Hunting North American Indians in Barbados
By
Professor Patricia Penn Hilden
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ethnicst/es/hilden.html
(Reprinted with the kind permission of the author, as found originally at http://omni.ucsb.edu/cbs/xsite/lectures/legacy/Hilden.html)
This is a story. It is an abbreviated story of a quest, one that is far from finished. It begins with my first meeting with the great Caribbean poet, Kamau Brathwaite, on a rainy night in Canterbury, England, where Brathwaite was giving the first of three T.S. Eliot Lectures. That night, I heard him sing and drum and chant the echoes of West Africa, sounds he had found in Barbados, sounds he had heard as a child but which he hadn't then recognized because of the opposing cacophony of "Lil' England" noise then prevalent in Bajan identity formation. As I listened, I found myself thinking two things: first, that the indigenous sounds of North America were similarly muted, and even silenced, in our own version of "Lil' Englandism", and second, that something in what he was doing recalled an Indian amongst that African sound. At that time, I only wondered, though I began to talk to Kamau about this idea as the years passed and our friendship grew.
Then I visited Kamau Brathwaite in Barbados and he took me to look for Indians, in this case, the Arawaks, who had "disappeared" almost immediately after the first contact with Europeans, their diseases and their guns. We sought a site around a point at Pico. Brathwaite has written of this place, in Barabajan Poems.
"Now, final, Bathsheba. But we must include the
whole wild Maroon coast from RiverBay right
round to Pico & the miracle of Cove the ancien
(T) Amerindian religious settlement, through Ca-
ttlewash to Martin's Bay and congoRock & Con-
setts in the distance..."1
We didn't find Pico that day, though I have been there since. It remains a sacred place, despite the depredations of artifact-hungry archaeologists, who have lifted as much as possible of the indigenous material history of the island and placed it inside the post-independence Barbados Museum, where it lies in a special room designated "prehistory", producing a "heritage" for contemporary Barbadians in a manner familiar in North America.
But despite this assignment of Arawaks to a "pre-European, pre-African past", I continued to find Indians in Barbados. I kept seeing "Indian" place names, hearing "Indian" sounds. I knew, of course, that Indian slaves had come from South America and from the Mexican coast. But I knew also that many thousands of North America's indigenous peoples had been captured and sold into slavery. In fact, near the end of the 17th century, the Wampanoag leader, Metacomet, known to the English as King Philip, had warned New England's tribal people: "these people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of our parents and our council fires, and enslave our women and children."2 I knew that tribal people had worked across the colonies, enslaved in households and workshops, on farms and in fisheries. I knew, too, that Indian slaves worked side by side with African slaves, constituting 1/3 of the slaves in early 18th century South Carolina, for example. Moreover, a handful of historians, Almon Lauber in 1913, followed by Caroline Foreman (1943) and Jack Forbes (1993), had argued that the trade in North American Indian slaves did not limit itself to the North American colonies or even to the trade between America and Europe. So I began to wonder if some North American Indians had not formed part of the slave population in Barbados and thus possibly provided the sources for the place names - "Indian Pond," "Indian Ground," "Indian Corner" - that dot the Barbados landscape. My quest had begun.
I started in the National Archives of Barbados, looking first, rather randomly, through late 17th century records. I quickly discovered that all the myriad - and hopeless - efforts to regulate and control slave rebellion referred consistently to "African and other slaves". But I knew that Indian slaves had also been brought from Guyana and from Venezuela, so these could well have been the "others" referred to. Then I came across the following act, dated June 1676:
Act to Prohibit the Bringing of Indian Slaves to this Island
"This Act is passed to prevent the bringing of Indian slaves and as well to send away and transport those already brought to this island from New England and the adjacent colonies, being thought a people of too subtle, bloody and dangerous inclination to be and remain here....."
So there I had it: clear evidence that North America Indian people had indeed worked in Barbados's sugar plantation world. I then took up Richard Hall's Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados from 1643-1762.3 Here, too, were the tantalizing suggestions hidden in the language of more efforts to halt or prevent rebellion. I have time to read only a few:
27 October 1692:
An Act for the encouragement of all Negroes and other slaves that shall discover any conspiracy...
An Act for prohibiting sale of rum or other strong liquor to any ***** or other Slave...
An Act for the encouragement of such Negroes and other slaves that shall behave themselves courageously against the enemy in time of invasions (manumitted if two white men proved that they killed an enemy)...
And even more specific wording:
6 January 1708: An Act to prevent the vessels that trade here, to and from Martinico or elsewhere, from carrying off any *****, Indian, or Mulattoe slaves....
11 November 1731: Act for amending an Act...entitled 'Act for the Governing of Negroes and for providing a proper maintenance and support for such Negroes, Indians, or Mulattoes as hereafter shall be manumitted or set free....
