American racism was given the power of religious fervor by those who thought the Bible alone provided the rule of faith. Don Johnson, author of “Twisted Unto Destruction: How ‘Bible Alone’ Theology Made the World a Worse Place,” explains.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, and delighted to welcome Don Johnson to the program this time to talk about racism, and sola scriptura, and how those two things go together. And maybe you think, “Could they possibly go together?” Well, then you haven’t read his very fine book, Don Johnson’s very fine book, Twisted Unto Destruction: How Bible Alone Theology Made the World a Worse Place. Don is an evangelist. You can find him at Donjohnsonministries.org. And a filmmaker, he’s made wonderful films, the most recent of which… See it. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve got to see it, Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion. Don, thanks for being here with us.
Don Johnson:
Hey, good to talk to you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
Very good to talk with you. It’s always good to talk with you, Don. I always have fun when I talk to you.
Don Johnson:
Well, good.
Cy Kellett:
And maybe it’ll be less fun because the topic is kind of harder today. It’s not a fun topic, but first of all, if you’ll kind of take a minute to just give us the lay of the land as far as the book, Twisted Unto Destruction, and then I want to talk with you in detail about the relationship between a certain kind of Bible alone Christianity and modern racism.
Don Johnson:
Sure. So Twisted Unto Destruction, the basic premise is that sola scriptura, the idea that, hey, we live by the Bible alone, the Bible is our soul source of morals and authority for living, which is what I grew up in. I grew up in a very Bible centered home, memorized thousands of Bible verses, went to Bible school, went to Bible study on Wednesday night. I mean, that premise, as good as it was for me growing up as far as being Bible saturated, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it simply isn’t enough. Not only is it not enough to provide a basis for… Well, we all know it’s not enough to provide a basis for doctrine. Anybody probably who is listening to Catholic Answers knows that, right? It breaks into many different sex, and belief systems, and organizations.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
But it’s also not enough for morality, to provide a standard for right and wrong, what should we do, that sort of thing. But even beyond that, and this is the point where I decided to write the book, I think, or started pitching it to people at least, is that it actually makes things worse in that not only do you not have a foundation of firm reality, which is one thing, right? It’s like arguing with an atheist about absolute right and wrong, like that sort of thing. Okay, you just don’t have a basis for any sort of standard, but actually providing a divine mandate for evil, that I believe is the next level thing. That’s what sola scriptura ultimately does. It takes something that’s objectively wrong. So in the book, we talk about racism and slavery. We talk about consumerism. We talk about the sexual revolution and all of the various vices that go along with that, but it takes those vices and says, “You know what? God approves of this. God wants you to do this.” And that level of… Is it blasphemy? I’m not sure, but it’s somewhere getting close to that, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
Where you have a divine mandate for sin. That’s what sola scriptura ultimately provides in a way that has been immensely harmful for millions of people [inaudible 00:03:49] the globe. And so we tell that story a little bit in the book, sort of, honestly, building off my own experience actually. I as a Catholic convert, I found it incredibly compelling when I started looking into some of the things that the church teaches on morality, things that, frankly, Protestants don’t necessarily teach anymore like contraception, for example, right? Everything is, “Oh, that’s a nutty thing with the Catholics.” Well, when I started digging into that, I realized, “Wow, not only is this a major, major issue, but the Catholics have been completely right about it.” And the teaching of the sola scriptura folks, the Bible alone, the Protestant group, have actually made things worse by saying that God wants us to do this, and so that led me to explore several other areas, including our history of racial sin in America. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And it’s funny because people all around the world listen to the podcast, but I don’t know the history of racism in other places. It does seem to me that America has not unique, but a particularly maybe uniquely intense racial history of racial oppression, and really the evil of racism afflicts us in a way that I don’t know if other places in the world have it in the way that we have it.
Don Johnson:
Yeah. And I don’t know that I’d want to make any too strong statements about that either, Cy. I think here’s where I would go with this. I think the American experience, as I explain in the book, is somewhat unique in that America is where you get the full flowering of a Protestant culture, which I really don’t think you have anywhere else in the world where you’ve got the age of exploration coinciding with the reformation and just the chaos of the world at that time. You get that institutionalized in America with even the way that we formed our states and then our governments. It is like how are we going to do this in a Protestant world? And of course, not all are Protestants, but largely, I mean, that’s what it is, a sola scriptura world coming out of the wars of religion and the chaos of the Reformation Era, by the time you get to them… I teach high school. We’re studying the Declaration of Independence right now.
