Tag Archives: redemption

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Looking for God’s Hand in History

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And now, a question that makes Christian historians uneasy.  Is it possible to identify how God works through history?

My guess is that many ordinary Christians would answer yes to that question.  Most Christian academics would be very hesitant to say one could do it.

Does that seem strange?

Actually, there are some very good reasons why academic historians—even those with a deep Christian faith–do not think we should wade into these waters.  Frankly, it can be arrogant (and thus sinful) to claim that one can fathom the ways of God in the wider world.  Historians are well aware that Christian Yankees and Christian Confederates during the Civil War each claimed that they could see God at work in the war, but those claims nearly always tried to prove that God was on their side and against the other side.  Historians also know that other Christians, like the Puritans, stumbled over themselves trying to determine what counted as God’s favor, what counted as God’s judgment, what counted as Satan afflicting the faithful, and what counted as Satan fooling people into thinking their prosperity was God’s favor when it was really Christians sinfully putting trust in their own goodness instead of God.  It got messy.

Furthermore, academic historians who try to piece together history from thousands of incomplete, complicated and conflicting primary sources know that figuring out what caused what in history is actually a tentative and uncertain business–even when we don’t try to bring in questions about the hand of God into the picture.  Good historical methodology is based on making careful judgments based on the evidence we have before us.  How in the world could we determine what counts as evidence of God’s activity?  This is complicated by the reality that Christians have different theological explanations for how God works in the world.

Finally, the “rules of the game” for historical scholarship declare that we should stick to evidence and assumptions that all historians can observe and agree upon, regardless of their religious or intellectual commitments.  History is not a discipline, it is assumed, that can address theological questions.

And yet.

And yet, as a Christian historian, I am not fully satisfied with how we do things.  Now, I’m not quite what to do about it.  But I am curious about these questions.

For instance, it seems to me that we humans yearn for a grand purpose and direction in our existence and this comes out in the stories we tell, including our academic histories.  As a result, we consciously or unconsciously end up trying to tell stories that fit into a master narrative that in some way mimics, approximates or searches for the hand of God.

Take James Bond.  OK, it seems odd to look for the hand of God in James Bond films. Bond operates in thoroughly secular world.  One can’t find God, Christian faith or any kind of religious practice anywhere.  Furthermore, these films seem to be little more than entertainment.  The vast majority of viewers don’t think very deeply about James Bond films and the film makers probably didn’t think very deeply about what they were doing, either.  It may be pushing it to look for any larger meaning here.

But millions of people find these films to be interesting stories.  Why is that?  I would suggest that a good part of the reason is that we know that James Bond will not fail.  Yes, there will be set backs and tight spots.  He’ll get conked over the head a few times.  But he always comes out on top by the time the closing credits roll.  And we all know it.

The problem is that no human can go through life with Bond’s success rate.  We can try to fool ourselves into fantasizing about being clever, witty, sexy, technologically astute and successful like James Bond, but we’ll never live up to his fictional example.  But I don’t think Bond’s appeal normally lies in viewers imagining themselves to be like him.  Instead, I would suggest that there is a reason why stories in which good triumphs over evil are so popular.  It is because, consciously or unconsciously, we yearn for a Savior who can defeat evil and make everything right in the end.  Temporarily, at least, James Bond makes us believe that evil will be overcome.

What about Samuel Sharpe?  He was, after all, a living human being and not a fictional character.   How do we tell his story and what meaning do we take out of it?

Here is what I find so interesting about Samuel Sharpe:  he failed.  And he failed spectacularly.  His rebellion was quashed.  He was executed.  So were many of his fellow rebels.  That is about as final of a failure as one could imagine.

But as I pointed out earlier, the low level of violence and ultimate failure of the rebellion helped convince a significant number of Brits that blacks were not animalistic savages.  This reality played an important role in the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

We don’t have a lot of documentation to know what Sharpe was thinking, but I don’t see how he could have predicted how his rebellion would play out.  I think it is safe to say that even though Sharpe probably calculated that a low-violence campaign would help his cause, it seems absurd to think that he figured that a quashed rebellion and his own execution would produce a favorable outcome.

Stay with me, here.  Maybe, just maybe, the structure of those events make it possible to see the hand of God in this.  All people of good will today, whether they are Christian or not, can agree that the abolition of slavery was a good thing.  Christians, more specifically, believe that humans cannot make things right by their efforts alone.  We believe we all stand in need of God’s grace, which in different ways trumps our flaws, failures, sins and evil intentions. The central story of the Christian faith is that God Himself came to earth and was crucified by humanity, but then rose again, overcoming death.  The most important story of the Christian faith is a story of God bringing good out of the flaws, failures, sins and evil intentions of the world.

One can, of course, find plenty of flaws, sins and evil in the system of slavery.  Historians also know that the entire process of abolishing the transatlantic slave system was a large, complicated, multi-faceted process that involved different nations, economic forces, social trends, cultural shifts, and political interests.  No person or group or nation could control the outcome.  We also can identify a number of people who were seeking God’s grace to deal with this oppressive system.  One of those individuals, Samuel Sharpe, failed spectacularly in the process.  And then good came out of it.

