ones are not going to

00:33:07.520 be in heaven because they denied things like the Trinity and the inspiration of scripture and that

00:33:12.400 kind of thing. They weren't the good guys. They weren't the good guys. Which is crazy. And that's

00:33:16.440 something for me that like, that's how I started off this episode was by saying that like, okay,

00:33:21.340 get your theology squared away. Like, I'm not saying that history, you know, or philosophy or

00:33:25.440 anything, like that it trumps theology. Like the word of God, do your exegesis. What does God's

00:33:30.480 words say. That's our final arbiter of truth. So that's the standard. So not as a substitute for

00:33:37.680 that, but then around that, in ways that are consistent with that final arbiter, the Word of

00:33:44.100 God, we do need to then beef up our understanding of history and philosophy and these kinds of

00:33:49.320 things. And as I have, and I have a lot more to learn, but as I have, what I've been realizing

00:33:55.720 rapidly is the abolitionists were not the good guys.

00:33:59.640 Let me read for you, if you have a minute, just some brief quotes from abolitionists,

00:34:04.300 just to kind of shock people a little bit who are just starting to get red-pilled on

00:34:08.400 this.

00:34:08.620 William Lloyd Garrison, okay?

00:34:10.320 He's started the Liberator newspaper, one of the big prominent abolitionists who I would

00:34:14.800 say a lot of abortion abolitionists look to.

00:34:17.200 And I understand why they do, but I think it's a very simplistic, like, well, he was

00:34:21.220 against slavery, we're against abortion.

00:34:22.860 And he quoted the Bible at times.

00:34:24.260 All these guys did because they lived in a very Christianized society.

00:34:27.820 You couldn't really make an argument work unless you somehow used the Bible. 0.68

00:34:31.880 Even Thomas Paine used the Bible in common sense, right?

00:34:35.340 He had to appeal.

00:34:36.180 Abraham Lincoln, who Herndon, his law clerks, said he was possibly an atheist and said blasphemous things that didn't really go to church regularly.

00:34:43.820 He had to use the Bible.

00:34:45.100 Everyone does.

00:34:45.900 That doesn't mean they're Orthodox Christians.

00:34:47.380 So William Lloyd Garrison paid homage to Thomas Paine for providing him with the intellectual resources for getting beyond the Bible.

00:34:52.820 And he said, quote,

00:35:22.820 absurd and pernicious yeah so he radically denies the inerrancy of scripture he makes

00:35:26.320 andy stanley look like a conservative christian like that like it's basically a transcendentalist

00:35:31.020 yeah that's terrible harriet beecher stowe believed the bible was easily manipulated to

00:35:35.140 prove anything with regard to the problem of slavery that the readers might desire

00:35:38.400 and i can give you quote after quote you maybe don't have time but you know all these all these

00:35:43.760 guys that seem like the prominent abolitionists have quotes like this so that that's super helpful

00:35:47.260 john thank you so so then the question that i was going to ask is like all right so there's a lot

00:35:51.060 of good guys that you may not like them, but you're going to have to eventually get over it

00:35:56.420 and reconcile with them in eternity because they're in heaven. And if you want to be in

00:36:00.560 heaven too, these are our brothers in Christ. And that doesn't mean that our former brothers in

00:36:07.760 Christ, our fathers and ancestors, that they were infallible. They're humans just like us,

00:36:12.600 they sin. But this is what I've been coming to realize. For the longest time, the way that I

00:36:19.680 would have said it and the way that others have said it is um you know there's there's the

00:36:23.600 progressive you know progressive christians aka you know unregenerate people who aren't christian

00:36:28.960 at all and they're actually going to hell right so there's those guys like russell moore i i truly 0.89

00:36:33.680 believe that russell moore is going to hell and i hope he repents you know but i i truly believe

00:36:37.480 that um and so like there's wicked progressive guys that you know use the christian moniker but

00:36:42.800 i i don't believe a christian at all and they would just they because they don't have any dog

00:36:47.780 in the fight. Like they're, you know, perfectly content and comfortable just saying, you know,

00:36:52.000 that, you know, George Whitefield is terrible and Jonathan Edwards was terrible. That's their

00:36:56.220 explanation. But the good guys... Let me briefly give you one other reason. Russell Moore corrupts

00:36:59.960 the gospel because he straps it to a political thing. And these guys did too. The abolitionists,

00:37:03.940 I can give you quote after quote of them basically saying that this Southerners don't have the true

00:37:08.500 gospel. So, and I believe you, but my point, so my point is this, you've got the progressive,

00:37:13.280 today's modern progressive Christians that I don't even think are Christians, but the good guys,

00:37:16.600 what I'm trying to get to is like the good, you know, conservative evangelicals, what they have

00:37:20.800 said and what I would have said and what I've believed for a very long time is they would have

00:37:25.100 said, well, of course, Jonathan Edwards is, you know, a dear brother in Christ. He was a good

00:37:28.800 Christian man. He's in heaven. But, you know, every generation has its blind spots, right?