The context in which that is put forward right is where, on one hand, we can’t have this institutionalized religion because it just causes wars. So you’ve got to on one hand, you’ve got to keep that private. On the other hand, we are a Bible believing group of people, so that everything that we do has to have some sort of scriptural support. So we always have our Bible verse to go along with it. Well, that history I think is somewhat unique in the world, that you just don’t have that in other places where it’s just so explicitly free flowing Protestant groups trying to figure out how to live together.
Cy Kellett:
Well, let me establish with you a few things that you do not say in the book and are not saying in this interview. I want to confirm with you that you’re not saying these before we get into what you are saying. One of them you’ve already said, you’re not saying that Protestant people are immoral racists.
Don Johnson:
Right. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
No? Okay.
Don Johnson:
Right. Well, totally. And frankly, listen, I tried to take pains at the beginning of the book to explain that for the first 45 years of my life, I’m an evangelical Protestant working in evangelical circles. I still do. Most of my family, all of my family, frankly, is still evangelical Protestants. We use the Bible to increase in holiness. We still do that, right? No, it does not mean that you cannot use the Bible to increase in holiness or that individual Protestants are not righteous people. No. Again, you make the same argument with atheist, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
You say you tell an atheist that, “Well, you don’t have a foundation for what you’re doing.” They say, “Oh, you think all atheists are bad people?” No, of course we don’t think that. Of course, you can be good. So you’re absolutely right. We’re not saying that at all.
Cy Kellett:
And conversely, you’re not saying that in Catholic countries or among Catholic people, we’ve just really done a great job as far as racism, and slavery, and all of that. You’re not saying that either.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, right. No, of course not. I mean, you have to be completely ignorant of history to see. I mean, of course, all these Catholic countries are the ones. It was the ship that sold the first slaves here in 1619, the ship was… Well, the ship that got stolen was called Saint John the Baptist in Spanish, but that’s the name of the ship. I mean these were Catholic people that were selling the slaves. So no, of course, we’re not saying that at all. I mean, ultimately what we are saying is that one group is explicitly ignoring the teachings of their church, and the other simply doesn’t have teachings to ignore necessarily, or they don’t have that foundation.
Cy Kellett:
Yep. So one of the things you do at the beginning of the book is you do make clear that… And this is not a story, and I’m glad that you did a good job of referring to each of the papal, and cyclicals, or motu proprio, or the various papal documents over the years, starting with before Columbus ever sailed, 50 years before Columbus ever sailed, objections to permanent slavery, for example, or racial slavery, and insistence on the part of the highest levels of the Catholic church. Whatever a local bishop was doing, or even local bishop’s conferences, or whatever they had in those days were doing, at the highest levels of the church for the entire modern era, if you think of the modern era as starting in the 1400s or 1500s, in the entire modern era, there is a papal demand accompanied by various excommunications and reiterating of excommunications that Catholics not engage in the slave trade and not engage in this modern form of slavery.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, 50 years before Columbus ever set sail, you have Pope Eugenius IV offering a papal bull saying that, “Hey, if you do not get rid of your slaves,” in fact, I think he was explicitly talking to the Canary Islands. He said, “You got 15 days to get rid of your slaves, or you’re all excommunicated. You’re all on your way to hell, basically.” Yeah, and that continued throughout the entire age of exploration in as much as even as Catholics ignored the teaching, and frankly, in some South American countries, the locals wouldn’t allow the Papal Bulls to be read anymore. They passed laws banning the publishing of these cyclicals and papal bulls because they didn’t want that on their conscience, I guess, but no, the church is very clear. The church has been very clear throughout this time that the trade of human beings is against God and against the teachings of the church.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So Protestantism, however, was not able to… and in part because it Protestantism, excuse me, is rooted in this idea of scripture alone, that is of surrendering any idea of a magisterium, or a Pope, or anything like that. It had no equipment with which to say, “This is wrong. You can’t do it. You’re going to hell if you do it.” Even if everyone had ignored that, as many, many people ignored the popes who said… The Protestantism had no mechanism to say, “Stop this. It’s evil.”
