Christianity reads the Exodus typologically — as an event that happened and also as a template the church claims for itself. The Easter Vigil, the longest service of the Christian year, has the crossing of the sea as its central reading, followed immediately by the blessing of the font: the water that drowned the army is the water of baptism. That reading is ancient and uncontroversial. What is contested is the political one. Latin American liberation theology in the 1960s and 70s took the Exodus as the hermeneutical key to the whole Bible, God as liberator of the oppressed, and got a formal warning from the Vatican in 1984 for the Marxist analysis attached to it. Long before that, enslaved Christians in the American South had already done the same work without a seminary: masters preached Ephesians on obedient servants; the slaves sang about Moses, Pharaoh and the crossing, and the spirituals are the record. James Cone built Black theology on exactly that move, and Cornel West and others carry it now.