Twenty years ago, Brooks Holifield made an insightful point about the importance of the biblical debate over slavery in the nineteenth-century U.S.: “Long before biblical criticism made significant inroads into the consciousness of most Christian thinkers, the debate over slavery would introduce American readers to critical questions about history, doctrinal development, and hermeneutics” (Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 494–495). Although disagreements over scripture were nothing new, Holifield was correct that the debate over slavery not only drove Americans into opposing camps as they argued over enslavement but also changed how readers viewed the Bible. In moving from a precritical to a critical approach to scripture—a process charted by Hans Frei and others—readers recognized the vast differences between their world and biblical times, and this recognition transformed how they found meaning in the texts. In Slavery and Sacred Texts, Jordan T. Watkins assesses this awareness of “historical distance” and its influence on Americans’ views of scripture and the Constitution (4). The result is a book that should be required reading for anyone attempting to understand how Americans have grappled with the Bible, the Constitution, and their history.
American views of the past are of vital interest today. Conflicting views of the founding era, the nation's moral integrity, and the history of slavery have provoked controversy on various issues. To cite one instance, Watkins writes that the Black Lives Matter movement makes a claim on the past, focusing on how slavery has shaped the nation—a historical augment that has vast ramifications for the present. Working from James Baldwin's statement, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it,” Watkins writes that “Americans have failed to come to terms with the ways in which the past has unconsciously controlled us, in part, perhaps, because we have been too busy using the past to try to control our present” (xiv–xv). Various attempts to ground current views on a more perfect past reveal Americans’ tendency to sidestep the complexities of history and neglect the differences between the world of the past and the realities of the present. Such attempts at a simplistic reading of history do not go unchallenged, however, because “our period is characterized by a greater self and societal historical awareness” (xviii). In Watkins's view, Americans gained this greater historical awareness mainly through their antebellum debates over slavery. Specifically, Watkins “narrates how the biblical and constitutional debates over slavery in the decades before the Civil War gave rise to a new sense of historical distance in America” (xxii). The intractable disagreements over slavery—disputes that simple appeals to scripture and the Constitution could not settle—convinced many Americans they could no longer read the Bible and the Constitution without coming to terms with the contrasts between the world that produced these texts and the twenty-first century.
In eight chapters plus an introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, Watkins's argument unfolds chronologically, beginning with the seventeenth century and expanding to the Civil War. Watkins believes his “book's most innovative move is to show how the interpretive shift in biblical debates over slavery corresponded to a similar shift in constitutional debates over slavery” (18). Not that the slavery debates caused the constitutional arguments, but they corresponded, Watkins argues. From the 1830s, interpreters who tried to use scripture to oppose slavery admitted that the New Testament did not condemn slavery outright. But they claimed that Jesus and his apostles opposed slavery more subtly by teaching “principles” that would undermine “slavery with time” (26). A decade later, antislavery advocates made a similar move with the Constitution, admitting that the founders protected slavery but claiming they did so in hopes that future Americans would use the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to eliminate slavery (26). This reasoning supported the arguments of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and others. Douglass used this rationale to defend the Constitution in opposition to other abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and others, who were ready to condemn it as a slaveholding document (292–294). Antislavery arguments from the Bible and the Constitution employed the past in similar ways, therefore. This occurred as Americans often drew parallel truths from the Bible and the nation's founding, as when Frederick Douglass praised John Brown for grounding his beliefs on the Bible and the Declaration of Independence (336).
Slavery and Sacred Texts draws on an impressive range of sources, especially the writings of Theodore Parker, William C. Nell, and Frederick Douglass, and gives more attention to antislavery than proslavery perspectives on sacred texts. Watkins tries to connect the rising historical sensibilities of antebellum America with today's quandaries over American history. This is the epilogue's focus, reflecting on the rising recognition that the Bible and the Constitution “remained timeless, and sacred, precisely because of their capacity to adapt to new conditions, including those of mid-nineteenth-century America” (346). The Civil War and debates over slavery brought this kind of historical awareness to many, but not to all. The nation remains divided on its interpretation of history and its implications for national politics. As Americans reassess their history in light of contemporary realities, they would do well to engage the evidence and analysis in Watkins's book.