Don Johnson:
Yeah. And this is important to understand from the very beginning, that Martin Luther himself dealt with this issue, right? When everybody disagreed with him on doctrine, it wasn’t just doctrine they were disagreeing on. It was morality. He was appalled at the way that his fellow Protestants, his fellow reformers were acting, and he told them, “Hey, you’re all going to hell.” They’re like, “Martin, you can’t tell us we’re going to hell. The Bible tells us we can do this.” Right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
And that just shows you, like encapsulates the problem here. Martin Luther himself had absolutely no control over those that disagreed with him, and no means of establishing… I mean, he called them a bunch of names. He called them, “Hey, you’re on the side of Satan.” He did all that, but ultimately they’re like, “Listen, we got our Bible. We’re reading it. We’re interpreting it how we want, and we’ll just call you names.” Well, that continued all the way through the history of Protestantism. So when the first slaves get sold on the coast of Virginia in the early 1600s, I mean, some people… Right? They were all Protestants there. Some people are like, “Hey, I don’t know if we should do this.” Right? I mean, obviously this doesn’t seem like a very [inaudible 00:13:22].
Cy Kellett:
Christian.
Don Johnson:
If you look at Jesus’ command to love each other, these are human beings. That doesn’t seem very Christian, but very quickly they found a scriptural justification for doing that. I mean, early on, one of the main arguments was because they’re like, “Well, listen, we’re supposed to love our neighbor. These are fellow human beings. We can’t do that.” The quick argument was, “Oh, actually, actually these are not human beings. These Africans are more like animals. They are not people. So they are not made in the image of God the way that we are, therefore, Jesus’ clear command to love each other does not apply because they’re not the other.” I mean, it is when you think about it now, to me, it’s flabbergasting that… Well, it’s not flabbergasting because we see it all throughout history, but I mean, this is a real time living out of Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Who’s my neighbor?
Don Johnson:
The people who come to Jesus, and they say, “Well, listen, who are we supposed to love?” And he says, “Well, love God, love your neighbor,” “But who is my neighbor?” And then he tells them the story of the good Samaritan. Jesus says, “They’re trying to get out of it.” I want to follow your commands, but I don’t want to love that guy. How can I get out of it? Well, I’ll just think he’s not my neighbor. And so then Jesus says, “Well, no, even the Samaritans are your neighbors, buddy.” But that’s what they were doing. They were like, “Africans don’t fall into the category of people made in the image of God. They are subhuman. They’re animals. They’re more like [inaudible 00:14:59].”
Cy Kellett:
So then everything the Bible says about justice, mercy, and ultimately charity, it just doesn’t apply to African people then?
Don Johnson:
Just doesn’t apply to African people. So that was an easy way out early.
Cy Kellett:
And again, many Catholics making the same argument, but the highest authority of the church never falling into that argument. The highest authority of the church saying, “No, that’s not an argument. you can’t live by that.”
Don Johnson:
Yeah, and again, the difference, I mean, it’s one way to understand the difference I think between the Catholics disobeying the clear teachings of the church and Protestants making up their own teaching is that you can say someone is a bad Catholic. Right? It’s a term that’s in our culture. We understand what that means. Celebrities use that all the time. Stephen Colbert might say, “Hey, I’m a bad Catholic.” Well, what do we mean by that? Well, he doesn’t obey certain things of the church, or he doesn’t agree with them, or he tries hard but fails. We don’t know, but we know that he’s not in line with the teachings of the church, because you can look at the teachings, and you can see where he is not in line with them. And so he is just like, “Yeah, I’m a bad Catholic,” but what you don’t see in our culture is someone saying, “Hey, I’m a bad Protestant.”
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Don Johnson:
That’s not a thing.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Don Johnson:
What do you mean bad Protestant? There is no such thing. You might be a bad First Baptist of Wichita or something. You might be, “Hey, I go to Calvary Chapel at this particular group and I’m a bad Calvary Chapel guy, because I don’t agree with the pastor.” But you know what? That conversation is never going to last very long because you already know by the time he finishes it that he’s gone somewhere else. You’re not a bad First Baptist of Wichita. This just means you went to Second Baptist or you started your own, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Don Johnson:
You’re not a bad Calvary Chapel guy. Maybe you started your own Calvary Chapel. You go somewhere else, you go where you agree with, or you make up your own thing. That’s the Protestant approach. There is no mechanism by which we can judge fellow Protestants. That’s why it is always from the very beginning, Luther’s buddies included, split apart, right? So you split apart based on these beliefs, and so yes, the Catholic church is very clear that, hey, slavery is wrong. These people are made in the image of God. You cannot buy and sell them like cattle. Protestants say, or you might have some Catholics who’s like, “Well, I don’t know,” but they’re, they’re clearly disagreeing.
