Someone you love tells you the Bible is a slaveholder’s book, and you have to decide what to say next. Over three sittings, you will practice admitting the wound without flinching, reading the hard passages for yourself, and rehearsing the conversation out loud. The aim is to be steady enough in your own reading of Scripture that you can stay present with someone else’s hurt, without freezing and without faking certainty.
You can work through it alone with a notebook, or with two to eight people around a table. Each sitting takes about forty-five minutes. Bring a Bible, a pen, and permission to say less than you know.
Sitting one: Start where they are
Esau McCaulley does not open this question by defending the Bible. He opens it by naming what happened. When he explains why trust in Scripture is a sharper question for Black people, his answer is short: “the Bible has been used against us.” He traces that use from capture through the Middle Passage, the auction block, slavery itself, and on into Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement. He also calls it “a question that goes all the way back to the first time someone who was enslaved heard about Jesus.”
Your friend’s objection has a long history. Enslaved people asked it, and so did every generation after them. Treat it with the seriousness that history deserves.
First observation
Before you read anything, write down the strongest version of your friend’s claim in their own terms. Do not soften it. Then write one sentence describing how it lands on you when you hear it. Do you feel defensive, ashamed, or unsure? You will come back to this page at the end of sitting three.
Scripture: what staying looks like
Read Job 2:11-13 slowly. Job’s friends hear about his suffering and travel to him. The text says, “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13).
This is narrative. It describes what the friends did; it does not command a seven-day silence. Read on, though, and you see the same friends start talking in chapter 4 and keep talking for most of the book. By chapter 42 God says they have not spoken of him rightly (Job 42:7). Their best moment was the one where they said nothing.
Now read James 1:19: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” James writes to believers under pressure, and his instruction runs in a specific order. Hearing comes first.
What McCaulley models
McCaulley says he came to faith in “a context of deep hypocrisy and confusion,” and he speaks directly to people the church has hurt: “I’m sorry that this happened to you.” He does not call the hurt a misunderstanding, and he does not let it settle the question about God. He keeps those two things apart.
Practice: the listening paragraph
Write a short paragraph you could say to your friend that contains no argument at all. It should show that you heard what was done, and to whom. Read it aloud. If it contains the word “but,” cross out everything after it and try again. In a group, read paragraphs in pairs and tell each other one place where the words sounded like a defense in disguise.
For anyone leading: some people in your group carry their own memories of Scripture used as a weapon, sometimes by family. Nobody needs to share those memories to complete this exercise. Let people write privately and read aloud only if they choose.
Sitting two: Build your own footing
You cannot stay calm in a hard conversation if you are secretly afraid your friend is right about the text. This sitting is for you, not for them. The goal is to read the passages that trouble people, closely enough that you know what you think and why.
McCaulley reframes the whole question first: “So our trust in the Bible isn’t actually a trust in the Bible, it’s a trust in the God who gave us these texts.” If that is what is at stake, then the character of God shown across the whole book is the evidence you need to weigh.
Reading in keys
McCaulley compares Scripture to music. Each passage is a key, and faithful reading means playing each one at the right time and for the right length. “And if you just hit the wrong key at the wrong time, it distorts the song that is trying to be played.” He is equally firm that the hard passages are real: “I think that it would be dishonest to say there aren’t passages in the Old and New Testament that give us pause.”
The picture has limits. Music has no moral content, and a reader still has to argue for which keys carry the melody. Use the picture, then do the reading.
Exercise: three passages side by side
Draw three columns on a page. Read each passage and fill in the column before moving on.
- Genesis 1:26-28. The text says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). Write down who is included and who is left out. McCaulley’s conclusion from this passage is blunt: “A racial hierarchy then is functionally idolatry.”
- Exodus 3:7-10 and Deuteronomy 15:15. God says, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). Later the law tells Israel, “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee” (Deuteronomy 15:15). Underline every verb God is the subject of. Write one line describing the God those verbs reveal.
- Ephesians 6:5-9. This is the passage most often quoted to enslaved people. It opens, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh” (Ephesians 6:5). Read past verse 5 to verse 9, which tells masters to stop threatening and reminds them that their own Master is in heaven, “neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9). Write down what this letter says to each party, and what a preacher would have to leave out to use only verse 5. The KJV word servants here translates a term that often meant slaves in the Roman world.
Now compare the columns. Which passages describe God’s character and purpose? Which passage gives instructions to people living inside a social order that already existed?
