Give me a God I can relate to...

Dear William and Ellen Craft,

I was so inspired by the story of your perseverance towards your aspirations of emancipation and, finally, freedom. Throughout your hardships, you repeatedly turned to religion as a stronghold and source of faith and justice, helping you deal with the difficulties you faced: for example, you believed strongly that slaveholders would eventually be punished by God's hand. Yet, I'm curious about your unwavering attitude towards your religion. In the Christian tradition which you must have been exposed to by your white owners, God is supposedly white, a race Ellen specifically seems to mistrust deeply (at least before meeting the kind whites in Philadelphia). Not to mention, so many of those purportedly close to him, the reverends, defend slavery emphatically and believe strongly in the inferiority of your race. Throughout it all, instead of becoming jaded, you held on to your faith, never doubting that God was on your side, even if he was worshiped by not only blacks, but also slaveowning whites. This forms a fact I find simply astounding as someone who is not religious.

In the foreword to The Color Purple, Alice Walker once wrote that "It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. . . . We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction," which reminded me of feminist writer Blythe Baird's book title, "Give Me a God I Can Relate To." I wonder how you would respond to this. Despite your limited education, you evidently did not accept blindly everything the masters believed in and passed on to you (slavery), and it's curious to me your complete acceptance of a god who seems to be fundamentally at odds with you.

Dana

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