The slaveholders’ use of the Bible was real, and the honest reply starts by admitting it. Dr. JP Foster, a pastor at Faithful Central Bible Church, does admit it. The argument built on that history still fails. To make the Bible serve slavery, its users had to misread Genesis 9, quote half of a verse in Acts 17 and physically cut most of the book away. People who must shorten a text to get its support are not following its plain meaning. The passages they leaned on hardest, read in context, say something else.
What did slaveholders actually do with the Bible?
Dr. Foster calls the opening section of his book on this subject “bearing the wound,” and he does not hurry through it. His summary is blunt: “Christianity was weaponized to dehumanize black people.” He calls it historical fact. He also names the emotional pull that other movements use when they recruit disillusioned Black Christians: they point to the rapes, the enslavement and the use of the faith as a weapon. He grants that the history behind those appeals is accurate. His concern is what people conclude from it when they lack the rest of the history.
So Dr. Foster asks the question himself and answers it without hedging: “was Christianity distorted and misused and abused to de-humanize black people in this country? Absolutely.” Lisa Fields frames why the admission matters. People in pain can be steered anywhere, and as she says, “it’s easy to be manipulated when you aren’t armed with truth.” Any reply that skips the wound loses the hearer, and it loses honesty with them.
Dr. Foster’s sharpest piece of evidence is a physical object. Dr. Foster describes seeing the slave Bible at the Bible Museum, and says “the slave Bible was like a pamphlet, like a church fan.” By his account, about 90 percent of the books from Genesis to Malachi were removed, along with 40 to 50 percent of the books from Matthew to Revelation. Those figures are his report of what he saw. Dr. Foster’s conclusion about the purpose is direct: the volume was “made to subjugate and to dehumanize black people to justify slavery.”
Notice what that object implies before any verse is read. Its makers did not trust the whole Bible to do their work. They needed a shorter one.
What does Genesis 9 actually say about Ham?
The most notorious misuse Dr. Foster names is the so-called curse of Ham. Slaveholders used it, he says, “to come to a conclusion that black Africans were perpetually used for servitude from generation to generation.” His reply is four words: “Ham wasn’t even cursed.” That sounds like a debating point. It is a plain description of the text.
The passage is a short narrative in Genesis 9:18-27. After the flood, Noah plants a vineyard, becomes drunk and lies uncovered in his tent. Ham sees his father’s nakedness and tells his two brothers, who walk in backward and cover Noah without looking. When Noah wakes and learns what his younger son did, he speaks. Genesis 9:25 records his words: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Three observations follow from reading the verse where it sits.
- The curse names Canaan, not Ham. The narrator prepares for this. Twice before the curse, in verses 18 and 22, Ham is introduced as “the father of Canaan.” The story is pointing at Canaan from the start.
- Noah speaks the words, not God. The narrative reports what an angry, recently drunk father said. Narrative of this kind describes; it does not instruct later readers to carry out what it records. Earlier in the same chapter, Genesis 9:1 says “God blessed Noah and his sons,” and Ham is one of those sons.
- Nothing in the passage mentions skin, Africa or perpetual slavery for any people. Those ideas had to be brought to the text from outside it.
The text leaves real questions open. Interpreters disagree about what exactly Ham did. The most common reading is that he dishonored his father by looking and then broadcasting it; others propose the wording hides a more serious act. Interpreters also disagree about why the curse lands on Canaan. Many read the scene as anticipating Israel’s later relationship with the Canaanites, whose land Israel would enter. Faithful readers differ on these details. None of the options comes near the slaveholders’ conclusion.
The next chapter settles the geography. Genesis 10:6 lists Ham’s sons: “Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.” Cush, the son most often associated with lands south of Egypt, is not the one Noah cursed. Genesis 10:15-19 places Canaan’s descendants along the eastern Mediterranean, from Sidon toward Gaza. Whatever the curse’s precise force, it attaches to the people of the land of Canaan.
So the curse-of-Ham argument needed a chain of substitutions. It swapped the cursed son for his father, Noah’s words for God’s decree, Canaan’s descendants for African peoples, and a story about one family for a permanent law over whole nations. Each swap goes against what the text says. That is why Dr. Foster describes it as using Scripture to manipulate Scripture.
How did Acts 17 become a segregation text?
Dr. Foster traces the same pattern past slavery. In the era of Jim Crow and redlining, he says, people cited the Tower of Babel and Acts 17, where God has marked out boundaries, to argue that the races were never meant to be together. His response is impatient for good reason: “what Bible are you reading? Have you read the Bible?”