00:37:33.960 That's something that like John Piper would have said, you know, cause he loved Edwards and John

00:37:37.800 Piper never said that Edwards wasn't a Christian. He loved Edwards, but he would, you know, John

00:37:41.860 Piper very much, you know, subscribe to the post-war consensus. And so he would have, the way

00:37:46.300 he would have reconciled Jonathan Edwards being a great man, but also the fact that he had slaves

00:37:52.100 was this terrible, terrible thing. The way that guys like John Piper, so not a progressive

00:37:57.180 Christian, but a conservative evangelical for the most part until COVID and vaccines, but

00:38:01.320 a conservative evangelical would have said, Jonathan Edwards is good, but also slavery is

00:38:07.520 bad. And these two things are reconcilable. How? Guys had blind spots. Every generation has its

00:38:14.420 blind spots. And what I'm getting at is what I'm, what I'm starting to be, you know, increasingly

00:38:19.240 suspicious of in my own heart, in my own life is I'm wondering, um, everything, these guys,

00:38:26.780 like these aren't our peers. Like Stonewall Jackson is not my peer. Robert E. Lee is not my

00:38:31.760 peer. Um, these guys are better than me. They're my superiors. They're not my peers. Um, it's not

00:38:38.840 like, well, they had the blind spot of racism, you know, and we have the blind spot of materialism,

00:38:43.680 you know, like we spend too much time at the mall, you know, and they also, you know, they hated 0.97

00:38:47.780 black people. I don't think it's that simple. These guys, I don't think it's just like, we have a 0.85

00:38:52.560 blind spot in our generation. They had their blind spot in theirs. No, these guys are superior to us

00:38:56.720 in virtually every single way. They were better read. They were better studied. They were more

00:39:01.240 disciplined. They were more pious in the good ways, like not pietism, but piety. They were better men.

00:39:07.880 They were better men all the way around from top to finish, A to Z.

00:39:12.540 And so I'm looking at the world now and I'm thinking like, these guys, our fathers, they

00:39:18.440 would have never allowed, never would they have allowed for transgenderism or LGBT or

00:39:24.740 gay pride parades or indoctrination in schools, pornography, you know, for fourth graders, 0.91

00:39:31.500 tampons, you know, like with Tim Walls, you know, for fourth grade boys in their bathrooms 0.97

00:39:35.660 or abortion, you know, the abomination of 50 million, they would have never, ever, ever 0.72

00:39:42.000 allowed for any of these things. So I don't just think like, well, they were racist and we're

00:39:46.280 baby murderers. No, maybe they were good and we're bad. And if it's that, and I'm starting to suspect 0.76

00:39:53.440 it might be that, not perfect, they're not infallible, they're sinners, but I think in

00:39:58.060 general, in a general sense, it's not they were bad here, we're bad there. No, I think it's

00:40:02.760 generally, they were good. And generally, our generation is bad. They were better men,

00:40:08.380 better women. If that's the case, then what I'm starting to wonder now, as I'm looking into,

00:40:14.700 you know, history, I'm starting to wonder, have we been played? Like, has the whole Civil Rights

00:40:22.080 Act, you know, I read, you know, Caldwell, you know, and, you know, that was, I think I read

00:40:28.140 that in 2021. I'm blanking on the title. What was Caldwell's? Age of Entitlement. Yeah, the Age of

00:40:35.140 Entitlement, you know, and the Civil Rights Act, like you can't get rid of the Constitution. So

00:40:38.580 what do you do instead? Well, you create a de facto constitution and you don't get rid of

00:40:43.620 the true constitution because that's too obvious and people would revolt. So what you do is it's

00:40:47.660 like a glass case of this de facto constitution. You put it over the actual constitution. So

00:40:52.180 the actual constitution no longer is a hedge or a protection or a defense or even a threat to your

00:40:57.260 progressive agenda because every time somebody defers to the constitution, it will be viewed

00:41:02.800 through this progressive lens, the Civil Rights Act and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so

00:41:08.360 all these red pills happening for, and I know I'm not alone. I just represent, I'm one small

00:41:14.880 representation of like a million young men across the world, more probably, but across the world 1.00

00:41:21.240 who are waking up and unplugging from the matrix and realizing we're stupid, we're stupid, 1.00

00:41:27.260 we're stupid. And our fathers, they were right. They were right. They were right. And the more 1.00

00:41:32.820 that I realized that it's changing the way I think about everything. And so all that being said,

00:41:38.260 so give me your best attempt of what Jonathan Edwards would have said, what Dabney would have

00:41:43.040 said, what Whitefield would have said, what would they have said when somebody cites Leviticus or

00:41:49.140 Exodus 21, and says, wholesale, there's absolutely no conceivable, biblically justifiable way that

00:41:58.080 any Christian man can own a slave, period, in the 1700s and 1800s because it's kidnapping.

00:42:07.020 What's the alternative view? What's the defense? What do you say? 0.91

00:42:10.660 Are you desiring to change your financial trajectory and build multi-generational wealth

00:42:15.180 for your children and grandchildren?

00:42:17.140 Our sponsor, Private Family Banking Partners,

00:42:19.940 invites you to join a growing number

00:42:22.220 of like-minded individuals, families, and entrepreneurs

00:42:25.880 who are working together to form a unique part

00:42:29.020 of the parallel economy.

