Slaveholding Theology: A 21st-Century Reckoning with How Scripture Was Twisted to Defend Slavery — and the Faith That Read It Right

American slavery did not merely survive alongside Christianity. It was built by a theology.For two centuries, trained clergy constructed, taught, and defended a doctrine that claimed chattel slavery carried the permanent sanction of God. They cited chapter and verse. They wrote catechisms. They printed a Bible with Exodus cut out. Slaveholding Theology names that system plainly and takes it apart the way it was assembled - verse by verse.With the precision of the academy and the fire of the pulpit, Rev. Dr. Billy J. Hill traces the four pillars slaveholders leaned on, exposes the invented "curse of Ham" that was never spoken in Scripture, and follows the Apostle Paul - a man who wrote his letters in chains - as he is wrongly conscripted to justify the very bondage he knew from the inside.But this book does more than dismantle. It rehabilitates the misread apostle, recovers the courageous counter-tradition of Douglass, Walker, Garnet, and the unnamed faithful who read Scripture more truthfully at the risk of their lives, and restores the full witness of a God who liberates.Rigorous enough for the seminary, clear enough for the pew, and honest enough for this present hour, Slaveholding Theology is a reckoning the 21st-century church can no longer postpone - and a companion volume to Onesimus: No Longer a Slave."That we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness." - 1 Peter 2:24