Whereas the Protestants, not only are they disagreeing, but now they are even the where you had, “Well, they’re not fully human, right? They’re not made in the image of God. They’re animals,” even when you had people disagreeing with that, so guys like Cotton Mather, who said, “You know what? I don’t buy that. I think these clearly are human beings.” Okay. We shouldn’t treat them as if they don’t have a soul. And so he’s like, “You know what? We need to actually evangelize the Africans. We should try to get them into heaven.” [inaudible 00:17:58]
Cy Kellett:
And then he said, “We got to set them all free,” right? Because is that what Cotton Mather, the great Protestant-
Don Johnson:
Well, he….
Cy Kellett:
No? Am I missing something?
Don Johnson:
He did not.
So Cotton Mather runs into a problem, because he sees them as made the image of God, but the problem is if they’re Christians, if you can evangelize them if they’re humans, even British law and the society said, “Hey, we don’t enslave fellow Christians.” Right? And so they went and started justifying from scripture and changing the laws, in fact, changing the baptismal vows in some cases to say, “You know what? No, they can become Christians, but just because you save their souls doesn’t mean that we have to free their bodies.” So they did bring in a little bit agnostic dualism, a little bit of enlightenment, dualistic… I would say nominalistic thinking. I mean, there’s some bad philosophy involved, but they did manage to do it, so that he actually started the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to African People. You had the society of… I can’t remember the other name of it, but there was to reach the Negro people is how they were they going to do it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, foreign people, I think.
Don Johnson:
But not free them from slavery, just save their souls. And so they would use biblical justification for doing that.
Cy Kellett:
And the biblical justification had to do with Noah and his sons.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, that was one of the main ones. And frankly, you can still find this today, 300 years later. So one of the main arguments they used was that in the story of Noah, we have Ham doing some sort of sin. It’s not even very clear in scripture, frankly, what the sin is, but he is cursed in some way. Well, people took that and said that IS he became the father of the dark-skinned people of Africa, and that the curse of Ham means that all dark-skinned African people, the Hamites, need to be in perpetual slavery, like this is their God ordained place in life is to be in slavery because they are to the descendants of Ham. There’s all sorts of bad exegeses going on there, of course, and then bad sociology and, I mean, all sorts of bad, but that became a very powerful argument. I mean, you can find that argument up until the 1980s in school segregation battles.
Cy Kellett:
And here’s what I took away from your book. At this point, we really are moving into doing something religiously that Catholics were not able to do, which is begin to say slavery is a positive good willed by God, and that if you oppose slavery, you oppose the will of God. That’s not a move that Catholic churches were able to make.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, this is key, right? That’s where really the evil, how it makes the world a worse place comes in, is that now we are giving slavery a divine mandate. We are putting God’s stamp of approval on it, so that you are actually on God’s side by having slaves. And so these arguments got quite elaborate. I mean, even guys like George Whitfield, who I actually don’t think we mentioned it in the book, but George Whitfield, one of the great theologians and preachers of American history owned slaves, and even as he was saying, “We should treat them kindly, he did note that… In fact, I have a quote from him, “Cruelty can have the positive effect of heightening their sense of natural mystery and thereby increasing their receptivity to the Christian gospel.”
Cy Kellett:
Holy Lord.
Don Johnson:
There was a large movement using scripture to say that, “You know what? It is to their benefit that Africans are put into slave ships and brought over here, because in their natural state, they don’t realize the curse of Ham. They don’t realize that they need the gospel, so they don’t realize the humility that they need to accept Jesus’s love and forgiveness of them. So we need to make them slaves as a benefit for them, and that it is our God given duty to enslave the African people. We are on the side of the gospel here. We are on the side of scripture in doing this.” And that’s where we really, many non-Catholic historians included, guys like Mark Noll, Paul Johnson, who was Catholic, but a great historian, many of these guys note this effect in the culture, so that in early 1600s, early 1700s, slavery is embedded in the culture in American society in a way that made the rest of our history worse.