00:42:31.080 With Private Family Banking,

00:42:32.760 you will learn how to establish a privatized banking system

00:42:36.400 that will increase the value of the money and savings

00:42:39.880 that you already have flowing through your life.

00:42:43.100 Join this growing community today

00:42:44.860 as a part of putting post-mill talk into post-mill action

00:42:48.160 by contacting a private family banking partner today

00:42:51.700 by emailing them at banking at privatefamilybanking.com.

00:42:56.500 Also see the show notes below to schedule a discovery call

00:42:59.980 and get a free copy of the e-book,

00:43:02.500 Protect Your Money Now,

00:43:04.040 How to Build Multigenerational Wealth Outside of Wall Street

00:43:07.460 and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown.

00:43:09.980 America is a country that was founded 1.00

00:43:11.280 for the purpose of allowing Christians

00:43:12.660 to do their duty before God

00:43:13.980 not to have their consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men.

00:43:17.740 Reese Fund exists in order to see the Ten Commandments properly applied,

00:43:21.440 not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in business

00:43:24.760 as though they're commandments from God that we're supposed to obey.

00:43:28.480 Our goal is to find businesses and to buy them and to build them up.

00:43:33.140 We want to find manufacturing businesses and use them

00:43:36.200 to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here.

00:43:40.020 Reese Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.

00:43:43.980 Well, Dabney did address that in a defense of Virginia. And I mean, in the debate that I just referenced with Jay Blanchard also came up and they essentially say that, you know, this is we're downstream from this.

00:44:01.680 Like I said, Dabney said it was an iniquitous traffic.

00:44:05.040 And at the point in which we are now, we have to deal with those who are sometimes generations into it. 0.92

00:44:12.900 And so you have slaves who they've only known life in the United States at the time. 0.59

00:44:19.020 And, you know, maybe their great-great-grandfather or something was the one who was sold in Africa.

00:44:25.440 What do you do?

00:44:26.400 What's the easy solution to that?

00:44:27.880 Do you return this person to a place they have absolutely no connection to, except, you know, that's the land of their ancestors, but now they know it. 0.92

00:44:35.420 Right, just drop them off in the jungle on the other side of the world.

00:44:37.980 Yeah, and Liberia was a failed experiment, really, in this, trying to do that kind of thing.

00:44:44.640 And so you have to look at the situation on the ground.

00:44:48.800 What do you do?

00:44:49.680 So what does that mean?

00:44:50.740 Okay, so, you know, these slaves may have had ancestors who were kidnapped.

00:44:55.540 uh do you just free them into a vacuum they can't really take care of themselves many of them and

00:45:01.320 this is hard for people to believe that the conditions of slavery are not what we are led

00:45:05.380 to believe there are we're bad conditions for some people there's no doubt but if you look at

00:45:09.240 the slave narratives uh fogle and ingerman show that about 60 to 80 percent of them don't have

00:45:14.440 anything negative to say about their life in slavery and there's a you read like a up from

00:45:19.720 slavery by booker t washington he talks about they were freed and they go to the plantation house and

00:45:24.260 they just cry with their master because this is the person that they're attached to.

00:45:27.800 This is, it's the home in which they've raised kids and made meals.

00:45:32.400 And when they were sick, their master took care of them.

00:45:34.700 And there's this, people can't conceive of this today.

00:45:38.080 And it's one of the, you know, Eugene Genovese, who I think is probably one of the best, he

00:45:43.200 is the best historian of slavery, shadow slavery in the United States in the 20th century.

00:45:48.640 He came to recognize this and writes about it in mind of the master class that, and he

00:45:52.740 was a recovering Marxist, by the way. And he came to see that the mechanization of modernity,

00:45:58.140 whether Marxism or capitalism, it makes you a number and you end up getting enslaved civilly

00:46:03.480 somehow. And that there was something, he didn't like every aspect of slavery, but he knew that

00:46:08.040 there was just something that bound these, many of these Christian slave masters to their slaves

00:46:13.580 in a caring kind of way that you just did not see in these other systems. And there was something

00:46:19.940 worth learning from there, maybe not not even preserving the institution in every way, but

00:46:24.600 learning from the way that they got along with each other. And so this is the context we're

00:46:28.700 talking about. This is the context where foreign observers who came over said, like Tocqueville

00:46:34.060 even said that, hey, the racism in the north worse, or I don't know if you use that term,

00:46:37.820 because that term wasn't invented yet. But racial animosity is worse in the north. And in the south,

00:46:42.320 they've learned to live with these people. Now, there's a there is kind of a structure where

00:46:46.380 there's a subordination going on, but it's a very delicate thing that was developed organically

00:46:52.700 over time. And you got to be careful disrupting those things because you could, the cure can

00:46:56.900 sometimes be worse than the disease. And this is the kind of thing Dabney acknowledged that

00:47:00.560 you have to be very gentle when it comes to trying to overturn social structures, because

00:47:05.860 what ended up happening in this case is about a million of them starved, died, got diseases after

00:47:11.940 the war and it poisoned race relations to this very day. And we're still dealing with the

00:47:16.560 consequences of the way in which slaves were freed. And it's terrible. And the consequences,

00:47:21.100 when you talk about abortion and dependency on welfare and crime rates and all the rest of the

00:47:25.420 things that we see today, you have to wonder, could it have been different? Could we have been

00:47:31.720 like every other Western nation that freed slaves without a war? We are the only ones that had a war

00:47:37.420 to do it. And was there a better way to do this? I think there was. And I think many Southerners

00:47:42.200 saw a path to immediate emancipation, but they were blocked by abolitionists who were,

00:47:47.740 frankly, irresponsible. That's, yeah, that's the conclusion I'm coming to.