Then a diversion. I encountered the only person who had then written about Indian slavery in Barbados, Jerome Handler. In 1968 he had written about the 1676 law but, knowing nothing of the history of North American Indian slavery, had reached different conclusions. Handler argued that North American natives formed only a minuscule, and therefore insignificant, number of Barbadian slaves. All the geographical references to "Indians", he insisted, referred only to Caribs or Arawaks, or to Indians brought from South America or the other Caribbean islands. "By the end of the first few decades of the eighteenth century," Handler wrote, there are few traces of [North American Indians] existing as a distinctive sub-cultural group."4
But "traces," I knew, are more significant than Handler allowed. Stubbornly, I went on looking.
There were words, and here are a few:
At the beginning of the 18th century, in a South Carolina peopled by Indians, Africans, and Europeans, where Charleston formed the heart of the bustling North American-Caribbean slave trade, "mustee" meant people born of all three. In 1770, another word. In Scotland a Society of Gentlemen offered this definition of "mulatto" in their Encyclopedia Britannica: or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: "Mulatto: a name given in the Indies to those who are begotten by a ***** man on an Indian woman, or an Indian man on a ***** woman."5
At the same time, North American colonial history was replete with references to Indians captured and sold into the slave trade, references often riddled with stereotypes born, as we shall see below, from the first moments of African Indian slavery. James Axtell, a noted scholar of the colonial era, offered a typical version of events: "The English incited 'civil' war between the tribes....[then] rewarded one side for producing Indian slaves who were then sold to the West Indies, often for more biddable black slaves."6 Axtell's absurd assertion, that "black slaves" were more desirable because more tractable, is repeated across United States history. Here is Yasuhide Kawashima, writing of Pequot warriors captured after escaping the Puritans' genocidal attempt to exterminate their people in the 1630s.7 After capture, they were "sold to the West Indies in exchange for more docile Blacks who became the first ***** slaves in New England." There are others like these two, purveying the same general idea, though with varying degrees of bigotry.
How did this stereotype of willing Black slaves and rebellious Indian slaves arise? Mason Wade offers a clue: "The French...at Biloxi and New Orleans attempted to use Indian slaves to work the tobacco plantations but these ran away and it was decided to import Blacks from the French West Indies."8
Of course. Indians could run away - to their own tribes, to other Indians, to escaped Black slaves in the many maroon communities that soon grew up wherever there was African slavery. So long as they were home, Indians knew where they were - much better than any European, as the records of Indian rescues of witless Europeans attest. Rather than trading boatloads of rebellious Indians for cargoes of "biddable" Africans, it is surely more likely that the English - in New England, Virginia, Barbados, and elsewhere - rounded up and exported any leaders or fomenters of rebellions, whether African or Indian. Removed from whatever place and community they knew, they were perhaps more easily subdued, more easily reduced to a state of hopeless exhaustion characteristic of any dislocated, enslaved peoples. (But it should be reiterated here that the laws of the Barbados Assembly testify eloquently to the constancy with which enslaved peoples continued to rebel, to run.)
Still, some more recent histories take a different view. Jill Lepore's In the Name of War, which narrates the Europeans' version of King Philip's War, takes note of the exchange of African and Indian slaves without characterizing either as "tractable" or "biddable." Indeed, she links Nathaniel Saltonstall's Continuation of the State of New-England, together with an Account of the Intended Rebellion of the Negroes in the Barbados, published in London in 1676, to the simultaneous revolt of New England Indians: "Terrified English colonists in Barbadoes believed that the Africans had 'intended to murther all the white people there,' just as panicked English colonists in New England feared that the Indians had 'risen almost round the countrey.'" She concludes, "the parallels between the two uprisings were uncanny and profoundly disquieting." Moreover, Governor Berkeley of Virginia complained in that same year that "the New England Indian infection had spread." And Barbados's panicky governor, Jonathan Atkins, had sent a similar warning to London shortly before: "the ships from New England still bring advice of burning, killing, and destroying daily done by the Indians and the infection extends as far as Maryland and Virginia."9
So there is some hope for the overturning of this canard. Still, this stereotype, once spread through the colonies, continued for a long time to "justify" the importation of vast numbers of Africans to "replace" the "disappearing" Indians who were, of course, being sold for profit to the Caribbean. However scarce, Indians continued to be captured and sold to Barbados. After the 1670 founding of Charlestown by Sir John Colleton and his fellow Barbadians, dozens more landless Barbadians flocked to the area where they quickly replicated Barbados economic and social practices. Anthony MacFarlane tells us, "there was...an ominous sign that [Carolina] would eventually follow [Barbados's] path, in that the settlers took Indians as slaves, both for their own use and for export to the West Indies."10 As commodities on the slave market, Indians were quite valuable. In neighboring Virginia in that era, "a child was worth more than her weight in deerskins; a single adult slave was equal in value to the leather produced in 2 years of hunting...By the latter half of the 17th century, if not before," Joel Martin reports, "slavery was big business in Virginia, an important part of the English trading regime."11
