The President and the Pope

[JMHACLJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/15/2004 3:43:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
obrien at wvwc.edu writes:

Since Christian  ministers differed on each of these issues (in the old South 
Christian  ministers maintained Bibilical support for slavery; in the South 
of 1963  Chritian ministers continued to maintain Bibilical support for 
segregation),  it seems to me that for the President to opine about the beliefs or 
actions of  "good Christians" constitutes endorsement of one set of varieties of 
 Christianity.  However, for the President to call upon all like-minded  
Christians to come to his support is another  matter.


For sake of historical accuracy, I would have preferred that specific  
ministers be identified, or that the word "some" appear just before "Christian  
ministers" in the quotation above.  For the rich sense of irony it would  have 
provided, I would also like to have had it noted that Christian ministers  who 
preached a slavery gospel had no enduring name in our country, while Charles  
Finney, who barred a slave-owner from coming to the altar until he had  
manumitted his slaves, is remembered.  And, in the double- to triple- irony  
department, it could be noted that Christian ministers who supported slavery did  not 
control the legislatures or the courts of the South, and that the published  
reports of the southern courts (populated by finely trained legal minds) found  
ample justification for slavery wherever they could, including in some, but 
not  all pulpits.
 
Remember, it was a Christian minister of the Gospel who preached an  election 
sermon against Thomas Jefferson's election to the presidency on the  ground 
that Jefferson's peculiar ethnobiology regarding "the African" meant that  
Jefferson was an apostate blasphemer who rejected the single creation of all men  
by one God.
 
Jim Henderson
Senior Counsel
ACLJ
 
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