00:47:51.280 Love your neighbor. Love your neighbor. I mean, that's what this is. This is love your neighbor

00:47:54.740 and make sure that you're going to have an actual plan for him to take care of himself.

00:47:58.620 Right. If you're going to disrupt the mechanism that currently is taking care of him.

00:48:03.040 Right. So everything you said about arguing, what was some of Dabney's reasoning for

00:48:10.400 why it's permissible? And permissible doesn't mean like, hey, so let's have slaves forever.

00:48:17.840 Like you already said, that the South had a plan and was resolved. 0.51

00:48:21.700 Well, yeah, it's very simple. Scripture talks about this and gives us direct commands about

00:48:26.560 how to deal with this. Think of the Greek, Greco-Roman slave system for a moment. Let's

00:48:29.560 get off the hebrew slave system um although we can talk about that but the greco-roman slave system 0.98

00:48:34.160 is is much worse because you didn't have gladiatorial arenas in alabama you did not have 0.79

00:48:38.960 the kinds of horrible mistreatment it was just very common in roman slavery to have uh slaves

00:48:44.900 that you just abused young men who you would just abuse and it was accepted socially that wasn't

00:48:50.500 accepted in the south it's fact in fact to be a slave trader uh was that that was not a noble

00:48:57.060 profession you were looked down upon if you were in that profession uh even though it was a society

00:49:02.620 that had slaves and and it's probably worth mentioning that it was the upper elite it was

00:49:06.440 probably you know five percent of the southern whites who actually owned the slaves um you know

00:49:12.000 if you're talking about families maybe fifteen percent it was the majority of southern whites

00:49:16.000 did not own slaves but um but their economy relied on this in many ways because there were there was

00:49:21.480 a lot of slaves and a lot of these big plantations and so forth and so uh so anyway all that to say

00:49:26.540 you look at the Greco-Roman slave system, it has many abuses, it's horrible. What does Paul say?

00:49:32.260 What does Jesus say? Jesus gives parables that include slavery, and he doesn't denounce it.

00:49:37.740 He even talks about many lashes. In one of his parables, he says that the slave who doesn't

00:49:43.940 follow essentially what his master told him will receive many lashes. It's like,

00:49:47.240 what? Jesus said that? Yeah, he did. Paul talks about the responsibilities of slaveholders

00:49:54.020 many times. In fact, there's a whole book, Philemon, which some modern, like reading the

00:50:00.240 Bible while black. I remember I read that book by Esau McCullough. He twists it beyond recognition

00:50:03.800 to try to make it an anti-slavery book. Just read it. That's not what's going on at all in that book.

00:50:09.040 Just read it in context. He nowhere goes against the social systems, but there is a reforming

00:50:15.760 element that happens here because we're not going to operate in the sinful way that those

00:50:21.840 in our pagan society are operating when it comes to this.

00:50:25.040 We're not going to violate the commands of God

00:50:27.520 and abuse our slaves.

00:50:28.040 We're not going to throw slaves to lions

00:50:29.860 in a coliseum for sport.

00:50:32.740 Like, yeah.

00:50:33.220 No.

00:50:34.080 They're your Christian brothers. 0.87

00:50:35.740 They're, you know, when they convert,

00:50:37.260 they're the mission field.

00:50:38.160 And when they convert, they're your Christian brothers.

00:50:40.000 And you need to treat them that way. 0.51

00:50:41.400 And that, there is a revolutionary, I suppose,

00:50:43.500 you could say element to that,

00:50:44.760 that eventually perhaps did lead to the overturn

00:50:48.780 of slavery in a way.

00:50:50.760 I'm open to that.

00:50:51.980 I think William Wilberforce, by the way, you mentioned him.

00:50:54.480 He is someone who is ardently against the slave trade.

00:50:58.060 And that was, I think, unquestionably a Christian thing.

00:51:02.380 Because you look at this and the conditions on those boats were horrific. 1.00

00:51:07.400 Just the way that the whole thing started and the way it was sourced was horrible.

00:51:12.040 And he was taking a stand against a great evil and wanting to end it.

00:51:16.300 If you're in a boat that's sinking, you try to stop the leak.

00:51:19.660 And that's what he was doing.

00:51:21.160 And so, yes, a lot of the guys, Dabney included, were against that as well.

00:51:25.440 But once you're downstream from that particular problem and you are left with a very real 0.77

00:51:31.040 tangible situation, like a Greco-Roman slave system that has many wickedness, many wicked 0.86

00:51:35.960 things attached to it, what do you do? 1.00

00:51:37.240 You live the way Paul said to live.