The test that keeps you honest
McCaulley offers a way to read the hard laws and letters without deleting them. “I’m not talking about ignoring difficult text,” he says. Instead he asks, “at what place is God actually accommodating himself to the weaknesses and brokenness in humanity?” Jesus reads at least one law this way. Asked about divorce, he says, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8).
Be careful here. Jesus applies that distinction to divorce. Extending it to slavery regulations is an interpretive move many Christian readers make, and a reasonable one, but it is a proposal, not a verse that settles the question. Your footing is stronger when you know exactly how much weight a step can bear.
McCaulley adds a second test, aimed at the reader instead of the text: “if my reading of scripture makes me less like Christ, then I know that I’ve read them incorrectly.” Lisa Fields pushed on this in the same conversation. She pointed to Judas, who followed Jesus closely and still became greedy and a betrayer. McCaulley agreed that a person can affirm every high claim about the Bible and still live badly. The test does not promise that Bible readers will be good. It tells you how to judge a reading.
Sitting three: Rehearse the conversation
This sitting is practice. In a group, work in pairs. Alone, write both voices on facing pages.
One person plays the friend. Their opening line is a sincere one: I can’t follow a religion that was handed to my people in chains. The other person responds. Run the exchange twice, switching roles.
Round one: the friend is arguing
Here your reading from sitting two matters. You might offer a historical point McCaulley makes: he argues that the slave trade was justified in part by a ranking of human beings that put Europeans at the top, and that it did not begin with someone reading Paul. That is his historical claim, and you can present it as his. You might also point to how slaveholders treated the book. He observes that they edited the Bible and kept enslaved people from learning to read. “They took those things from us ’cause they knew that if we read these texts for ourselves, we’d be difficult to control.”
Use one point. Then the person playing the friend pushes back with one of these:
- That’s one professor’s reading. Plenty of preachers read those same verses the other way for two hundred years.
- Paul still told slaves to obey. If God hated slavery, why didn’t the Bible just say so?
- Even if the masters read it wrong, why would God leave verses that were so easy to abuse?
Do not try to win the rejoinder. Practice three moves instead. First, restate the objection until your friend says you have it right. Second, say plainly what you think and which passage you are leaning on, perhaps the full chapter of Ephesians 6 or Genesis 1. Third, admit what remains hard. The third rejoinder in particular has no tidy answer, and saying so is more honest than inventing one. After each round, the friend reports which move made them want to keep talking.
Round two: the friend is hurting
Run it again. This time the friend is not debating. They describe a person who quoted Scripture while harming them. The person responding may not use a single verse or argument for the first two minutes. Return to your listening paragraph from sitting one.
Afterward, ask the friend in the pair what helped and what felt like pressure. In a group, the leader should keep this debrief about the practice, not about anyone’s private story.
What you can honestly carry
McCaulley names a pattern he wants to resist: “we sometimes allow our frustration with our Christian neighbors who failed us to send us hurtling away from God.” He also repeats that white supremacy has already taken a great deal from Black people in America. In his words, “It can’t take the scripture from us too.”
You may not say that line to your friend. It may not be the right moment. It gives you a reason to stay in the conversation without panic. McCaulley argues that enslaved believers who heard a God of freedom in their masters’ book were the better readers. You can hold that conviction without needing your friend to agree today.
Back to the first page
Return to what you wrote at the start of sitting one. Would you summarize your friend’s claim differently now? Look at the sentence describing how the claim landed on you. Has anything changed, and if so, what changed it: a passage, an argument, or simply having practiced?
Questions for discussion
- When someone says the Bible was used against them, what is the difference between agreeing that it happened and agreeing that the Bible endorsed it? Can you say the first without implying the second?
- McCaulley frames trust in the Bible as trust in the God who gave it. Does that make the question easier or harder for you to answer, and why?
- In the three-column exercise, what did you notice in Ephesians 6:9 that you had not noticed before? Does it change how you read verse 5, or not?
- Where does the music picture help you, and where does it fail to answer a skeptic’s real objection?
- McCaulley’s test is whether a reading makes you more like Christ. Lisa Fields raised Judas as a counterexample. What does their exchange clarify about what the test can and cannot prove?
- Which rejoinder in round one was hardest to answer honestly? What would you need to read or learn before you could respond to it?
A practice to keep
This week, pick one passage people use as a weapon, and read the full chapter around it before you read anything about it. Write down what the surrounding verses say that the quoted verse alone does not. Then write one honest sentence about what still troubles you in that chapter.
If a conversation opens a wound bigger than friendship can carry, for you or for the person you love, bringing in a pastor you trust or a licensed counselor is no failure of faith. Staying with someone sometimes means helping them find more care than you alone can give.