Ta-Nehesi Coates has a thoughtful post on the slaveholders' making Christians of their slaves that is worth reading, but I reproduce here a comment by Doctor Cleveland:

It's a classic example of how ideology controls perceptions, where the slaveholders (in this case) just couldn't see what they were doing because they couldn't acknowledge some basic truths.

I mean, if you're going to keep a large group of people in bondage, why would you ever tell them the Moses story? It only makes sense when you understand that the slaveholders couldn't imagine that anyone but themselves could ever be the Israelites. They couldn't imagine themselves as Pharaoh, even while they were building their big cotton pyramids.

What's telling about the decision is how the white supremacists not only would not but could not make a distinction between what they were doing and Christianity. To keep a dirty system going, you have to selectively but profoundly misunderstand it. (You can't be Pharaoh without pretending to yourself that you aren't.) But because you can't look at what you're doing in the cold, hard light, you make gigantic misjudgments.

Goes to what I've been saying about the essential subversiveness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. When its liberating, lifegiving juice has been squeezed out of it by the control-freak Pharisees, Inquisitors, and Christianists, it morphs into its opposite.  That's what the so-called new atheists mostly don't understand.  They see as a danger, and I think rightly so, this rigidified husk of a faith tradition that has become an emotional and intellectual cage. In its essence, it's the opposite.

Christian discipline, a regime designed to promote emotionaal and intellectual liberation, cannot work if it is coerced.  It must be chosen, as one would choose to submit to the discipline or practice regime required if one seeks to improve as an athlete or a musician.  It becomes a parody of itself when it is used as a tool of social control.