00:51:38.740 And that's what Dabney said.

00:51:39.760 That's what pretty much, I mean, I can give you quote after quote of Southern denominations

00:51:45.580 and publications that Southern Christians put out

00:51:49.540 that essentially say, this is your duty

00:51:52.360 to educate masters on the way

00:51:54.060 they're supposed to treat their slaves

00:51:55.120 and slaves on the way they're supposed

00:51:56.200 to treat their masters, and that's our goal.

00:51:59.260 Yeah, so all that's really helpful, John.

00:52:00.900 What I would add to it in some of my reading of Dabney

00:52:03.700 and thinking about this is also one big factor

00:52:06.160 that I think modern Christians

00:52:07.480 just don't account for enough is providence. 0.71

00:52:10.900 So like, for instance, in terms of like authority

00:52:12.700 and like princes and kings and civil authorities,

00:52:15.580 um, you know, so many countries are established because, you know, one, one people conquers

00:52:21.560 another, you know, and, and very often, you know, especially historically going back centuries,

00:52:26.080 it's not, it's not that, you know, this country invaded that one and they adhere to all seven,

00:52:30.220 you know, different principles of just war theory. Like it was, it was corrupt. The, uh, the, the

00:52:34.720 war was not justified in a biblical sense. And yet, uh, somebody fights, somebody wins. Like,

00:52:39.220 like, so for, uh, you know, if you're thinking of, you know, Hebrew slaves and servants in, 0.73

00:52:44.860 in Babylon, you know, and then, and then Babylon is overtaken by the Persians and the Medes. Like 0.67

00:52:50.360 we have this in scripture, like I taught through Ezra, you know, recently, and all of a sudden you

00:52:54.460 get Cyrus, you know, and he's actually a better, well, is Cyrus, is he a rightful ruler? Did he

00:52:59.980 invade Babylon justly? Like did, we don't know. Did Babylon, were the aggressor, you know, was,

00:53:05.540 you know, was Cyrus, you know, just defending, you know, his own people. And, but, but what you

00:53:11.180 see is that the Hebrews, all these people, whether it's Zerubbabel, who rebuilt Zerubbabel,

00:53:17.760 rebuilt the rubbabel, is how I remember how to pronounce his name, but these guys, or Ezra the

00:53:23.100 priest, they speak and regard Cyrus with the kind of honor that the Christian faith mandates to

00:53:34.800 civil rulers without necessarily establishing an A to Z path for why Cyrus is a legitimate,

00:53:41.520 to apply it in a modern sense, make it relevant for us. I believe that Joe Biden, not him

00:53:47.760 personally, I don't think that he can tie his own shoes, but his administration, his team,

00:53:52.380 I believe that Joe Biden stole the election in 2020. And yet I also believe that Peter's first

00:53:57.980 epistle and how Christians should honor the king applies these past three and a half years to us

00:54:04.200 as Christians and how we should regard Joe Biden. That doesn't mean that we call him out, we correct

00:54:09.280 him, where he's doing things that are wicked. But I believe, what I'm trying to say is, I believe

00:54:13.660 that Joe Biden, for these past three and a half years, has been the sitting president of the

00:54:18.480 United States and that all the Bible verses and all the principles that we have for how Christians

00:54:23.500 should regard civil rulers has applied to Biden, even though I think he stole an election. My point

00:54:29.480 is that there are degrees, like Dabney argued, degrees of separation at a certain point that

00:54:33.980 what I would call the providence factor begins to kick in. And at a certain point,

00:54:38.800 this country may have wrongfully invaded that country and didn't keep to just war theory

00:54:44.740 principles and blah, blah, blah. But at a certain point, it's like, so-and-so is the king.

00:54:49.080 This is the country. I would say this with Israel. Okay. So the modern nation state of Israel,

00:54:54.140 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 0.99

00:55:00.040 Muslims, I think it was a recipe for indefinite, unceasing wars. I don't think it was a good idea. 1.00

00:55:07.640 However, that said, so even though I'm not a Zionist, and I don't think it was a good idea,

00:55:12.340 you know, in the 1940s to do all these things, all that said, the providence factor kicks in.

00:55:17.760 So what does that mean for us today? It certainly doesn't mean that as Americans that we should be

00:55:21.480 sending billions of dollars to, you know, to Bibi, but what it does mean is that I absolutely

00:55:26.080 believe that Israel does not have some supernatural divine land right, but they, like any other

00:55:31.820 nation, that they are a legitimate nation state. They have a right to self-defense. They don't have

00:55:35.700 a right to other entities giving them billions of dollars, but they have a right to their own

00:55:40.280 people, their own protection as a nation state. I don't think they have a supernatural divine

00:55:43.940 land right into perpetuity, but as of right now, so long as they're there within the sovereignty

00:55:49.620 and providence of God, they are a legitimate nation and they are afforded all the rights

00:55:53.860 that legitimate nations have. That's just, that's the reality. So my point is back to Dabney and

00:55:59.300 slavery, you know, because I'm just thinking of the devil's advocate, you know, an abolitionist

00:56:05.560 who's listening to this episode and saying, well, you know, Joel, you forgot to mention that Exodus

