The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
is offensive and indecorous, as it is to criticize the book of an author, or the dancing of an actress, or any thing else that is presented to public observation” (120). Following the spirit of 1 Corinthians 13 (the chapter on the virtue of love, or charity), women should “quietly” hold their own opinions and seek to promote “a spirit of candour, forbearance, charity, and peace” (128).
Acknowledging that the Bible sometimes calls upon individuals to serve the role of “reprovers” (145), Beecher said that Scripture “unequivocally point[s] out 49those qualifications which alone can entitle a man to do it” (146). Men should themselves follow “the example of the Redeemer of mankind” (150), in imitating his gentleness, his pity, and his love (151).
See also City upon a Hill; Esther as Political Archetype; Grimke, Angelina; Grimke, Sarah M. (An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States); Grimke, Sarah M. (Letters on the Equality of the Sexes); Slavery
For Reference and Further Reading
Beecher, Catharine E. 1837. An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins; Boston: Perkins & Marvin.
Gardner, Catherine Villanueva. 2004. “Heaven-Appointed Educators of Mind: Catharine Beecher and the Moral Power of Women.” Hypatia 19 (Spring): 1–16.
Beecher, Henry Ward
Preachers have influenced thinking about politics in America from the time of the Pilgrims to the present. Some, like Jonathan Edwards, are original thinkers, while other are better at reflecting changes in contemporary opinions. One of the most influential nineteenth-century preachers was Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), a Congregationalist who pastored the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and routinely spoke to Sunday audiences of two thousand to three thousand people. He was from a family of pastors and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who authored Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
During the Civil War, Beecher published a series of sermons under the title of Freedom and War that showed his evolving thinking on the subject of slavery. Unlike some of his colleagues, Beecher began by taking a relatively moderate view of slavery, believing that it was a moral evil but uncertain how it should be eliminated and unwilling to put all the blame on the South. After Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter and sought to leave the Union, however, he became increasingly convinced that slavery needed to be eliminated, and he increasingly portrayed Northern forces as aligned with good and Southern forces with the devil.
At a time when sermons often lasted two hours, Beecher would often reason from a relatively obscure biblical passage to contemporary issues, typically bringing in arguments from natural law and from a variety of other sources as well (Chesebrough and McBride 1990, 278). The first sermon in his book was entitled “The Nation’s Duty to Slavery” and was taken from Jeremiah 6:16–19, which described how Jeremiah had sounded the trumpet of impending doom and the people had refused to listen (1863, 1). His specific subject was John Brown, whom Beecher believed had become transformed from a somewhat unbalanced prophet to a martyr for the cause of liberty.
Beecher’s second chapter was based on the description in Luke 4:17–19 of Jesus appearing in a synagogue and proclaiming that he was fulfilling Scripture that called for preaching deliverance and setting the oppressed at liberty. In this sermon, Beecher argued against compromising with the South in order to avoid war. His next sermon, built around the story of Jesus calming a storm on the Lake of Galilee in Mark 4:37–39, was something of a jeremiad in that it pointed 50to a variety of national sins including not only slavery but also American aggression against Native Americans and Mexicans. Like Lincoln, Beecher recognized that both North and South had been complicit in establishing and perpetuating slavery. His denunciation of certain interpretations of the Bible were harsh: “If men can make the Bible teach me to disown childhood; if men can make the Bible teach me that it is lawful to buy and sell man, that marriage is impracticable between slaves, that laws cannot permit any custom which would hinder the easy sale of such property,” then they should be driven from the temple (79). He further observed “that wherever you have had an untrammeled Bible, you have had an untrammeled people; and . . . wherever you have had a Bible shut up, you have had a shut-up people” (80). He ended this sermon by comparing the need to awaken liberty to Jesus’s raising of Lazarus from the dead (82).
Writing on the verge of impending war, Beecher drew from Exodus 14:15 urging the nation, which he likened to the children of Israel pressed up against the Red Sea, to move forward and resist Southern interpretations of the Bible as teaching “the religion of servitude” (98). Beecher was especially outraged by Southern deprecations of the flag at Fort Sumter, and “The National Flag,” perhaps the most impressive of Beecher’s essays, followed and was based on Psalm 9:4, which referred to fighting under a banner of truth. He even compared the sight of the flag to biblical prophecies portraying the Messiah as a light shining in the darkness (124).
A sermon based on Deuteronomy 23:14, which referred to God as being in the midst of the camp, reflected contemporary fears of the moral dangers of army life. The next sermon, based on an encounter between Elisha the prophet and Joash, the King of Israel as recorded in 2 Kings 13:14–19, argued for the continuing vigor of the administration of government.
Although the eighth sermon was entitled “Moses and Duties of Emancipation,” it began with a reference to the prophet Samson in Judges 14:8. Here Beecher quoted from a speech by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States, in which Stephens, relying on a biblical analogy generally understood to refer to the Messiah, had argued that the belief in racial inequality was the cornerstone of that government (179). Beecher’s ninth sermon dealt with “The Church’s Duty to Slavery” and was based on Jesus’s teaching from Matthew 20:25–28, in which he contrasted Christ-like servant leadership with the way that Gentile princes ruled over their people (200). Although otherwise praising Abraham Lincoln, Beecher took a firm stance against recolonizing African Americans, unless they chose such a course for themselves.
Quoting from a Presidential Proclamation of May 19, 1862, in which President Lincoln expressed willingness to cooperate with states that were willing to begin a process of voluntary compensated emancipation, Beecher cited Isaiah 42:10–12 and compared this to “The Beginning of Freedom” because it demonstrated that a national leader had finally recognized the need to abolish the institution (223). Recognizing that the passage was filled with poetic imagery, in a sermon on “The Success of American Democracy,” Beecher began with a passage from Daniel 11:9–17, which referenced a war between a northern and a southern kingdom (248).
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Returning in the next chapter on “Christianity in Government” to Luke 4:18–19 (1863, 270), Beecher described the duty of Christian governments to provide for the weak and poor. Expressing reservations about whether emancipation would bring social equality, and using the N-word so predominately employed in the South at the time, Beecher said that Christ died as much for them as he did for whites (292). This was followed by a sermon taken from a single clause in 2 Peter 2:10 that warned against speaking evil of governmental officials (294).
While Lincoln often mused about whether God was using the Civil War as a form of national punishment, Beecher was much more explicit about this in a sermon drawn from 1 Chronicles 29:10–13, on “National Injustice and Penalty” (311). There he observed that “if it is possible for a nation to sin, it must be when it has been led systematically to violate all the natural rights of a whole race or people; and American slavery, by the very definition of our jurists, is the deprivation of men of every natural right” (318). He argued that slavery violated the right of individuals to their own labor, worked against stable family life, perpetuated ignorance, demeaned human life, ensconced an evil as a good, and brought God’s judgment on the nation (320–26). He concluded that “God is pouring out the vial of his wrath; and bearing witness, tremendous witness, by war, against slavery, and against the cruel wickedness of men that perpetuate it” (332).
Beecher drew his sermon “The Ground and Forms of Government” from Job 34:30, warning