ABSTRACT
SCHOLARS OF STATURE within mainline Christian denominations have produced immense literature on the Bible and slavery with very little unanimity. Some have written about the various types of antislavery arguments found in the Old and New Testaments. Others have engaged in rigorous historico-critical exegesis of selected Scriptures used to condone slavery. What is interesting in the analyses by liberationists is the direct correlation between apologetic selectivity and the exegetes’ political-social commitments. Thus, my particular concern as a liberation ethicist is to unmask the hermeneutical distortions of white Christians, North and South, who lived quite comfortably with the institution of chattel slavery for the better part of 150 years. Slaveholders knew that in order to keep racial slavery viable, they needed-in addition to legal, economic, and political mechanisms-religious legitimation within the White society.