00:56:09.260 and Leviticus, they don't just mention the man-stealer, but also anyone found to then hold

00:56:15.980 that slave. So it could be not just the man-stealer, I think of like Joseph and his enslavement,

00:56:21.320 that it's, I forget exactly who it might've been the Chaldeans or it was something, you know,

00:56:25.220 but then he was, he was stolen by his brothers, technically would be the man stealers and then

00:56:30.620 sold to the Chaldeans and then eventually sold to Egypt, right? So you have three degrees of

00:56:34.760 separation by that point. Like, so here's the question, was Potiphar in sin? I think Potiphar

00:56:41.420 was probably in sin for being a pagan and worshiping Egyptian gods, but was Potiphar in sin 0.96

00:56:46.180 for owning Joseph as benevolent, his wife, she was trash, but Potiphar himself, he was a benevolent 0.98

00:56:53.140 master. He treated Joseph well. Joseph rises to, Joseph has more, probably is eating better and 0.96

00:57:00.240 has more provisions as Potiphar's slave than he had back with his father, Jacob, when they were

00:57:06.760 suffering and weren't quite as rich and weren't quite as wealthy and didn't have some of the

00:57:11.460 modern comforts of Egypt and blah, blah, blah. And so my point is, was Potiphar in sin? Was

00:57:16.100 Potiphar in sin? Joseph's brothers were in sin because they wrongfully sold their brother into 0.62

00:57:21.800 slavery. They stole him, enslaved him and sold him. And then maybe even the first degree of

00:57:28.320 whatever it was, the Chaldeans or whoever first bought Joseph, knowing that his brothers were

00:57:33.920 selling him, Joseph wasn't indebted. He wasn't in slavery because of debt or he was just stolen by

00:57:38.840 his brothers and sold for silver. And so maybe there's imputed guilt. And I think you could

00:57:42.820 argue from Leviticus and Exodus that the immediate buyers of Joseph, that there was an imputed guilt

00:57:47.340 there. But then what about Egypt? And then what about Potiphar? And then what about later on?

00:57:51.960 And so my point is this, I think that the providence factor kicks in. Joe Biden,

00:57:58.960 I don't even know if he's alive, but at a certain point, Joe Biden, regardless of means,

00:58:04.920 regardless of whether it's rigged or stolen or legitimate or whatever, at a certain point,

00:58:10.660 all the Bible verses for us Christians and how we should regard rulers, they eventually begin

00:58:15.460 to kick in with Joe Biden. This is how you can call him out. He's wrong, call him to repentance,

00:58:20.560 but you should pray for him. And on what basis? What basis should I pray for Joe Biden?

00:58:24.860 Because he is a civil ruler. Well, wait a second, but I don't think he got there legitimately.

00:58:29.820 Yeah, but regardless of how he got there, for all intents and purposes, God in his providence established him.

00:58:36.140 He is the sitting president.

00:58:37.760 And so all the Bible verses that teach you, tell you, instruct you for how to regard them, that's how it works.

00:58:43.380 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.

00:58:50.840 And it's been 30 degrees of separation by this point.

00:58:54.700 and you've got the great-grandchildren of a guy who was sold, and even the guy who was sold,

00:59:01.740 he could have been the great-grandchild of who was his great-grandfather who was initially

00:59:06.900 captured, who was actually stolen by this tribe in Africa. And even with that, we don't even know

00:59:11.880 if the war was just. It could be that you had an invading tribe, and then one tribe simply

00:59:16.600 defending, they held their own in the province of God and were able to win the battle against

00:59:22.180 the invading tribe and those that they didn't kill in self-defense, they enslaved the others

00:59:26.020 so that they wanted, you know, neutralizing future threat. And then they sold it. Like,

00:59:29.440 it's just, the point is, it is not this black and white, ooh, you just hate black people and 1.00

00:59:35.460 you're racist. That I'm just realizing more and more as I grow up, part of it's maybe just getting 0.99

00:59:39.820 older and growing up and not being, you know, a little boy and being immature and stupid anymore 0.99

00:59:44.420 by God's grace. But as I grow up and as I read history and as I learn and I've just realized 0.98

00:59:49.460 things are not nearly as simple as we like to make them out to be.

00:59:52.960 That was a really, really good point. And I would say that the reason I brought up the story of

00:59:58.920 Booker T. Washington and his family crying when they were freed with the plantation owners

01:00:02.780 is because there was this mutual love that often took place and happened. It's a reality. And you

01:00:08.520 can see it with the slave narratives. You can see it with foreign observers and what they saw.

01:00:12.980 You can see it with even Census Bureau data, which shows that families seem to thrive in 0.71

01:00:20.400 the South, slave families more than free blacks in the North. 0.63

01:00:22.860 And so all this stuff paints a picture that's very different than the picture that we have.

01:00:27.000 And I'll tell you a story about my grandfather.

01:00:28.980 He died this year at 101 years old.

01:00:31.840 When he was a child growing up in Mississippi, rural Mississippi, that's my Confederate

01:00:36.240 connection, I guess.