It pointed us towards things like the Civil War. It’s not the only reason for the Civil War, I get that, but some of these, our history with racism and slavery in America, by giving it that divine mandate and tying it so closely to what it means to be Christian, and what it means to have a Christian culture put that into the culture in a way that made it much harder to root out later on. Because now, I mean, you look by the time we get to the Civil War, you have the most adamant, the strongest voices from the South advocating for war are advocating, and their argument is, “We are doing this because we are defending God, because we are defending Christianity, because we are defending the Bible against these godless heathens from the north who want to…” That was the argument. I mean, I quote several preachers in the book that put, “Our fight is God’s fight. We are crusaders on behalf of scripture and all that is good and holy to save slavery.” That’s the problem, right? The Catholics, it wasn’t possible that they could get there, and they never did either.
Cy Kellett:
But then in the north, you have preachers in Rhode Island saying, “God is on your side against these godless Southerners who misappropriate scripture.” And in the South, you have the preacher saying, “God is on your side,” and this is really the tinder of the Civil War.
Don Johnson:
I think it is. I think that Mark Noll’s book, The Civil War is a Theological Crisis, I believe is a must read on this. This ultimately would not have been. Maybe you have a war, maybe you don’t, but it would not have been the same type of battle if both sides do not think that they are on God’s sides, and in particular the south. Obviously, the North was arguing, because the obvious answer to this they said, “Well, hey, weren’t the abolitionists motivated by the Bible too?”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Don Johnson:
Well, yeah, fair enough. Absolutely. Guys like George Whitfield in the UK, obviously motivated by scripture and their understanding. And so throughout you have arguments on both sides. I mean, you can find a few preachers who would’ve been arguing against the curse of Ham. You have guys who have been arguing against all this, but that’s the problem. It’s your interpretation versus theirs. There is no way to adjudicate, and ultimately you end up with, “Well, I’m on the side of God.” “No, I’m on the side of God.” Okay, what are you going to do? It’s interesting that even though the founders… Well, they tried to set up a country in which you wouldn’t have the wars of religion, and they succeeded to a great extent, but not entirely, I wouldn’t say. I don’t think we can understand the Civil War completely without that religious element in it.
Cy Kellett:
And in the Civil War, in many ways, many Catholics became Americans in the Civil War, that is the great immigration of Catholics, 1820s, 1830s, and then the forties and fifties, and so this was their… In a certain way, the Catholics, even bishops, they don’t really distinguish themselves as an anti-slavery force. I think they’re trying mostly to be accepted by the rest of American culture. So I don’t want to exaggerate the-
Don Johnson:
Yeah, you had Catholics on both sides of the war, and the church, as I understand it, never took an official position.
Cy Kellett:
No, right.
Don Johnson:
Right? But, and I have a few quotes in the book on this too, the Catholics in that situation where you have Catholics on both sides, but loving on both sides as well, right? The Catholic Church did have a unique position that sort of confounded Protestant America, that you have this knot tying her, and this is, I think, a unique Catholic thing just in general in regards to worldly matters that we are here, but we’re not entirely. Yes, we’re Americans, and yes, we’re Northerners or Southerners, but we’re not entirely that in the way that you are. Right? There is this Catholicism offers something that goes beyond, and so I think Catholics, you read some of the accounts of how Catholics behaved in the Civil War, they sort of confounded the rest of the country in their ability to show sort of a third way that… I don’t know if that’s the right term, but just say-
Cy Kellett:
Well, you talk specifically about the women religious who cared for them, who bound up the wounds, so to speak, of the Civil War.
Don Johnson:
That’s right.
Cy Kellett:
And Americans had not had that experience before of Catholic women religious.
Don Johnson:
Yeah. I mean, just to put it in a more contemporary context, I think to be Catholic and to accept all of the Catholic teachings today even puts you in a bit of a no person’s land politically in America. There isn’t an obvious political home for you, I don’t think [inaudible 00:28:31].
Cy Kellett:
If here is, I would question you because…
Don Johnson:
Right? That’s what I’m saying, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. If you find you that you have, oh, well, this particular political position in America lines up exactly, perfectly well, I don’t see that, right?
Cy Kellett:
Perfectly. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Don Johnson:
So that’s an important point, right? To be fully Catholic means that you are a little bit politically homeless, that you have to stand against. I mean, regardless of what political party you vote for, whatever, that you have to stand against them in some areas probably. I think you do. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Right. Well, definitely. Yeah.