Marking the historical moments when the British sold captive Indians into the Caribbean slave trade is possible. Every single rebellion against the invaders, beginning with the first organized resistance to the Virginians at the beginning of the 17th century and continuing through the Pequot genocide (1630s), and Metacom's Rebellion (1675-76), produced Indian slaves for the Caribbean trade. The slave trade was extensive. There is room here for only a few examples. The Carolinians waged a long struggle with Spain in Florida, the fruits of which were often captive Indians. Between 1702 and 1707, thousands of missionized Indians - already trained into docility and servitude - were sold into the Caribbean. The next year, Englishmen in the Carolinas seized between 10,000 and 12,000 more Christianized Indians and quickly dispatched them to slave islands in the West Indies. The Tuscaroras and Yamassees were so afflicted by these English colonial practices that both nations went to war to try to stop it. Both paid a heavy price, though the Tuscaroras survived. When they inevitably lost their 1711 war, the entire surviving population managed to flee north where they found refuge with the five nations of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, ultimately surviving as the sixth nation of a confederation that continues today. The Yamassees, some of whom were part of the missionized Indians captured earlier, waged a long war against this slave trade, a war that lasted from 1715-28. They paid the ultimate price, their defeat signaling the virtual disappearance of the Yamassee nation though some survivors fled to other nations or to one of the hundreds of maroon communities across southeastern North America. A few years later, the defeat of the great pan-Indian rebellion of 1736-66, led by the famous war chief Pontiac, sent still more Indians on their way to Caribbean cane houses and cane fields. And from all the other invaded regions of North America came more rebellions, more slaves.
All the years between these markers, all over North America, slave raids and violent conflict produced humans for sale. The "Plantation Records" of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society carry these few documentary fragments. In 1630, John Winthrop sold an Indian to John Mainford of Barbadoes. Two decades later, Richard Ligon visited the island and recorded his "true and exact history", published upon his return to London in 1657.12 Ligon recorded many encounters with "Indian" slaves, many working in the houses of his hosts. One woman taught him how to make corn pone by "scaring it very fine (and it will fall out as fine as the finest wheat-flower in England....)."13 Indian men slaves made "perino", a drink "for their own drinking...made of Cassavy root, which I told you is a strong poyson; and this they cause their old wives, who have a small remainder of teeth, to chaw and spit out into water...."14 Ligon liked the Indians he met. He remarked, "As for the Indians, we have but few, and those fetcht from other Countries;...which we make slaves; the women who are better vers'd in ordering the Cassavie and making bread then (sic) the Negroes, we imploy for that purpose, as also for making Mobbie: the men we use for footmen and killing of fish, which they are good at; with their own bowes and arrows they will go out; and in a dayes time, kill as much fish as will serve a family of a dozen persons two or three dayes....They are very active men, and apt to learn any thing sooner than the Negroes....they are much craftier and sutiler then the Negroes; and in their nature falser; but in their bodies more active..."15
Of course generations of African diaspora scholars have demolished this kind of reading of the behavior of African slaves - wiser than the Indians in not leaping to do the bidding of owners and far "subtler" in keeping their attitudes to themselves. But that Ligon so admired these Indians suggests the extent to which the Barbadian plantocracy shared these views and was anxious to accumulate more such people.
Shortly after Ligon's return home, the Barbados Museum records tell us, a large number of Narragansetts from Connecticut were sold to Barbados. In 1668, at least one Indian slave was sent from Boston to the island while in 1700, a "big sale" of Indians from North America to the West Indies occurred. A year later, in 1701, Acolapissa Indian captives were sold by Virginians into the Caribbean.
The early 18th century saw no end to this trade though the bulk of the market may have begun to shift to the French speaking Caribbean as the British continued their conquest westward and as the French continued to use the slave trade's profits to support their war efforts.16 In 1729 the Louisiana French, together with their Choctaw allies, put an end to constant Natchez Indian revolts, capturing the Natchez war leader, Great Sun, plus some 480 others, and selling them all to the West Indies. The capture and sale of Natchez people to the islands continued until, one historian notes bleakly, by 1742 "the Natchez tribe had virtually disappeared."17
Small little markers - ephemeral traces - but signs nonetheless of a vast dislocation, a terrible colonial "trail of tears" as later forced removals came to be known. Indians slaves were useful; Indians slaves were profitable; Indian slaves left behind land for the Europeans to steal.
