A couple of years ago, I walked through the library looking for a book to read during the winter break. I kept seeing S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed, and as I passed it, I thought, “Now is the time to give it a read since I’ll be able to read during the break.” I devoured the book on the way to Louisiana to visit family for the holidays, and once I finished it, I knew that I wanted to teach it someday. I organized my Lost Voices in American Literature course this semester around mysteries and thrillers, and I did that, purposefully, so I could finally teach All the Sinners Bleed.

I knew, from my initial reading, that I wanted to have students think about the ways that Cosby interrogates organized religion in the novel, one of the foundational lynchpins of Southern literature. After my first reading, I wrote about the “Christ-haunted” nature of All the Sinners Bleed, and today I want to expand that discussion some, looking at a few specific passages that explore the ways that individuals manipulate religion to serve their own personal means or use it as a mask to cover up their own oppressive natures.

When Titus goes to Elias’ church, he talks with a neighbor of the church, Griselda. She tells Titus about the young boy that Elias and his family raced, a “mixed-race child that was being homeschooled by the goddamn Heaven’s Gate.” Griselda tells Titus how Elias and his family abused the boy, simply because of his racial identity, denying him even basic necessities, and she even tells Titus that “Elias is to the right of David Duke.”

From the pulpit, Elias preached the Bible, quoting scripture to his congregation and manipulating it to fit his Lost Cause and white supremacist beliefs. Griselda continues, “He talks an awful lot about God and the Bible, but my mama always said the devil can quote the Good Book as well as any angel. And Elias is as close to the devil as I wanna get.” Griselda’s comment stems from Satan tempting Jesus in the desert following his baptism. This account appears in three of the gospels, and in Matthew and Luke, Satan quotes Psalm 91 when he tempts Jesus to throw himself from the top of the temple so the angels will save him. In response, Jesus responds with scripture as well, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The phrase, “The devil can site scripture for his purpose,” doesn’t come from the Bible, even though it refers to the temptation of Jesus. The phrase initially appeared in William Shakespeare’s A Merchant of Venice, when Antonia addresses Bassanio. He continues by stating, “An evil soul producing holy witness/Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.” The point, of course, is that anyone can take and manipulate scripture to their own ends, using it to suppress others and bend them to their will. We see this with passages like the first part of Romans 13 where Paul says that all authority has “been instituted by God.” We saw it with the way that enslavers used it to justify enslaver their fellow human beings. We saw it with the way segregationist used it to justify Jim Crow. We see it with the way individuals use it to uphold patriarchy. Griselda points out that for all of his sermonizing, Elias uses the Bible to maintain white supremacy.

The recurring theme arises again and again in the novel. We see it directly in the references to the racist theological reading of the Curse of Ham. When Dr. Kim provides Titus with the autopsy reports for the children found under the willow tree, she tells him that someone carved “Cursed be Canaan” into their skin. This phrase immediately made Titus think about the Curse of Ham from Genesis 9:20–27. In the biblical story, Noah, following the flood, gets drunk and falls asleep naked. His son, Ham, sees him, and Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan, telling him that he will be a slave to the sons of Noah’s other sons, Shem and Japheth. In verse 25, Noah says, “Cursed be Canaan; the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”

Enslavers used the “Curse of Ham,” or more accurately the “Cuse of Canaan,” to justify enslaving individuals of African descent. Mia Bay writes, “Once seen by Europeans as a curse on the Slavs from the Black Sea region, who were widely enslaved in the late Middle Ages, the European myths about the curse of Ham were transferred to the African race with the rise of racial slavery.” The story, thus, became a justification to enslave others and to justify white supremacy. Titus thinks about the ways it had been used by “multiple empires” as a way “to justify subjugating various peoples and keeping them in chains.”

Titus continues, though, by recalling what one of his teachers says during a social studies class. The woman told the class, “without a hint of compunction that Black people were cursed to be slaves by the word of God.” Right when got home after school, Titus told his mother what the teacher said, and she replied, “We going up there to talk to that wench tomorrow. The Word is perfect, but the way men interpret it is corrupt. And your teacher is full of shit.” Titus has lost his faith, and he sees the “Word” not as a capital “W” but “just as corrupt as the men who read it” because, in his view, “written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.” Titus saw the ways the Bible became nothing more than a tool of oppression, a weapon to wield when needed, and that perspective, along with other things, led him to become agnostic.

Later, when the third wolf calls Titus, to taunt him, the killer tells him, “Genesis nine: twenty through twenty-seven,” and Titus immediately recognizes the verses as “The Curse of Ham.” He asks the killer if those were the verses he used as “justification” for murdering “boys and girls” of color, abusing them, carving things in their skin, and killing them. The murderer simply responds with another Biblical reference, this time to John 10:12–13, describing Jesus as the good shepherd. Here, Jesus points out that a worker, unlike the owner of the sheep, flees when he sees the wolf coming because “he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep.” Again, the killer, like Elias, like the enslaver, like the segregationist, like the male supremacists, like countless others, uses scripture for his own means, to taunt Titus.

We know the ways that individuals twist and manipulate words, working themselves into knots to tell themselves they are right and everyone else if wrong. This contorting plays into what I want to look at in the next post, the ways that All the Sinners Bleed deals with the myth that when something bad happens people say, “This ain’t us.” Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.