01:00:37.060 he was a cotton farmer and he met he had a slave ex-slave who lived down the road and an ex-confederate

01:00:44.720 soldier who lived down the road that he would talk to this blows your mind that you know i knew him

01:00:49.660 and he knew but a slave but the slave uh that lived down the road told him the story of being

01:00:54.440 captured in africa and coming to the united states and he lived in harmony he was friends

01:01:00.560 with my grandparents family would it have been right or just to take that slave and say we're

01:01:06.240 shipping you back. We're going to just drop you in Africa somewhere. Obviously not. He had made 0.99

01:01:10.500 his life in the United States at that point. And when you look at slavery itself, John Thornton

01:01:18.660 talks about this in his book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. The supply

01:01:22.440 chain started with Africans in tribal warfare. We don't have records about this. We don't know

01:01:27.180 exactly what happened. We just know that they were sold to Europeans at some point and brought over.

01:01:33.440 but you don't know.

01:01:34.760 It could be that there was a war that happened

01:01:37.300 between tribes that happened all the time

01:01:38.920 and it wasn't the exact kind of kidnapping

01:01:41.640 the Bible mentions.

01:01:42.920 There's a lot of ignorance about this.

01:01:44.720 The point is downstream from it,

01:01:46.700 what do you do with real tangible people

01:01:48.380 with real tangible needs

01:01:49.800 and who have connections that they've developed

01:01:52.480 in this country?

01:01:53.920 And this real quick, just to interject, John,

01:01:55.940 this is where I just, you made me think about it.

01:01:58.800 And I've been thinking the whole hour we've been talking,

01:02:00.820 so I gotta get it out.

01:02:01.600 but this um this is one of the problem with some of like the modern theonomist guys who i'm a

01:02:06.180 general equity theonomist i love those brothers but like as they speak about slavery and those

01:02:10.060 kind of this is what i've realized is the operating uh default assumption um is is they're

01:02:15.860 going to say because israel um there were particular guidelines if you um if you had

01:02:20.860 your own hebrew brother as a slave but as it pertained to um the the other nations like if

01:02:26.340 you had a slave from assyria or a slave from babylon or a slave for whatever from pagan nations

01:02:32.020 here's the deal a lot of a lot of even the and i'm talking about the conservative christians

01:02:36.620 today theonomous being one of them they operate underneath this assumption that the only foreign

01:02:41.640 slaves that israel ever owned that every single one of them was um initially um put into slavery

01:02:47.500 because of uh financial debt oh yeah no here's the question so so the the requirements that god

01:02:54.240 gives through Moses, God's law word for Israel about man-stealing being a capital offense,

01:03:01.340 and the one who owns, who takes possession. And I take that as the immediate buyer who knowingly 0.73

01:03:08.200 is buying a slave that they know was captured and stolen wrongfully, man-stolen, that that person

01:03:14.180 also is a capital offense. That's what the Bible says. Beyond that, we don't have all these other,

01:03:18.940 in 17 degrees of separation later, it's still, nope, that's going beyond the biblical text.

01:03:23.900 So that is a capital offense.

01:03:25.740 But here's the deal. 0.66

01:03:27.120 That is God's law word to Israel as it pertained to owning slaves.

01:03:31.560 But the idea is there's a difference.

01:03:35.240 When God's word says man stealing, there's a difference between an individual anti-type

01:03:40.200 and an individual household, right, separated from a civil power, separated from a national

01:03:45.400 sense.

01:03:46.180 If an individual is just going around, like on the black market, you know, going around

01:03:52.120 like Taken, Liam Neeson. If you have individual crime syndicate, just going around capturing

01:03:57.780 girls or capturing young boys and stealing them, I think that is what is in view. But if you have

01:04:03.480 an entire nation as a civil entity going to war with another nation and in that war, winning,

01:04:10.880 conquering the nation and killing some and enslaving others, then the others that they 0.84

01:04:17.260 slave, if they're up for auction, I think Israel is actually allowed to buy them. I do. I do. I 0.92

01:04:24.220 don't think Leviticus is applying to that. And that's what was happening, from my understanding,

01:04:28.840 that's what was happening in the South. That's often a mercy to not kill those who you're

01:04:35.760 warring with in the ancient world and even in the pre-modern world. Slavery was the option you

01:04:41.740 wanted if you were in that situation because you don't want to die. And I think it's worth pointing

01:04:46.580 out that many of the slaveholders, we have records of this, there was a mercy that they had. I think

01:04:52.640 of John Randolph, I mentioned earlier, who freed his slaves and sent them to Ohio, and they came

01:04:58.560 running back. They wanted to be with him. And Robert E. Lee had an affection for his slaves.

01:05:04.340 There was a willingness and a wanting to take care of them. Jefferson Davis even, he basically

01:05:10.080 adopted a young black boy as his slaves. And after the war, when they lost, his ex-slaves

01:05:16.400 took him in to live with them.

01:05:19.400 He was the one that fought in Congress 0.78

01:05:20.660 so slaves could have patents, 0.90

01:05:22.500 so they could actually make money on their own.

01:05:25.280 I mean, the color that these things are being painted with

01:05:28.240 is just not accurate.

01:05:29.480 He was the one who led the Confederacy.