The quest continues, and there isn't time to narrate the further fragments I have found. But it is clear to me now that Indian voices, muted, mixed in the "Negroe, Indian, and Mulattoe" slave worlds of the 17th and 18th centuries, form an as yet little heard chorus, mixed into the complicated sounds of Barbados that Kamau Brathwaite has given that nation and the world. Even as I listened to Kamau sing us the drumming sounds of Mile and a Quarter that drizzly night in Canterbury, I really did hear, too, the softer sounds audible nearby at "Indian Groun(d)" (now a Seventh Day Adventist Church), these the sounds of the houmfort, the tonelle, the music of his Great Uncle Bob'ob the Ogoun (and the sounds of prejudice: "white man better than red man better than black man"18). It was not a fantasy. Hearing Brathwaite, I was hearing our Indian sounds, too, the drumming, the sounds of moccasined feet dancing the earth.
The extent of the trade in North American Indians that I and others are beginning to document becomes clearer with each foray into the archives. And increasingly the question becomes why the silence? I think there are two basic reasons. First, the overculture's silence is easily explained by the fact that its historians never want to come to terms with a bloody and terrible past. The acknowledgment of African slavery by overcultural U.S. historians took decades of struggle by African American scholars and activists. That the indigenous genocide hidden behind all United States history has yet to be recognized is, like the issue of Indian slavery, due to the powerlessness of indigenous peoples and - it must be said - to their own reluctance. The trade in Indian slaves was profitable both to whites and to Indians, and in many cases, the capture and sale would never have reached the extent it did without the active participation of indigenous people themselves. In a time when indigenous peoples are struggling to re-write their own histories, tell their own stories, interpret their own literatures in their own indigenous ways, research not surprisingly focuses less on the painful histories of collaboration and inter-tribal warfare and more on resistance and struggle. But the whole story, the entire past, matters - to all of us. And so this work must be done. Beyond the enriching of Native America's own history, as well as that of the overculture, there are other implications buried within this quest. Here, too, scholars of the African diaspora have given us a crucial lead, and we must follow it. A few examples only. As Judith Carney has painstakingly recorded the African roots of southern rice production, so Indian scholars must add the Indian roots of that same agriculture. As Michael Gomez has shown us with precision the African origins of southern slaves, so we must try to track our own peoples as they disappeared into the vast maw of the West Indian slave markets. As Kamau Brathwaite has recorded the African cultural roots of Bajan identity, so we must add the North American Indian contribution - to the Bajan world, as well as to the world across the Caribbean. It is time, as I realize again every time I am swamped by invitations to come to Jamaica, to the Dominican Republic, to Haiti, to Martinique and Guadaloupe, to Cuba, and back to Barbados whenever I speak of this work. Women I meet tell me that their old grannies have always told the grandchildren that they were Indian as well as African. They want me to come tell these ladies that this is so and why before their grannies die. Others - Caribbean people now living in the United States - recount similar family stories, tales that always before seemed preposterous to many of their hearers, or tales that many argued linked people of African descent only to the Arawaks or Caribs but never, ever to North American Indians.
But perhaps it is more than this. Perhaps for us indigenous scholars, it is just now, at last, time. In the words of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot:
"At some stage, for reasons that are themselves historical, most often spurred by controversy, collectivities experience the need to impose a test of credibility on certain events and narratives because it matters to them whether these events are true or false, whether these stories are fact or fiction."19
Notes
1Barabajan Poems 1492-1992 (Kingston and New York: Savacou North, 1994):228
2This 1675 speech is attributed to Metacomet by William Apess, a Pequot Indian writing in 1836. See Colin Calloway, ed. The World Turned Upside Down: Voices from Early America (New York, Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1994):20
3London, 1764
4Handler, "The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," vol. 8 (1968): 39
5Vol. 3 (Edinburgh: printed for A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar. 1771): 314
6Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981):239
7 Kawashima, "Indian Servitude in the Northeast," in Handbook of North American Indians: History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb Washburn (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988):404
8French-Indian Policies," in ibid, p.4
9 8 Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998): 173-5, 153, 170, 167-8, resp.
10MacFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1`480-1815 (London: Longman, 1994):111
11 "South Eastern Indians and the English Trade in Skins and Slaves," in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994):308
12 Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes: illustrated with a map of the island and also the Principal Trees and Plants there, Set forth in their Proportions and Shapes, drawn out by their several and respective Scales (London: Frank Cass, 1970). (1st edn. London: privately printed, 1657; 2cd edn. London: for Peter Parker & Thomas Guy, 1673).
13ibid. pp.29-30
14ibid. p.32
15ibid. p.55
16 The French had long been immersed in a thriving trade in Indian slaves, most of them sold either to colonists in what became the United States or to Canada. So common was the sale of Pawnee Indians to Canada that the French Canadian word for slave is "panis". The historian of this trade is M. Trudeau.
