On Mark Twain and Social Injustice…

I recently reread a few excerpts from Mark Twain’s famous American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Twain had a knack for making fun of Christianity and was able to point out many of her practitioners faults.  In chapter 31, Twain introduces a Spiritual dilemma for our hero, Huck Finn.  Huck had been on the Mississippi with Jim the slave and ended up losing Jim to a group of “scoundrels.”  His dilemma was that he had been taught in his limited experience in church that it was a sin to help slaves.  Evidently, this was a prominant teaching in the South during the time of the novel.  One can only imagine what reasoning may have gone behind that teaching!  The Torah, which was the law given by God for the Jews, had many laws pertaining to how one should treat his slaves and by default was approving of slavery.  The Torah makes up part of the Christian Old Testament.  Without putting those Scriptures into context, it is quite possible that an uneducated individual with a prejudice against a different people group could easily twist those passages to okay the type of injustice that went on in the South.  Careful study, however, would suggest that the type of slavery that went on in the Old Testament that had God’s stamp of approval was voluntary servitude in order to pay off debts.  On top of that, the individual had a time limit on how long he was to be indebted to his master and then was to be given the option of being set free or to continue working.  Christians in the South who approved of slavery through this reasoning were taking Scripture out of context.

Today, we no longer deal with slavery in America.  Praise God that such a terrible institution was abolished! Even though we have come a long way as a society, every generation deals with some group that is stigmatized and rejected.  Homelessness is one of the greatest problems facing our society today.  The face of homelessness has changed and is no longer simply the classic picture of the “town drunk.” Now the group has grown to include people of all walks of life, including women and children.  Mike Yankowski wrote a book that chronicled his journey as a homeless man living in America called Under the Overpass.  In the book, he demonstrated several examples of how churches shunned he and his friend.  How sad that in a time where the homeless are stigmatized the Body of Christ is not stepping in to say “this is wrong” but instead “we join in.”  Our Lord said: “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith.”  Even today, we continue to neglect the more important things; and, in doing so we are forcing the Hucks of the world who want to do good to choose hell over God.

s.t.