Can we say that this is evidence of God at work in history?

I’m interested to hear what you think.

At any rate, it beats James Bond.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  2

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Redemption and Violence

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James Bond or Samuel Sharpe:  which one should we be most interested in?  Today begins our head to head competition between the two (see the previous post for details).  Round one begins with the topic of redemption and violence.

James Bond in “Dr. No”

James Bond is in the redemption business.  He tries to save the world from bad guys and bad women who come in all kinds of different sizes, shapes and nationalities.  And he saves the world, every time of course, usually by killing the bad guys.  At one point in “Dr. No,” the first Bond movie (filmed in Jamaica), Bond knifes a guy from behind who was trying to track him down.  “Why did you kill him?” asks Honey Ryder.  “I had to,” replies Bond, coolly.  According to the logic of the film, the world won’t be saved unless Bond kills bad people.  We see him kill five individuals at different points in this film, not including those who might have died when he blows up Dr. No’s secret nuclear powered radio beam laboratory at Crab Key in Jamaica.

But is it interesting?   Well, yes, on one level.  Several Bond films have hit the top 100 grossing films of all time.  A lot of people are quite interested in stories in which a hero or set of heroes kills off bad people who threaten to destroy society.  It is one of the most common stories humankind tells itself.   And it is very common in film.  (Just think Star Wars, Spider Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rambo, the Avengers, Little Mermaid, your typical western, your typical war movie, any film with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it where he does not get pregnant, etc. etc. etc.)

Now, I have to confess that, personally, I don’t find this basic formula extremely interesting, partly because it is so very common.  I am, however, extremely interested in why so many people find this kind of story interesting, but that’s a question for another day.

So what about Samuel Sharpe?

Sharpe was also in the redemption business.  He was a Baptist evangelist, which meant that he was interested in the salvation of souls.  But he also was very interested in saving society from the oppression of slavery.  As a result, he attacked that system.  But his story unfolded much differently than the typical Bond film.  Let me highlight two points.

First, if the goal of a rebellion is to kill the bad guys, the Jamaican slaves proved to be stunningly and amazingly ineffective.   Sixty thousand slaves rose up, fought for one month and in the process killed…..fourteen whites.  60,000 to 14.  Has there ever been a smaller proportional harvest of dead bad guys than that?  James Bond could knock off that many bad guys in about three minutes of hand-to-hand fighting in an ordinary atomic laboratory.

What kind of rebellion was this, anyway?

Jamaican slaves attack a plantation

The Baptist War was a rebellion that intentionally targeted property rather than people.  The slaves burned hundreds of houses and attacked sugar mills.  Sharpe explicitly told the rebels that they were to drive the slaveowners off the estates but they should not harm them, except in self-defense.  What a strange strategy.  More strange was that 60,000 slaves should listen to it. Burdened by a terribly oppressive system and given the opportunity to vent their frustrations, why should they exhibit this amount of self-restraint?

The slave rebellion was crushed.  In the end, 500 slaves were killed or executed.  The rebellion was a failure.  Slavery was not abolished in Jamaica.

But the story does not end there.

Slavery was not abolished, that is, until one year later, when the British Parliament emancipated the slaves in all its colonies (except those under the control of the British East India Company).  And here we come to the second very interesting part of this story.  The self-restraint and relative absence of violence on the part of the slaves played a key role in abolition.  In a round-about way, the slaves won, even after they lost the rebellion.

It’s a long and complicated story, but here are the relevant points for our purposes:  abolitionists in Parliament had been working for decades against formidable opposition.  They had managed to ban the slave trade and slavery in Britain.  It was tougher going to ban slavery in the colonies.

By 1831, political conditions made it look like abolition was in reach.  The key lay in persuading enough politicians and their constituents to put the vote over the top.

But most Brits had the 1791 Haitian slave revolt in the back of their minds.  That revolt left 10,000  blacks and 2000 whites dead.  It provoked an even more violent twelve-year rebellion.  As a result, the Haitian revolt  left an ambiguous legacy.  It proved that abolition was possible.  But the violence of the rebellion terrified whites in Europe and the Americas.  Stores of atrocious acts of violence by blacks (though not those of whites against blacks) circulated among white populations for years afterward.  The revolt reinforced racial stereotypes of blacks as savage beasts and encouraged many whites to believe that emancipation would lead economic ruin and the wholesale slaughter of whites.

Had the Jamaican slaves in 1831, then, set out to kill as many slaveowners as possible, they most likely would have turned a great chunk of British public opinion against them.  Samuel Sharpe, who had received news from missionaries about Parliamentary negotiations, knew this.  Thus, the orders for self-restraint.

And it shaped the political discussion in the months after the Baptist War.  Instead of hearing speeches denouncing savage brutality of blacks who wanted to rape white women and massacre the English, MPs in London heard missionaries testify about the cruelty of the planters and the execution of Christians like Sharpe.  Black slaves no longer looked like savage beasts.  It became more possible to conceive of them as free citizens.  Although there was more to the story, the relative lack of violence by the Jamaican slaves played a key role in their redemption from slavery.  How strange.

And what an interesting story of violence and redemption.

Score:    James Bond         0

Samuel Sharpe    1