Re: Your Political Stance - 2014 Edition
{pretty much every line of every statement}
We're going to need
this.
Is the only feedback you have from the Freedom from Religion Society?
First link I found, and in any case: Genetic Fallacy. The source of the information does not matter, its truth does.
At very minimum, Garrison was in the same neutral camp as Jefferson Davis.
Middle Ground Fallacy, but it's worse than that.
You are arguing that when Davis uses religion to support slavery we can't take him at his word because he's using political rhetoric. The proof offered for this is that to the extent that someone is Christian they can't support slavery (No True Scotsman), so since there's no proof it has to be a blanket statement that words used in the heat of political battle are inadmissible since they may simply be a ploy. But then you quote Garrison in the heat of the battle and say that contradicts what he writes in hindsight when the battle is over. To the extent that your dismissal of Davis' statement is true, your citation of Garrison as contradicting himself is undone by the
same logic. You either have to admit into evidence Davis' statement as supporting the proposition that slavery advocates sincerely believed their stance had God's approval, or you can continue to deny that but then admit that Garrison and others opposed slavery without religious conviction. You can't have both, and either alone is bad for you.
Yet nearly a third of the original AASS convention were strict Quakers
Begging the Question. Where does "strict" come from? We know 21 members were "Quakers," but we have no idea to what degree they were even observant. Thomas Paine was from a family of Quakers and took pains to distinguish Quakers as people who did not believe the Bible to be the literal word of God. Deists and Quakers are often lumped together in this period as being separate from mainstream Christianity in believing there is an inner light source that trumps ritual and scriptural mandates, which are man-made, and the establishment Christians of the time treated them as an "other" group. Saying they count in your win column is like trying to count Unitarian Universalists as part of the Christian right because they go to something they call a "church." The only way you can argue these were somehow especially observant is by saying "well of course they were since they opposed slavery..." which is circular reasoning.
The backdrop for all of this was the Second Great Awakening.
You mean this
Second Great Awakening?
Slavery in the 19th century became the most critical moral issue dividing Baptists in the United States. Struggling to gain a foothold in the South, after the American Revolution, the next generation of Baptist preachers accommodated themselves to the leadership of southern society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery and urging manumission (as did the Quakers and Methodists), they began to interpret the Bible as supporting the practice of slavery and encouraged good paternalistic practices by slaveholders. They preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters. In the two decades after the Revolution during the Second Great Awakening, Baptist preachers abandoned their pleas that slaves be manumitted.
After first attracting yeomen farmers and common planters, in the nineteenth century, the Baptists began to attract major planters among the elite. While the Baptists welcomed slaves and free blacks as members, whites controlled leadership of the churches, their preaching supported slavery, and blacks were usually segregated in seating.
Or the fact that in the 40 years between the end of the SGA and the outbreak of warfare, southern Baptists separated themselves religiously because their brand of religious observance and their ownership of other human beings were designed to be mutually reinforcing?
The Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society adopted a kind of neutrality concerning slavery, neither condoning nor condemning it. During the "Georgia Test Case" of 1844, the Georgia State Convention proposed that the slaveholder Elder James E. Reeve be appointed as a missionary. The Foreign Mission Board refused to approve his appointment, recognizing the case as a challenge and not wanting to overturn their policy of neutrality on the slavery issue. They stated that slavery should not be introduced as a factor into deliberations about missionary appointments.
In 1844, Basil Manly, Sr., president of the University of Alabama, a prominent preacher and a major planter who owned 40 slaves, drafted the "Alabama Resolutions" and presented them to the Triennial Convention. These included the demand that slaveholders be eligible for denominational offices to which the Southern associations contributed financially. These resolutions failed to be adopted. Georgia Baptists decided to test the claimed neutrality by recommending a slaveholder to the Home Mission Society as a missionary. The Home Mission Society's board refused to appoint him, noting that missionaries were not allowed to take servants with them (so he clearly could not take slaves) and that they would not make a decision that appeared to endorse slavery. Southern Baptists considered this an infringement of their right to determine their own candidates. From the Southern perspective, the Northern position that "slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus" effectively obliged slaveholding Southerners out of the fellowship.
A secondary issue that disturbed the Southerners was the perception that the American Baptist Home Mission Society did not appoint a proportionate number of missionaries to the southern region of the US. This was likely a result of the Society's not appointing slave owners as missionaries. Baptists in the North preferred a loosely structured society composed of individuals who paid annual dues, with each society usually focused on a single ministry.
Baptists in southern churches preferred a more centralized organization of congregations composed of churches patterned after their associations, with a variety of ministries brought under the direction of one denominational organization The increasing tensions and the discontent of Baptists from the South regarding national criticism of slavery and issues over missions led to their withdrawal from the national Baptist organizations.
The southern Baptists met at the First Baptist Church of Augusta in May 1845. At this meeting, they formed a new convention, naming it the Southern Baptist Convention.
tl;dr: The Southern Baptist church split off specifically over slavery.
Is there anything else from all the evidence I provided?
You've now helped to establish that the northerners who had metaphorical as distinct from literalist readings of the Bible founded the abolitionist societies, that southerners defended slavery as being God-ordained, and that Biblical literalists in the south were so serious about the connection between their slavery advocacy and their religion that they split off their religious sects
specifically to promote the religious rightness of slaveholding.
I'm not sure your argument can take much more of your examples.