Read the verse in full and the impatience makes sense. Acts 17:26 says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The boundaries are in the verse, but they come second. The sentence opens with one blood and one human family. Paul is speaking in Athens to an audience proud of its own ancestry, and his point is that every nation comes from the same Creator and answers to the same God. The segregationist reading worked only by quoting the last clause and dropping the first.
Doesn’t the Bible itself tell slaves to obey their masters?
This is the strongest objection. The slaveholders did not only misread Genesis. They also quoted New Testament household instructions addressed to slaves, such as Ephesians 6. Those passages are really there, and a skeptic can fairly ask whether the problem is the book after all. Dr. Foster does not work through those verses in this conversation, so his claim that the full Bible stands against slavery has to be checked against them.
The check holds up, with a limit. Paul wrote to churches inside a Roman world where slavery was everywhere, and he spoke to people already living in it. The same passage turns to the masters. Ephesians 6:9 tells them to stop threatening, “knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” Owner and enslaved stand before one Lord who plays no favorites. The law is sharper still on the act that built the Atlantic trade. Exodus 21:16 says, “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” First Timothy 1:10 lists “menstealers” among the lawless. These verses do not dissolve every difficult passage about servitude in the ancient world, and an honest reader should say so. They do show that a system founded on kidnapping and sale cannot claim the Bible as its charter.
Dr. Foster’s own answer to the deeper version of the objection is about human choice. When readers ask why a good faith could be used for so much harm, he says “what was done in Christ’s name wasn’t Christ. It’s not even the gospel at all.” People with free will chose to use the faith as a weapon. Then he corrects his own phrasing in a way that matters. He starts to say the same Bible was used, and stops himself: “no, it wasn’t the same Bible.” The cut-down edition is the evidence for his point.
What changed when people read the whole Bible?
Here the slave Bible returns. If the full text supported slavery, there would have been no reason to remove most of it. Dr. Foster’s line on this is the most memorable thing he says: “When Nat Turner got a hold of the whole Bible, Nat Turner turned up.”
His account is that Turner read Exodus and met the words of Exodus 5:1, where Moses tells Pharaoh that the God of Israel says, “Let my people go.” Dr. Foster describes Turner’s reaction this way: “wait a minute, you mean God demands my freedom?” That is Dr. Foster’s telling of Turner’s experience, and it should be heard as his interpretation. The textual point stands on its own. Exodus presents a God who hears enslaved people and acts against their enslaver. Dr. Foster traces a line from there to the civil rights movement, in which Black Christians used the Word of God as a path toward freedom.
He then points to the ministry of Jesus. John 4:4 says of Jesus, “And he must needs go through Samaria.” Interpreters debate whether that necessity was a matter of route or of divine purpose. Dr. Foster reads it as purpose, and the rest of the chapter supports him, because the story turns on a barrier being crossed. The Samaritan woman names it in John 4:9: “for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.” Jesus asks her for a drink anyway, and she goes back to her town telling people about him.
Paul’s letters, which Dr. Foster also cites, put the same move in doctrinal terms. Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Ephesians 2:14 says Christ “hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Colossians 3:11 ends, “Christ is all, and in all.” These verses do not pretend that ethnicity or social status vanished overnight. They deny that any of it ranks people before God or divides his household.
Whose religion was it before the slave ships?
Dr. Foster names what he sees as the core of all these distortions: “they had to dehumanize us and strip us from the image of God in order to treat us and dehumanize us the way that they did.” That diagnosis reaches back to the Bible’s first chapter. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image.” A system that wanted to own people could not leave that verse standing at full strength, so its defenders reached past it to a misread curse and a half-quoted sermon.
The timeline matters for the same reason. The charge assumes Christianity reached Black people through the slave trade, so its meaning belongs to the traders. Dr. Foster widens the history. He devotes a section of his book to North Africans such as Augustine, Tertullian and Athanasius, who worked out the church’s teaching on the Trinity and on Jesus being fully God and fully man, on African soil, before the faith came to Europe and America. Jude 3 Project holds the same historical point: Christianity took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe. If that is so, the slaveholders did not define the faith. They received something older than themselves and cut it down to fit their purposes.
None of this makes the church’s record clean, and Dr. Foster does not claim it does. His last text is the one he says haunts him. In John 17:21, Jesus prays “That they all may be one,” and then gives the reason: “that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” Dr. Foster draws the implication plainly. When Christians stay divided along the color line, they tell a watching world that the Father did not send the Son. By that measure, the question of whose religion this is gets answered less by old arguments than by whether Christians now treat one another as people made in God’s image.