Don Johnson:
That I think was shown in the Civil War too, that the Catholics weren’t tied to a particular political system in the same way that Protestants do, and Protestants had been using the Bible to support that political position, right? They were giving it a divine mandate. So when you have [inaudible 00:29:33] like slavery, now I’ve got the Bible supporting it. Well, that takes it to a different level, right? Now we’re talking [inaudible 00:29:41].
Cy Kellett:
One that you can’t let go of.
Don Johnson:
Well, you can’t let go of it.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Don Johnson:
It’s like pulling the Holy Spirit card out. Well, God told me to do this. The Holy Spirit just told me to do that. What am I going to say to that? Now if I disagree with you, I’m the guy without God, without the Holy Spirit? Now I’m on the side of the devil I guess.
Cy Kellett:
And this is a point that you make in the book as well then. So the South, of course, loses the Civil War. Slavery ends, but now segregation becomes the holy writ. The Bible demands that we be segregated from one another, so there’s really no quit in this. Once you’re committed that this is God’s divine providence, then you got to keep going.
Don Johnson:
Well, and it’s important. I think it’s important to realize that it wasn’t just slavery that they were supporting. It was a system of white supremacy. I mean, one easy way to understand to back that up, you never saw, even in all of your biblical arguments for slavery, and those that didn’t use the curse of Ham, you used things like Paul’s letter to Philemon where he tells him… He sends Onesimus, the slave, back to Paul, or the commandments mention slavery, and the old testament never seems to condemn it that much, the Exodus story not withstanding I would say.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I mean, that is kind of a big thing to…
Don Johnson:
That’s kind of a big one.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, to put on the scales, but certainly, even though God is clearly anti-slavery in the Bible, because he frees slaves, he’s not anti-slavery in the sense of there’s no biblical mandate to free all the slaves.
Don Johnson:
No. That’s what they were saying. You can obviously make this argument from the Bible. I mean, they made strong, strong, rich arguments for slavery, but here’s what you never heard. In fact, some of the guys on the other side were pointing this out. You never heard an argument for white slavery. If the argument is that slavery makes you happy… This is what they were telling the Africans. It’s better for the Africans to come over here. It is their path to joy. They’re happy. Aren’t they? This was the whole myth of the happy slave that just enjoyed his life in the field and all that that grew up. I mean, that was the argument they were making biblically like, “This is God’s pointed place for them. They’re content. This is a good thing for them.”
They would say, “Well, if slavery…” You can find these arguments. I don’t know that I quoted it in the book, but I have them in the early drafts, that you can find the arguments saying, “Listen, if slavery is such a great thing, why don’t we enslave our fellow white people and give them the blessing that we’re given to the Africans?” Right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, yeah, we missed that part of the Bible.
Don Johnson:
Oh, well, no. That didn’t seem to go very far with the… So it wasn’t just slavery. It was white supremacy. And so, of course, as soon as we see that post Civil War, I mean, racism did not end. We very quickly, especially after reconstruction, sort of crashed and burned, and we had to make some political compromises and give some of those [inaudible 00:32:41]. Things were going actually better than they were until we made some bad errors, I think, but then you have segregation, and what was the argument for segregation? Well, those arguments from the curse of Ham just got just shifted a little bit. Well, God maybe doesn’t want us to have slaves, but he certainly wants us to be segregated. He separated after all at the Tower of Babel, and he separated all of these people, and we just need to keep separated. I mean, that’s God’s plan.
So this argument, guys like Bob Jones, for example, I mean, this goes late into the 20th century, right? So Bob Jones preached what he considered to be his most important sermon ever, Is Segregation Biblical, in the 1960s, and he made exactly the same scriptural arguments that they made, and he added a few more, frankly, about how African people needed to be separate, that God wants purity of the races.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Don Johnson:
They would use passages like, “Hey, Jesus went to the Jews first because he believed in racial segregation.” I mean, all sorts of nonsense.
Cy Kellett:
That’s a novel view of the role of Jews in human history.
Don Johnson:
Oh my, if you read some of the sermons from those days, and the way they’re using the Bible, and you’re just flabbergasted, but it’s not… They didn’t stop-
Cy Kellett:
But that’s in my lifetime. Younger than me, but if you make a-
Don Johnson:
They didn’t stop interracial dating at Bob Jones University until the year 2000, by the way.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Oh, holy. Wow. Yeah.
Don Johnson:
Okay. So I’m just like, “Don’t think that this is an old thing.” Anyway.
Cy Kellett:
No, right.
