As a teenager, Tubman suffered a traumatic head injury that would cause a lifetime of seizures, along with powerful visions and vivid dreams that she ascribed to God. She would rely on these visions first in planning her own escape from slavery and later, when leading others to freedom in the North.
Rather interestingly, that follows from this first paragraph in the short bio.
Born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1820, Harriet Tubman (named Araminta Ross at birth) is remembered for challenging stereotypes of race, gender and class. As a child, she learned Bible stories from her mother, finding inspiration in the Exodus narrative and rejecting the admonitions for slaves to obey their masters. She would later become known as "Moses" for her work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, leading slaves North to freedom.
It seems that, after saying that, there's a felt need that the anonymous author of the bio attribute Harriet Tubman's religious experience to pathology so as not to risk anyone suspecting he or she takes it seriously, as seriously as Harriet Tubman obviously did since she recounted such experiences and attributed significance to them. And, I will point out, there is no real scientific evidence to go on in making that assumption, it is based on meager evidence filled in with a popular and superficial understanding of "neuroscience" as it is presented by the media, the farthest thing of an expert opinion on the matter. You would have to have a modern medical assessment of the living Harriet Tubman to do anything valid about it.
That is a pattern I've found in this look at the motives and reasoning of major figures in the abolition of slavery, figures in the past struggle and, as I'm finding ever more, now. The direct testimony of those who are the only experts on their experience, over and over again, cite their religious experience and reasoning about the scriptures as the thing that powered their resistance to slavery and oppression is discounted or unmentioned instead of being acknowledged as central to it, The motives of that in the academic and media class is partly ideological but, I think even more so, the result of the coercion to suppress any acknowledgement of positive religion and a felt need to demonstrate that someone is reliably non- or anti-religious so as to be acceptable in the peer group and hierarchy of those institutions and groups. As I noted a while ago, nothing from the injury to her head seems to have effected the brilliance with which she planned, studied and carried out many successful missions to rescue people from slavery, an effort in which she was able to say that she had never lost a passenger as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
That it is a fundamental distortion of history and a serious impediment to understanding what has worked in resisting one of the major evils that human beings face makes this disappearing of positive religion a means of supporting the continuation of that evil. Clearly for those deputed to be on the left who do that, ending oppression is not their primary goal, ending religion is. That has been announced as part of the intention of ideological atheists, to make religion into something seen as evil, as bad, as backward and superstitious and unkewl and so to convince people, especially the young that religion is nothing they need to or want to consider and think about seriously.
One of the major figures in the early post-abolition civil rights movement is the great journalist and writer Ida B. Wells-Barnett who I've seen presented as having rejected Christianity through selected quotes from her so as to make them seen condemn Christianity. I've seen quotes from Fredrick Douglass used the same way. In both cases the writers were not rejecting Christianity, they were pointing out how those involved with lynching and those who refused to do anything to end it were being hypocrites BECAUSE THEIR RELIGIOUS PROFESSION REQUIRED THEM TO END LYNCHING. They were being as bad at being Christians as it was possible to be, if they were doing it the right way, no one would be lynched or oppressed in any of the ways that comprised the Jim Crow period, in the South or in other and not so different ways in many other parts of the country. Both saw that as an offense against the religion that they took very seriously. Ida Well-Barnett began her anti-lynching campaign in church newspapers, she continued it through the churches, she taught Sunday school even as her anti-lynching campaign was well underway and continuing.
The same effort even led Christopher Hitchens to lie about the fact that THE REVEREND Martin Luther King jr. was primarily motivated in his civil rights resistance by what he learned from The Bible and the Christian theological tradtion. I guess Hitchens and the many online atheists who have parroted him on that are saying The Reverend Martin Luther King jr was lying about that, even in his last sermon as he compared himself to Moses who was allowed to see the future where civil rights would be won but which he, though still a young man, would not enter into himself. And it's obvious from the context of that sermon that he knew he was going to be assassinated, he clearly saw that as well.