17 Daniel Usner, "American Indians in Colonial New Orleans," in Peter Wood, Gregory Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989):109
18Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems, p.129
19 Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995): 11
Issues in Caribbean Amerindian Studies
(Occasional Papers of the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink)
Vol. VI, No. 2, Aug 2004 - Aug 2005.
You are invited to share any of your comments or criticisms of this paper with the author, via:
hilden@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Added to the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink on:
Friday, 12 August, 2005
There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious of as
the extent and strength of his prejudices.
—Francis Jeffrey1
Several of the writers of the Bible didn't care much for females. More than one thought homosexuals were vile. Some considered foreigners to be slightly less human than God’s Chosen People.
If the Bible is the record of imperfect humans, each limited by his own historical and cultural context, struggling to comprehend the divine, then we can approach its contents as those who carry forward this legacy. We can marvel at what our forebears achieved in their attempts to see Goodness "through a glass, darkly”2 and to model their societies and their individual lives on what they saw. We can look with humility on their failings, knowing that, if we are willing, they can teach us about our own.
If, on the other hand, the Bible is the perfect revelation of an unchanging God to humankind, then he feels the same as those early writers about females, homosexuals, and foreigners, and a host of social issues like privileged blood lines, vengeance, and slavery. People who commit
themselves to biblical literalism should know what this means. Recently, I read an essay in which an ex-believer told the story of his journey into and out of the faith. He said something like this: “Finally I found a church that was warm, loving, and accepting. Same sex couples were welcome, women were involved in the ministries, and members came from many different cultures. I didn’t know at the time how much of the Bible they had to ignore to create that kind of worship community.” How much did his church have to ignore? Let’s take a look.
What the Bible Teaches About Gender Equality
For starters, the God of the Bible is irrefutably male. The pronouns used for God are one indicator, and they are consistent throughout the Old and New Testaments. When God appears in human form, both in the Old Testament and in the incarnation of Jesus, he takes the form of a male human. Now, presumably, this male-ness isn’t sexual. It doesn’t mean that God has a penis. At the very least it doesn’t mean only that God has a penis. It means that in those core character traits that make the average woman different from the average man, God is more like the average man.
Here are some things we can say with confidence about the ways male humans on the average differ from females: more physical strength, higher aggression, more focus on uniqueness and difference rather than similarities and shared themes, more mathematical ability, less verbal ability, more self-focus, more independence, and lower empathy.3 Together these qualities lead men, generally, to be dominant, to innovate more, and to nurture less. Exactly which combination of these qualities, or other differences yet unknown, cause the Judeo-Christian God to be described as a male, we don’t know. What we do know, if we take the Bible literally,
is that overall males are more God-like than females. The rest follows.
According to the second chapter of Genesis, the first woman, Eve, is made from the rib of Adam to be a companion to him after God finds that Adam is lonely. God brings all the animals to Adam, one by one, and he names them. But none is found to be a suitable companion, so God
makes Eve.* From that beginning, it is clear that power and authority are in the hands of men.** The genealogies of the Old Testament list fathers and sons. When God blesses sterile women with babies, they are male. Righteous men offer up their daughters and concubines to marauding rapists, rather than offering up their male houseguests or themselves, and they remain righteous. When the Law is given, menstrual women are designated as spiritually unclean, as are women who have recently given birth. A woman is unclean longer after giving birth to a girl than after giving birth to a boy, twice as long, in fact (66 days vs. 33 days; Lev. 12). If a female is killed accidentally, the fine is less than for the accidental killing of a male.
The Patriarchs are patriarchs, not matriarchs. They have sex with their female slaves and concubines, but their wives have no parallel privilege. Priests are male, the greatest prophets of God are male, and when the civil authority of the Hebrews transitions from tribal chiefs to a monarchy, the Hebrews get kings, the wisest of whom has seven hundred wives. Women are veiled and are forbidden to wear men’s costumes. They worship in separate compartments from men, as do Orthodox Jewish women today. The writer of Proverbs complains that a nagging wife is like the relentless dripping of rain. He says that it is better to live in a corner of the housetop, or even in the wilderness, than in a big home with a contentious woman (Prov. 21, 25, 27). The Bible contains no analogous complaints about obnoxious husbands because there are no female writers.
Does the New Testament get better? “The head of every man is Christ,” says Paul in 1 Corinthians, “and the head of the woman is the man…” (1 Cor. 11:3). If a woman prays or prophesies with her head uncovered, she dishonors herself and should be shorn or shaven. If she doesn’t want her head shaved, she should keep it covered! (1 Cor. 13:5, 6). “[A man] is the
image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (1 Cor. 13:7–11). Women are forbidden to speak in church, even to ask questions. “If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a
shame for women to speak in the church” (1 Cor. 14:34). The book of 1 Timothy elaborates. “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding,
she shall be saved in childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:11–15).