Don Johnson:
But they were still, so that’s, yes, they finally allowed it in the 1970s, married Black students, but it was the year 2000 before Bob Jones allowed interracial dating. Always Bible centered. It was always Bible centered. So the whole segregation battle and the civil rights movement was very much a theological battle, and for the most part, even those that didn’t fight against it were very silent, because they thought that, “Well, in the same way that we would try to save souls and leave their bodies enslaved, we’d free their souls and we’d leave their bodies enslaved,” much of the middle 20th century involved those very same arguments from evangelicals that, “Listen, I’m not going to get involved in where people sit at restaurants. I mean, that’s about social issues. That’s about their bodies. I’m more concerned about their souls, and so, hey, they have their own churches. Their souls are saved. We just leave it alone.” This was a very mainstream opinion.
And before that, I mean, we’re talking mid 20th century. I mean, the early 20th century was frankly pretty ugly as far as American Protestantism. Things like the Ku Klux Klan was an incredibly, incredibly popular movement. 40,000 pastors were members of the Klan, and not only was it popular, but it was incredibly religious. This was an explicitly Protestant religious movement, anti-Black, anti-catholic, anti-Jewish, but very Protestant. All of their imagery, all of their forms, I mean, there’s a reason they’re burning crosses, and then they use the Bible constantly in Klan Craft, but the extent to which that was accepted, I don’t think we really want… Maybe we just don’t want to admit it. I think people are just hesitant to look back on this era. I mean, the first movie ever shown inside of the White House was Birth of the Nation, which was about the founding of the Klan [inaudible 00:36:48].
Cy Kellett:
About the glory of the Klan, yeah.
Don Johnson:
A real Klan movie. Wilson showed it in the White House, first movie ever shown inside the White House. How is that possible? How are we lynching at the time? They would schedule lynchings for when church got out. They would load up buses at churches, so that they could attend the lynchings. The account of the lynchings are so horrific that, again, frankly, some of them got edited out of the book so that we didn’t get people grossed out too much. It’s the same thing I do with movies. Sometimes you just can’t.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you have to. Right.
Don Johnson:
But the extent in which these were popular events where kids, where families would go, and get the lunch together, and have a nice sandwich, and they would hold their kids over their heads, so that they could see the negro body burning on the tree. They would cut out body parts and present them.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, good Lord.
Don Johnson:
There’s one story where the governor of Georgia was presented with the body parts. Again, this was the extent to which this was a societal thing in a very religious culture I think is only understandable because of the way that it had been Christianized, and that’s only understandable in light of sola scriptura, I think, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Don Johnson:
That evil of our history of slavery and racism is very intimately tied to its divine mandate that was given to it by all of those preachers, and so that, I mean, to take an honest look at that I think to me was very powerful, frankly, in my conversion. Yes, the Catholics again. The Catholics are part of this too, right? But you can find racist Catholics, but the Catholic Church was still, again, was different, and they had a means by which they could deal with this. So I tell the story of Archbishop Brummel, for example, in New Orleans during the segregation battles. He had a bunch of racist families in his church who didn’t want to integrate the schools. They wanted to keep them segregated.
He said, “Absolutely not. We’re going to integrate the schools. We’re going to have Black students,” and they started a parents group against him. And so he said, “Fine, you’re excommunicated. Fine, you’re out.” And this really shook people up. The three leaders eventually, I think at least two of the three, repented, and the whole movement crashed. You can see quotes from the time of the parent group. The guy came, and he’s like, “You know what? I can’t let this get in the way of my religion. I don’t want to be excommunicated from the church.” And they integrated the schools without any violence. There’s stories like that over all over the country where in Maryland… I can’t remember his name, but the bishop there says, “Hey, we’re integrating our schools,” and the guys told him, “Okay. Yeah, we can probably do that in about 10 years. That’s how long it’ll take.”
He’s like, “No, we’re doing it tomorrow.” And he did. they got it done, but that threat… We were talking about before we went on air about the notion that some people need to be excommunicated, right? That is a Catholic thing. If you publicly go against the teachings of the church and encourage others to go against the teachings of the church, the Catholic Church has in its setup, the way it’s in its authority-
Cy Kellett:
The way Jesus set it up.
Don Johnson:
The way that Jesus set it up. I give you authority. What you bind on Earth is bound. What you lose on… That’s where the rubber hits the road. So that we can say to a racist parent group, “No, we’re not having that here. You’re not going to come and get communion. You’re out.”