But the fact that The Reverend King led the last great successful campaign of the left, with the clearest of religious motives and working primarily within the churches and with them, can be disappeared by the coercive force of atheism which did virtually nothing in that effort that yielded any results. If anything, it was a burden and a hurdle that had to be gotten over, one of the major lies told about The Reverend King in his lifetime was that he was a fraud and a communist. I sometimes wonder if he had it to do again if he would have not gone to address the Highlander School where someone took his picture and used it to lie about his commitment to Christianity from the other side. The same lie told from two sides, serving the same end.
I would guess that any school teacher who told the truth about that would be in hot water for proselytizing or inserting religious propaganda into history classes, though the facts of the matter couldn't possibly be clearer. You can't honestly teach The Reverend Martin Luther King jr or the civil rights struggle without noting the major motivating force that the religion of the people involved is what made it happen. You can't ignore that it was their understanding of The Bible in the context of their lives that allowed slaves to imagine freeing themselves and ending the institution of slavery. It is often forgotten, especially in movie and TV costume dramas that it was the slaves, former slaves and free black people who are the primary force in the abolition and civil rights struggles and what they, themselves, articulated as to their motives and thoughts are the primary, primary source material in the period during which that first becomes available to us. No doubt it also was true when that was in the oral tradition which is, of course, lost to us now. To disappear the motives of those who struggled, fought and died to end slavery, to free people from it, is to lie about them, their struggle and to impede the continuation of that work which is certainly not over.
Update: July 16, 2015
The Google doodle today celebrates the birthday of the great anti-lynching, civil rights leader Ida Wells Barnett. I had intended last February, when I was doing my series on the religous roots of the abolitionist struggle, to write a longer piece specifically about her and her work, which, notably, began in church newspapers and continued throughout her life to be informed by and aided by her religion, her Christianity and her continued involvement with church communities - she also taught Sunday school. Since I doubt much of anything will be made of that in the internet climate which currently dominates, I've decided to repost this piece.
regarding the use of selective quotes: I found something similar in a brief Google search in re: Thomas Paine. Seems he was an ardent Deist and spoke against organized churches and priests in much the same vein as Jefferson and other "Founding Fathers." Odd thing is, they sound just like the Puritans on that subject.
ReplyDeleteWonder why that would be.....?
Stone ignorant of the importance of history and culture is no way to go through life, but so many people seem to.
Stone ignorant would be a good description of the neo-atheists and those who inform them.
DeleteI sometimes wonder if my period of agnosticism, during which I read a lot of that stuff, credulously believing that the eminent and less eminent writers of it had fact checked themselves wasn't so that when I learned better I'd be familiar with the literature of the liars. I've often found that the neo-atheists have often not read any of the stuff they base their folklore, gotten from TV shows and webloid gossip. They've certainly never gone back and read the primary sources of the likes of Paine, which, when one does, seldom says what they claim it does.
I remember when that movie about the British abolition movement came out about ten years ago even bloggers I respected at that time derided its claims about the religious motivation of the mainstream of the abolitionists. Only, when I went to look at that, in the wake of my eye-opening reading of Darwin's inner circle, I found that the agitation for abolition, going back more than a thousand years and into the most recent decades, was, in fact, fueled by religion, not the "enlightenment". More typically, atheists were either indifferent in the matter or they explicitly were racists and thought that black people were nature made for being subjugated, if not obliterated by white people. And you can say the same about the economic underclass. Even the great exception to that, Marxism, replaced racial slavery with the enslavement of "the masses" to the communist state instead of the private sector.
I've said it before, when Thomas Paine got himself into a jam in France and was awaiting execution and he whined about the diplomats from the United States not intervening on his behalf. I suspected that they'd concluded he was a nut case who was only good for whipping things up, the last thing the government of the United States was interested in doing at the time, especially with Britain. His activities in France certainly prove he lacked common sense.