The Book of Books (32 page)

The century of black progress that followed abolition and secured it, is a compelling time in human history. Whatever religion you might or might not have, you cannot fail to be impressed and moved by the way in which the African-Americans shook off the nullification of their humanity which had lasted for centuries. Their dynamic came through faith, founded in the King James Version. It was by the Bible that they fought their way to freedom and community. In the process they gave the world a new cultural sound and song. This happened through the black denominations, in black Churches in which the Bible was the Sacred Law. The Churches were the major instrument in bringing together, shaping, educating and leading the scattered and abandoned millions who had been told they were no longer slaves but no longer necessary.

The white South had failed. By some alchemy of the human spirit, many of them tried to turn defeat into a moral victory. But they were a society which had been stripped of its meaning and its long-inherited structure. Their destroyed lands and towns and churches, their bankruptcies and the loss, as they saw it, of a large and cheap labour force, threw them back on their own resources. Some went into a century of denial and brutality. Others re-thought and rebuilt.

It was in this regard that women, who had been called upon to do so much of men's work in the war, began to sew the riven society together. Samuel S. Hill, author of
Religion and the Results of the Civil War
, wrote:

Women's clubs and Temperance Unions sprang up and by the end of the nineteenth century women were becoming, though not considered of equal ‘value', nevertheless a conspicuous presence in the Churches, especially in the Methodist Churches, both black and white.

In the North, the women, according to Hill, were

The seismic upheaval of the American Civil War caused waves which swept in high tides across the United States for decades. The abolition of slavery was the one great result but it was as much a beginning as an end. And when the new struggle against
racism began it was the churchmen and women, Bible in hand, who led it. Humanists, secularists, atheists, agnostics and the religiously indifferent also joined in the marches, but the cause was fuelled and led by the descendants of those who had suffered most and the leaders of those determined to see the positive consequences of abolition fully realised: and they were Church people.

Martin Luther King came out of the Civil War, speaking what he believed to be Bible truths. His life and his death concluded that historic movement which took African slaves out of bondage, across the river of Jordan, to be set free in what proudly called itself ‘the land of the free'. Just under a century and a half after the last guns of war were fired in the southern United States, the world saw an Afro-American, a Christian, in that city on the hill, sworn in on the King James Version as President of the United States of America.

THE BIBLE AND EDUCATION

I
t would be fair to claim that for its first three centuries, the King James Bible was, in general, the prime educating force in the English-speaking world. Its impact was stronger in the first two centuries. In the nineteenth century, although there was growing competition from popular fiction and literature, it was still the dominant book. This was the case in the United States before, during and after the Civil War. From about 1850 – 1900 America was enthralled by the Bible.

People learned to read in order to read the Bible and they learned to read by being taught through the Bible itself. In a substantial minority of cases, Bible reading led on to other religious books: the American Civil War has been called the most religiously literate war in history, as the British Civil War was before it.

Even for those whose apprehension of faith was weak or nonexistent, the Bible could be very useful. The flowing poetic prose of the King James Version ran into American speeches, journalism and literature with an enriching effect plainly evident in letters, pamphlets and books from the early seventeenth century and it continues to this day. It was a fine and stately tongue which helped dignify and unify the new States in their conversation just
as the Bible unified them in their faith. This, with America's gift for new phrasings, new words and the welcome its English gave to immigrant terms has given it a dazzlingly layered language.

Most of all people were educated in the Christian religion and its history from Creation, through the Jewish Chronicles and prophecies and Psalms – which the Christians absorbed as ‘theirs' because they were God's Word – to the New Testament. To the fundamental believers the Bible held an explanation for everything : from the creation of the world to the new Israelites, who became the new ‘Saints', first in Britain and then in America, first white and then black.

The widespread concentration on daily learning rituals and practices which were introduced to increase the possibility of good moral Christian behaviour on this earth and eternal salvation in God's heaven, is hard for many of those in secular societies to fathom. But the records show it existed and in force. The King James Bible over centuries educated people who were proud of the privilege of being able to read the Holy Scriptures in their own language. It educated them primarily in faith. It was the call to arms: into the arms of the omnipotent Almighty and to arms in His cause. It was the Word of the Lord. But it also became the means of the unlocking of literary curiosity and ambition.

It was also thought the oracle which spoke mysteries, a guide to behaviour and morality, and the lawgiver full of grave warnings if the commandments of God were broken. For some it held prophecy of the future. It was the centrifugal force in and of all life and it demanded worship and obedience. Millions of people of all backgrounds over those three centuries willingly offered that worship and obedience as millions still do today.