Cy Kellett:
No. Yeah.
Don Johnson:
The Protestant system simply does not have that, and not only does it not have that, but what are they going to say? They’re going to say, “No, you. You are out. You are Satan.” And you’re going to say, “No, you are.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
Well, that’s it. [inaudible 00:41:20].
Cy Kellett:
And now we’ve each got our own church. Right.
Don Johnson:
I’m surprised. I’ve had quite a bit of feedback from the group. I’m surprised at how many people didn’t realize how we got a Southern Baptist convention, like how we got the Southern Baptists.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Don Johnson:
What? Where do you think we got the Southern Baptists? I don’t know. People don’t realize the reason we have Southern Baptists is because they split from the northern over slavery. I mean, there was no other issue. It was slavery. When you read their quotes from those times, we have the God ordained right to keep these people in slavery. We are defending scripture. We are defending the church, and as such, we are splitting away from you heathen Northerners. The Presbyterians did the same thing, the Southern Presbyterians. Any church that has Southern in it, you can almost be assured that we have that because of slavery. Yeah, but that’s what would happen. So now we’ve got a Southern Baptist, which is still to this day, the biggest domination in the country.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Don Johnson:
But it’s all because they wanted to defend slavery.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So God didn’t just leave us a scripture. He didn’t just leave us a Bible. He left us a church. He left us sacraments. He left us a teaching authority, and all of that has real social consequences. Abandoning that is not just a matter of it’s my personal choice, but once you abandon that, then you open the door to religion itself, to real religion, the true religion being twisted. Oh, wait, Twisted Unto Destruction. I didn’t even mean to go there, but as the title of Don’s book says, Twisted Unto Destruction.
Don Johnson:
And of course, that’s from a passage in second Peter, where Peter himself is saying that his fellow believers are using the Bible improperly. They are taking some of Paul’s writings, which Peter admits are hard to understand sometimes, and they’re twisting them, but they’re doing it to their own destruction. And so that’s where we got the title of the book. So it’s not like this is a new thing, but you look at how did the New Testament handle that? There was temptations to break away, right? Most of the New Testament letters were written because of some issue where someone is misunderstanding the teaching of the church, or they’re going off on their own. Well, what do we do? Well, we don’t just say, “Hey, here, here’s your Bible. Go do your best.” Acts 15, they have a council. The rulers come in. The bosses come in. The bosses come in and say, “This is it.” I give the example of Arianism. Rule by popular demand. I mean, most people believed in Arianism at the time of that heresy. And the church said, “No.”
Cy Kellett:
I know.
Don Johnson:
That’s an interesting issue, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Don Johnson:
So most people disagreed with the church. The church said, “No.” And of course, another, not that we’re talking about it in this podcast, but I have a chapter on the sexual revolution and contraception. Most of the people in the world were against contraception. Most Catholics thought, “Hey, we are going to change the teachings on this and accept contraception.” The church says, “No.” That’s why I’m still very confident even today where some people… I get asked this question all the time like, “Oh, do you think the church is going to change their teaching on this and that?” And no, I don’t.
Cy Kellett:
No, it’s not.
Don Johnson:
I don’t think they are. They’re not going to.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not. No.
Don Johnson:
Regardless of how bad our various bishops may be or whatever, no, they’re not.
Cy Kellett:
No, it’s not. Right. It’s a wonderful book, Twisted Unto Destruction: How Bible Alone Theology Made the World a Worse Place from Don Johnson, one of the greats. Check Don out at Donjohnsonministries.org. And Don, I’m very grateful for you. You wrote a great book, and I always think it’s a mark of a great book that it’s understandable. This is not I’m making these acrobatic arguments that nobody can get. You just walk us through it step by step about how these things happen. So thank you for the interview. Thank you for the book, Don.
Don Johnson:
Hey, appreciate it, Cy. Thanks for having me on, man.
Cy Kellett:
Again, I’ll recommend it to you, Twisted Unto Destruction: How Bible Alone Theology Made the World a Worse Place. It’s from Catholic Answers Press. Don Johnson is the author, and thanks for joining us. We appreciate that you take this time with us. If you would like to communicate with us, send us an email focus@catholic.com. You know where to give money if you come into big bags of money, and you want to support what we do. You can do that at Givecatholic.com. And as always, I will ask you again for that five star review and a few nice words, because that really helps to grow the podcast. I Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks again for being with us. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.