Modern literalists often say that it isn’t that women are inferior, it’s just that men and women have different roles. And besides, men are taught to be loving and respectful toward their wives and to take good care of them. But those fundamentalists who boldly assert the inferiority
of women are more aligned with the actual words of scripture and the attitudes of biblical figures from the patriarchs to the apostles than are their egalitarian brethren.
What the Bible Teaches About Homosexuality
I admit it. In contrast to what I’ve written about women, I’m on shaky ground accusing the Bible authors of a distaste for homosexuals. Scholars arguably have demonstrated that most Bible verses which appear to condemn homosexuality are mistranslations, deliberate substitutions of clearly anti-homosexual words for ambiguous Greek or Hebrew words,
or scripture taken out of context.4
Even the term sodomite meant something different to the writers of the New Testament and the early church fathers than it does today. In the centuries before and immediately after the death of Christ, the core sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not seen as sexual.5 “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen” (Ezek. 16:49–50).
For much of Christianity’s first fourteen hundred years, homosexual behavior was seen as a minor sin like gluttony or greed.6 Even so, I don’t believe that verses like the following can be adequately explained, except in the context of the tribal, patriarchal desert society they were written in:
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death: their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13).
God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Rom. 1:26–27).
The word that is translated abomination in Leviticus is the Hebrew to’ebah. This word has a specific use: to condemn pagan religious cult practices. Thus, it is likely that Leviticus refers to homosexual acts in the context of pagan worship. Furthermore, this verse is part of the Hebrew
Holiness Code, which also condemned cutting beards, wearing cotton mixed with wool, and eating seafood, rabbits, or rare meat. So the prohibition against man-to-man sex must be considered in its context. Nevertheless, the behavior in question is condemned strongly, more so than most other code violations. It is condemned as strongly as premarital sex, which also carries the death penalty, though for females only (Deut. 22:20–21), and extramarital sex, which carries the death penalty for both participants (v. 22).
The verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans seems more clear. It expresses the view that homosexual acts violate God’s intentions. Again, this must be taken in context. Paul describes marriage between a man and a woman as a concession to prevent the temptation of promiscuous desires. Ideally, believers should be abstinent. (Paul’s writings inspired
the celibacy of the priesthood in Catholicism and the exhortation for universal abstinence by Shakers.) So to some extent, sex itself is seen as a violation of God’s intentions. However, this perspective is interwoven with the idea that the union of a man with a woman is holy and provides an earthly model for Christ’s mystical union with his bride, the Church.7 No such beautiful words about homosexual unions are evident anywhere in Paul’s letters.
If we accept these direct incriminations of homosexual acts, then other, more ambiguous passages of the Bible appear consistent with this view (e.g. Jude 1:7). Several places in the New Testament, male prostitutes and [a word that may possibly mean gays] are barred from the kingdom of heaven, along with thieves, drunkards, and adulterers, which includes
anyone who is divorced and remarried (1 Cor. 6:9–10; Matt. 5:32, Matt. 19:9). And gays (possibly) are listed among men who are lawless and rebellious along with murderers, people who kill their parents, slave traders, perjurers, and liars (1 Tim. 1:9–10). Biblical passages regarding homosexuality are open to interpretation, but most likely they reflect actual negative attitudes that existed in the culture surrounding the writers. It is not unusual for patriarchal cultures to look negatively on non-procreative sexual behavior or any kind of behavior that might blur loyalty, lineage, or a man’s claim to his wife(s) and offspring. Since the fifteenth century, the position of orthodox Christianity has been profoundly unambiguous, labeling homosexuality as contrary to reason and to natural law, and condemning homosexuals to
ostracism and eternal punishment.*
If we take the Bible literally, female believers have at least a shot at righteousness, if not equality. “Women will be saved through childbearing —if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Tim. 2:15). By contrast, homosexual believers, unless they are abstinent and avoid committing sodomy in their hearts, are doomed to live in the shadow of God’s disapproval along with remarried couples and liars.
What the Bible Teaches About the Brotherhood of Mankind
In the land of Palestine at the time of Jesus, there lived a tribe of people called Samaritans. Genetically and culturally related to the Jews, they were nevertheless distinct, having split from the rest of the Hebrews hundreds of years before. The Jews thought them lesser, unclean, and
had no dealings with them. They were not the Chosen race. And racial purity mattered.
The patriarch, Abraham, from whom all Jews are said to be descended, married his half-sister to make sure he got the bloodline right. He later sent a servant back to his ancestral home to fetch a wife for his son, Isaac. “Put your hand under my thigh. I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac” (Gen. 24:2–4). But for his son, Ishmael, born of a slave, he had no such concern. God had already declined to make Ishmael the favored lineage. The message of Genesis is clear. God may appreciate good behavior, but his chosen ones are his Chosen ones, and being chosen is about ancestry.
