The Birth of a Nation

In addition to unease about whether this film is a historically accurate depiction of what life under slavery was really like, what Turner was really like, and what the people around him were really like, we have the additional issue that the film’s maker and star was accused of abusing a woman before making a film in which the availability of slave women for rape (certainly a historical fact) is a major issue. For Christians in particular, there is the additional factor that Turner was not only a literate slave, but a Bible reader and preacher, whose master kept himself financially afloat by renting Turner out to preach to other slaves about how God wanted slaves to obey their masters. After some of these slave owners also brutalized their slaves, Turner started looking at other parts of the Bible where the powerful are thrown down and the Lord orders violence against Israel’s enemies. One of the house slaves reminds Turner not to forget that God is also about love. When Turner baptizes a white sinner, this is contrary to the racial rules of slavery and his master and his underlings whip Turner unmercifully. Turner then organizes other slaves to rebel by killing slave owners, also in brutal ways. As a result, many blacks were murdered in retaliation. Whites certainly saw Turner as what we would call a terrorist, although slaveowning whites were certainly terrorists in a system of terrorism. Historically, fear of slave revolts existed throughout the South, particularly after Haitian slaves rebelled under Toussaint L’Ouverture. The West continued to collect reparations from Haiti into the fifties. Black violence and white violence to intimidate it remain live and sensitive issues.

Films like “12 Years a Slave” and books like the Underground Railroad do a better job of depicting the complexities of the brutal system of slavery, (as do films like “Selma,” “The Butler” and “The Help” with its Jim Crow aftermath) in part because filmmaker and star Nate Parker makes Turner the center of all attention as hero and martyr, almost a Christ figure, without a lot of complexity and understanding of what goes on inside of him.

This film is often compared to “Braveheart” and Mel Gibson’s similar role as a rebel who is killed and who fails in the short term but whose cause ultimately prevails through war. However, the old battles between Scotland and England are much more distant from the everyday anxieties of Americans who have to deal with, or flee, America’s racial legacy. Americans need films that engage them in ways that this film sometimes does but sometimes doesn’t.

For Christians, the most important issue may be the complicity of American Christians with slavery and its continued aftermath of racial inequality. Slavery may have built the nation’s wealth, but we are still paying the price, including the fact that so many Christians took part in acts that Jesus would certainly not countenance. Had they said no to slavery at the Birth of the Nation, things would be a lot better. Turner’s efforts of violence and counterviolence of course mean that people perish by the sword (or gun or rope), and this lead to a brutal Civil War and continues to resonate for us. Jesus’s words about justice and reconciliation are what we need to take seriously.