But the Bible had other educative functions. It was a bounty of great stories. There were sacrifices, wars, prostitution, seduction, escapes, love affairs, judgements, conversions, family feuds,
murders, disgraceful deeds, fabulous miracles and the astounding good-bad-vengeful-merciful-cruel-wise character of the Old Testament God. There were heroes and villains. There were Adam and Eve, David and Jonathan, Jesus Christ and Judas, Jacob, Nimrod, Samson and Delilah, John and Salome. There was the unblemished mother and the celibate son of God, there were the fishermen who became the fishers of men alongside pharaohs and Roman governors. Mystical writings could be found there and erotic poetry in the Song of Solomon.

There were proverbs to be recited and debated. The purity of perfect love and a perfect society could be cherished. The dark and wild furies of the Apocalypse could be relished by the Doomsday preachers. There was the host that encircled God – the angels and archangels, the seraphim and cherubim and all the company of heaven. And there was the finest jewel of all – the soul – endlessly discussed, full of promise and grace, the gift. Then there was Satan, who reared up at every opportunity to tempt and destroy, to entice and steal that soul away. Satan stalked the Bible and was the darkness of the world which so many of the faithful feared because they had experienced it in the fragile, mostly degraded condition of their daily existence. The book provided a mirror and a window: their own lives were reflected and enlarged.

There are those who claim it held back the shaping of the modern world. Others – including myself in the case of the King James Version – believe that it helped shape it often for the better and was integral in that process. There are those who see its moral qualities, those who can only see it as a breeder of more wickedness than goodness, more error than insight. Few can deny, though, that from 1611 in the English-speaking world, it was the primary education.

Such formal education as there was in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in many cases well into the nineteenth, was provided by the Churches. Inevitably it was Bible-led. Rather surprisingly, it was free. This became the norm in America which was the first nation to provide free schooling.

The original settlers in New England demanded that everyone know the Bible. Reading was compulsory. In Massachusetts reluctant parents would have their children apprenticed so that they could ‘read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country'. Connecticut passed a similar law in 1650. By 1700, Richard Middleton a historian of Colonial America tells us, about 70 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women could read and write and the numbers were growing steadily. Middleton points out: ‘the New England Primer, used by children, contained the alphabet and a list of syllables and biblical or allied material – hymns, prayers, stories and accounts of Protestant Martyrs.'

New England was well organised. Although education followed a similar pattern elsewhere, it was more patchy. At the centre of the educational system was the Church, usually a nonconformist sect.

It was only in the eighteenth century that other bodies began to move in to education in America with the realisation that commerce, law and administration needed educated men (only men) who would drive the secular engines of this rapidly expanding new continent. There was also the Englightenment project which was welcomed by a number of New World scholars, politicans and intellectuals who saw that national scientific and industrial progress was not anathema to moral progress.

Initially it was the Church schools that had the means, the motivation and the staff. As schools grew in number, teaching became a profession: Harvard was founded in 1636 to provide a trained ministry; it was also determined to offer instruction in
‘good literature, arts and sciences'. Teachers as well as preachers (often the same man) came out of Harvard and in 1693 the College of William and Mary was founded and Yale followed in 1701. Even so, many well-heeled Americans still sent their sons to Edinburgh University and to London for their training in law.

Slowly the colleges grew in number and slowly they moved away from the strictly theological curriculum. Benjamin Franklin, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London and the leading figure in the Enlightenment in America, helped to found the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751. This was the first secular institution to impose no religious test for admission. Despite Franklin's measured adulation of the English Methodist charismatic preacher George Whitefield, he saw the future of the country in science and not in religion and he set the example for the North. The Philadelphia Academy emphasised what was useful – arithmetic and accounts, for example, and a course to attend to the ‘improvement of agriculture and mechanics'.

When, in 1754, New York obtained its first college, the Anglicans and the Presbyterians competed and failed in their attempts to make of it a partisan religious institution. When it opened, it was non-denominational and its curriculum was centred on ‘languages and liberal arts and sciences'. The secularisation of American education had taken a grip.

Yet despite this, the Bible culture held on in many of the educational establishments, especially, as described in the previous chapter, in the southern states where the Church retained its hold for much longer.

This is not to say that the Churches were eased out of education. But the government did not have a constitutional stake in any religious denomination. There were numerous sects and they brought their religion into the schools and even more successfully into the Sunday schools. But there was no state-directed religion;
no authorised religion although the Authorised Version provided a common ground between the denominations.