NEW! The Problem of Slavery in Christian America

It’s finally here! After much tedious, painstaking, and gut-wrenching effort on my part, my long-anticipated work The Problem of Slavery in Christian America is finally available. You can get yours in our store in Paperback, Kindle, ePub, or PDF today for $20. (See Table of Contents below.)

As always, any orders over $50 in our store qualify for FREE shipping.

Folks, this is not an introductory volume, nor is it for the faint of heart. This book will mean not just painting your heroes warts and all, but in some cases losing respect for your heroes altogether. Several of my proofreaders and advance readers were shocked. Some said it changed their entire view of American history. All were awakened to a new level. All were Christians and well-read in American history to begin with, yet they had never heard some of the shocking details. Material of this type is dense and fills almost every paragraph throughout the book, and the book weighs in at around 460 pages total. It could have been 600, but I had made my points and had to get this done.

I wrote this book for multiple reasons, and I feel like I have achieved the goals I set out to accomplish:

1) The full extent of the injustices done to blacks, as well as the lasting legacies of these injustices, is largely unknown, especially among white Christians and conservatives. There is broad ignorance. Some of it innocent not-knowing. Whites in general simply do not have much teaching, let alone perspective, at all on the true extent, nature, and depth of the black experience.

To be brief, it is far more extensive, far worse in nature, lasted far longer, had much further-reaching implications, and was far more varied than virtually anyone talks about. Yet talking about it is crucial to healing, beginning in the church, and this simply means we need to do far more listening. This book is about listening. I did nothing but absorb information intensively for about two years or more on it. I offer to you for you to listen to.

To be clear: very little of what I relate about any of this is interpretation. I have done my best only to offer objective laws and statements from original sources that matter. I do cite secondary sources in places, but the backbone is all the relevant words of the documents themselves. The unknown depths of the black experience to which I refer are not my opinion; they are objective facts, and all you need to do to learn them is to study the development of the law. There is much besides this, of course, but this is the core of it, and it is not debatable.

2) Southern mythology still exists, and it must be squashed completely. Much of our ignorance stems from deception, not simple lack. The strength of the delusions taught by some Southern apologists, historical and contemporary, is still far too great. One of the historical realities you’ll encounter is how the vast and pervasive anti-black culture was created as part of a mythology and propaganda, and how much the churches either helped create it or stood by approvingly. This continues still today in some conservative Presbyterian and Baptist circles, among others.

3) One of the main reasons I undertook this study and wrote this book: I want to write a book on a biblical view of criminal justice reform; but you cannot understand the problems with the criminal justice institutions in this country unless you understand the history of slave law and slavery, as well as racism. This book is necessary for both looking backward and forward.

Understanding the legal transformations stemming directly from the reaction of whites to blacks in the nineteenth century is crucial to understanding the now-general tyrannies in police power and court power under which we all now live, and which, due to our ignorance of the past, we largely do not even realize as tyranny. In short, much of modern policing, corrections, prosecutorial immunities and privileges are little more than extensions of what whites implemented originally just to control slaves, and later the free black populations. My desire to write a book on a biblical view of criminal justice reform led me into Roman civil law systems, an ultimately into slave law systems in America. This was the necessary groundwork for going forward.

I think I have presented the material solidly enough to achieve these goals and more. Part I of the book gives a comprehensive outline of the development of slave laws and some political and cultural history from the earliest arrival of Africans up until the Civil Rights era. Then, in Part II, I back up and cover the role of the churches throughout the same time period. It was not pretty.

I’ll have more to say on this in the near future, but as far as I know, there is no other single book that covers all these issues, let alone together, and not to the same extent.

I’ll give you one little teaser/spoiler: the intellectual hero of the time should have been the Quaker George Keith, who published the earliest-known critique of American slavery in 1693—and it was strictly theonomic. That’s right, a Quaker, and theonomic. No one listened to him, but had they done so, God’s law would have ended the entirety of the sad tale of American slavery and racism altogether before it really ever began. I’ll leave you to Part II of the book for the rest of that detail.

Then, I finish with a little appeal from a racially-charged mandate from Scripture, involving a few characters on the Jericho Road.

Now, I need you to help me get the word out. Get your copy of The Problem of Slavery in Christian America today, and like, share, and tell all your friends. I am very proud of this work, very happy to have it available for you, and very hopeful for what it could help accomplish—if we will listen.