From Genesis on, God promises the land of Canaan not to those who worship him in spirit, but to the children of Abraham. As the descendants of Abraham claim this land, Canaanite children are cursed and killed for the sins of their fathers. Families are annihilated, not for individual wickedness, but because they belong to the wrong city and tribe. Always, massacres are justified because the people killed are heathens, enemies of the one true God. But the lines are drawn almost exclusively along tribal boundaries. And the deaths of foreign innocents warrant
nary a mention.
Jump ahead to the New Testament. In Matthew, a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew, calls out, begging Jesus to heal her daughter, who is possessed by demons. “Lord, Son of David,” she calls him. But he ignores her. Finally, his disciples get sick of her following them and shouting, and they ask him to send her away. Finally, Jesus tells her he was sent only to the lost children of Israel. She keeps begging. In the end he heals her daughter, but listen to their conversation as depicted by the gospel writer:
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss
it to their dogs.”
“Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall
from their masters’ table.”
Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request
is granted” (Matt. 15:25–28).
If the image doesn’t bother you, try to imagine an American slave or a South African Black having to do and say the same things to get health care for her child. “Please, sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
Jesus himself preached to the Samaritans, and his disciples took the message of salvation to the Gentiles—to the far corners of the world, they claimed. Paul, the Apostle, declared that in Christ there was neither Gentile nor Jew. But does that mean there were no longer Samaritans?
I’m afraid not. Salvation was open to all, but as we will see later, God’s chosen people continued to behave much as the chosen people have behaved since the beginning of Genesis, four to six thousand years ago. Women aren’t the only ones who have been obliged to worship in separate
compartments in the last 200 years.
Logically, one could argue that just because the Bible teaches that women are inferior, homosexuality is evil, and some races are Chosen while others are “dogs,” this does not mean that the Bible is wrong. Maybe women are inferior in some critical way. Maybe unrepentant gays are going to hell. And maybe God does prefer some bloodlines over others. But other explanations are possible.
We know factually that male humans are, on the average, more aggressive, more status oriented, and physically stronger than females. (So are male chimpanzees.) We also know that throughout the natural world, this combination results in dominance, the dominance of males over females in some species, females over males in others, and certain individuals over others within species, independent of gender. This has nothing to do with morality or with any of the virtues we cherish and attribute to God. Aggression is power. Strength is power. And, status
orientation provides a strong motivation to use both in the service of dominance. In other words, we know that independent of any God-given mandate, male humans would pursue the top role and would largely succeed in obtaining it by virtue of biology. We also know that humans use rules and religious doctrines to maintain dominance once it is established. Consider, for example, the Hindu caste system, which maintains the status of the Brahmins, or the European feudal system that once protected hereditary nobility.
So, which is more likely:
? That the God who created the universe, the laws of physics,
and sexual reproduction commands that one gender be subservient
to the other.
? Or that males, being more aggressive, status oriented, and
physically stronger than females set up the rules that way?
We also know that humans, like every other life form that depends on sexual reproduction, are, on average, preferentially attracted to members of their own species who have the potential to produce and rear viable offspring. Any species that wasn’t, would be at quite a disadvantage. The physical attributes that human males typically find attractive in human females are linked to fertility: large eyes, small waists, developed breasts, curves, smooth skin, and thick hair. Together these are suggestive of premenopausal sexual maturity and health, in other words, what scientists call reproductive fitness. We also know that these preferences are not cognitive but rather instinctive. Male humans, on average, are programmed to be turned off by characteristics which suggest that a potential sexual partner is post-menopausal, pre-pubescent, or male. The “yuck factor” kicks in.
So, which is more likely:
? That the God of mercy, justice, and love, (who, by the way, made a variety of animal species that engage in homosexual behavior) finds homoerotic behavior and same-gender love relationships to be morally abhorrent in humans.
? Or that humans (who must be attracted to the opposite gender for the sake of species survival and who, in consequence, typically have a built-in aversion to “misplaced” sexual attraction)
mistake their own instinctive distastes for morality?*
We also have mountains of evidence that humans show a universal tendency to see the world in tribal groupings: in-groups and out-groups. Children form cliques, team loyalties, and school rivalries. Nationalism is easy to arouse in adults, and even within geographic boundaries, a
Milosevic or Hitler has no trouble splitting a nation into opposing factions based on race, language, or religion.
All humans have different norms for how we treat insiders and outsiders. Sometimes these are very explicit, like rules prohibiting interracial or inter-sectarian marriage. Sometimes these are subtle, like differences in altruism or empathy. We perceive outsiders as slightly less human than our own group, are less horrified by violence committed towards one of them, and are less likely to help them at our own risk. Our natural tendency is to value our countrymen and co-religionists more than others, and we expect God’s loyalties to reflect our own. How many times have you seen a sign that says, “God Bless America?” How many times have you seen one that says, “God Bless the World?”