01:05:31.480 So there is a love that existed there

01:05:33.940 and a wanting to be a mercy to these people

01:05:37.980 in bondage at times.

01:05:40.580 To land the plane, just for the listener,

01:05:42.940 John and I, neither of us is saying

01:05:45.380 that the South was without sin.

01:05:47.460 We're talking about people.

01:05:48.880 It's just, it's not that simple.

01:05:50.180 It's complex.

01:05:51.040 All people are sinners.

01:05:52.180 So we're not saying that all these people

01:05:54.060 were perfect saints with pure spotless records

01:05:56.860 and that they had never done anything wrong.

01:05:58.180 But we are saying that the political propaganda narrative

01:06:03.480 that's been played for decades now in our culture,

01:06:06.780 in our nation, in our politics,

01:06:08.220 that says that it's just black and white,

01:06:11.200 South bad, racist, and North good,

01:06:14.640 you know abolition is good uh that that is um it's just not true and uh and understanding the

01:06:20.960 history and understanding some of the nuances and the dynamics and what was actually going on

01:06:25.100 um it it really it does matter because in some sense i feel like culturally and politically

01:06:31.620 we've just been rehashing out the civil war again and again and again on this soil and uh

01:06:38.900 and one of the reasons why we keep having with the same fights and we keep losing the same fights

01:06:44.580 where it's like we're losing the same battle again and again and again. And every time,

01:06:48.340 every year that goes by, we fight this battle again and we lose, conservatives lose this battle

01:06:52.540 again. You lose more of your country. You lose more of your income. You lose more of your chance

01:06:59.180 to own a home, more of your chance. And I don't think it's ever going to get fixed unless we do

01:07:05.960 two things. One of them is, yes, we do need people to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ and repent

01:07:11.020 of their sins. We need to preach the gospel. We need to see more people to become Christians.

01:07:14.580 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.

01:07:23.400 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.

01:07:38.820 If you think that Martin Luther King is a good guy

01:07:41.380 and Stonewall Jackson is a bad guy,

01:07:44.600 you've been lied to.

01:07:46.380 And until we have both faithful gospel preaching

01:07:49.340 and more local churches and more converts,

01:07:51.180 but also a faithful rendition of history

01:07:54.440 that honors the fifth commandment

01:07:55.880 by honoring our fathers,

01:07:57.640 we're not gonna get out of this mess.

01:08:00.080 Any final thoughts from you, Joe?

01:08:01.320 Yeah, for the last 30 seconds,

01:08:02.380 if I could just plug the 1607 Project,

01:08:04.180 because you set me up for it, 1607project.com.

01:08:08.100 I'm the director of the documentary, and there's also a book that my friend Brian

01:08:11.800 McClanahan has put together that will really help you, I think, understand true American history and

01:08:16.700 where some of the things that we've learned that aren't true went off the rails. And I think it's

01:08:21.900 a, I mean, I obviously biased, I made it, but it's a great documentary. And the last thing I also

01:08:26.660 wanted to say is that the moral complexities that we're talking about, Joel and I, we recognize

01:08:31.320 these moral complexities. Not everything is cut and dry, but if you put yourself in modern

01:08:36.880 situations, like if you're a Christian social worker in an evil system that allows, enables 0.99

01:08:41.620 people to eat without working, you know, that's a horrible thing. And there's generational 0.98

01:08:46.000 dependency, but we wouldn't want to get rid of it right, like immediately. There's, to approach

01:08:51.860 that, and you can be a salt and light in that system, even though there's evil attached to it.

01:08:56.340 We want to phase it out in a gradual way. I think it's a similar parallel. Same thing with prisons.

01:09:01.700 I don't think that we should have prisons the way we do. That's a form of slavery. But if you're

01:09:06.840 a prison guard and you're a christian you can be a salt and light you can shop at target and buy 0.63

01:09:11.000 clothes and electronics that are made with slave and sweatshop labor uh it is possible to do that

01:09:16.240 you can pay your taxes to a government that's engaged in civil slavery as well so we're involved

01:09:20.720 in all these ways that we don't see we don't categorize them as slavery because that was those

01:09:24.940 evil people back then and they would have looked at us and thought oh my goodness you guys are evil

01:09:29.200 look at look at all the things evil things around you and i mean grossly wicked uh forms of slavery 0.98

01:09:35.860 like sex slavery. 0.86

01:09:36.880 So don't think that you're so superior.

01:09:39.920 And I think that humility is important,

01:09:42.160 even historical humility.

01:09:43.400 And that's why I'm thankful for you, Joel,

01:09:44.760 and your last words there.

01:09:46.820 Thank you.

01:09:47.440 Thanks, John.

01:09:47.960 So go and check out,

01:09:49.040 where do they go to check out the 16-

01:09:50.760 1607project.com.

01:09:53.200 1607project.com.

01:09:54.040 John, thanks for coming on the show.

01:09:55.220 And listener, thanks for tuning in.

01:09:56.400 We'll see you next time.

01:09:57.680 God bless.

01:10:05.860 Bye.

The NXR Podcast - August 19, 2024

THE INTERVIEW - Slavery, Abolitionists, & The Civil War w Jon Harris from @ConversationsThatMatterpodcast

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript