{"id":2023,"date":"2009-05-22T08:01:32","date_gmt":"2009-05-22T16:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2023"},"modified":"2009-05-22T08:01:32","modified_gmt":"2009-05-22T16:01:32","slug":"religion-and-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/religion-and-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion and rights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB124295698268845895.html\">review<\/a> of a new book by Simon Schama about American culture makes the usual argument that religion, not Enlightenment values, was responsible for abolishing slavery and expanding civil rights for blacks:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The main weapon in both the fight against slavery and the struggle for civil rights was shame, which has always been a peculiarly effective part of religion&#8217;s arsenal. It wasn&#8217;t, after all, the appeal of Enlightenment ideas that shattered slavery or modern rationalism that ended segregation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>writes David Shribman in today\u2019s Wall Street Journal (reviewing Schama\u2019s The American Future).<\/p>\n<p>No question that many abolitionists were motivated by their faith to fight slavery.\u00a0 But the argument that we can thank religion for the abolition of the slave trade runs up against the fact that the slave trade went on for centuries without protest from the Catholic or Anglican Church hierarchies.\u00a0 Southern Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church, supported slavery,\u00a0correctly citing Biblical injunctions that slaves should obey their masters and expect their rewards in heaven.\u00a0 Surely priests and ministers know as much about the requirements and implications of religious values as anyone else.\u00a0 There is nothing uniquely religious about \u201cshame,\u201d as Shribman claims.\u00a0 And it is unpersuasive to claim that enlightenment ideals of equal rights and universality had no influence on the abolition or civil rights movements.\u00a0\u00a0 Darwin opposed slavery as a violation of the brotherhood of man.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The vitality of American religious life that Shribman and Schama celebrate resulted, by his own account (by now a ubiquitous conceit), from the separation of church and state.\u00a0 Such separation was a purely Enlightenment concept, created by 18th century rationalists to end the blood-letting that has been so frequent a consequence of totalizing religious conviction.\u00a0\u00a0 The churches didn\u2019t voluntarily come forth and say: \u201cNever mind.\u00a0 We don\u2019t really want our secular power after all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A review of a new book by Simon Schama about American culture makes the usual argument that religion, not Enlightenment values, was responsible for abolishing slavery and expanding civil rights for blacks: The main weapon in both the fight against &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/religion-and-rights\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[114,247,248],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2023"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2026,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions\/2026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}