So think about it. Which is more likely:
? That the God of the universe has a favorite bloodline of humans and intervenes in tribal territorial disputes in their favor.
? Or that members of each tribal group and culture including the descendants of Abraham, think of themselves as the most important and assume that their god shares their bias?
These are grave questions, because the biblical attitudes described in this chapter promote division and oppression. They place the interests of one group above those of another. They justify behavior that contradicts other moral values including, ironically, those most emphasized in the gospels: peacemaking, caretaking, healing, and love. And they do so
in the name of God.
It is convenient to believe that God sanctions our instincts to dominate certain others, to reject them, or to see their needs and suffering as lesser than our own. God’s stamp of approval removes the need for us to wrestle with ourselves. But are these instincts righteous or base? And does the existence of these attitudes in the Bible add credibility to the attitudes themselves or raise questions about the Bible as the timeless and inerrant word of God?
To Consider
In absolute terms, the Bible codifies sexism, anti-homosexual attitudes, and racism. Literalists have little choice but to embrace these three attitudes, thus arguing that inequality is God’s will, or to deny that inequality is inequality, typically by using the same kind of “separate but equal”
arguments that were once used to justify segregation. The one stance pits them against morality and the other against reality. Biblical literalism has a long history of pitting believers against morality and reality. Most of the harm done by Christians through the ages has been because of the tendency of church leaders or individual believers to take biblical texts literally and out of context, to develop doctrines based on this approach, and then to use these doctrines, or the texts themselves, to rationalize bigotry, violence, insularity, or self-interest.
In the past, many believers had no better way to understand the Holy Book. Mysticism seemed incomprehensible to most, and the tools of textual analysis had not yet been invented. Today, these tools are available to anyone who cares to understand the roots and essence of the ancient documents that make up the Bible. And yet many churches continue to ignore or deny the complicated history and ugly parts of scripture. In this way, they bind themselves to some teachings that are simply distracting and others that promote evils, both great and small.
A different approach looks at biblical mandates not in absolute terms, but in relative terms. It asks: how can we understand the Bible in the context in which it was written? How did Mosaic Law, the attitudes of Old Testament writers, the living example of Jesus or the teachings of
Paul compare to what came before? Seen in this light, in their cultural context, many Judeo-Christian teachings can be seen to promote progress toward more egalitarian gender relations or a more inclusive understanding of humankind.* This allows a different set of questions. Instead of looking at a Bible passage in absolute terms and asking: does this passage teach racism or sexism, and does that racism or sexism constitute goodness?, one may look at the same set of verses in relative terms and ask: does this passage reflect progress, a trend, and does that trend constitute goodness?
*What God would have had in mind for reproduction before that is an interesting question. Whether Adam had genitalia before that; whether God then reconfigured the other animal species to add genitalia and females and sexual reproduction, these also are interesting questions to ponder.
**Christians who assert the equality of women emphasize Genesis 1, in which male and female humans are created simultaneously and two sexes share the image of their creator, or possibly creators.
*The “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude frequently encouraged by Evangelical churches toward homosexuals is thin. It is one thing to say “love the sinner, hate the sin” when a person has stolen a candy bar or a car or engaged in some other behavior that is transitory or intermittent and contradicts that person’s own sense of identity. It is another thing altogether to promote this attitude when being gay (being attracted to/falling in love with/bonding intimately with people of the same gender) is core to someone’s sense of self. One cannot reject the sentiments and behaviors in question without rejecting the person.
*I mean misplaced only from the standpoint of evolutionary biology with the assumption that sexual attraction is fine-tuned to serve the purpose of reproduction. In actuality, humans create loving sexual bonds for all kinds of reasons, social and emotional, and these may have little or nothing to do with reproduction. It is noteworthy that people often have the same reaction to a relationship between a young man and a much older woman that they have to homosexual relationships—yuck. It is also noteworthy that heterosexual couples who choose not to have children or who remain sexual after childbearing have been condemned during some epochs of Christian history.
*This is the stance of modern Judaism. Judaism values inquiry, “wrestling withGod.” Consequently, in the 2500 years since the last manuscripts of the HebrewBible were written, Jewish scholars have produced a broad body of sacred interpretiveliterature. This provides a nuanced understanding of early religious textsand practices. Like Christianity, Judaism includes Orthodox members of thefaith who believe they adhere to literal interpretations of ancient rules. However,the strong tradition of inquiry means that these orthodox believers are asmall portion of those who call themselves Jewish.
If you found this chapter thought-provoking, the book is available at www.lulu.com/tarico. Previous chapters and other musings by this writer can be found at www.spaces.msn.com/awaypoint.