In 1845, a runaway slave named Frederick Douglass
published his autobiography, The Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass. If you
haven’t read it, you should. It is a great
classic of American literature and a harrowing
look at slavery. In his Narrative, Douglass
criticized both slavery and the kind of Christianity
that underwrote it. He described a slave being
whipped, back shredded and bleeding, as her
master quoted the Bible: “And by his stripes
you shall be healed.” He recounted masters
who became crueler after Christian conversion,
their faith seeming to fortify their cruelty.
He claimed that his kindest master was not
a Christian…and suggested that that was
not an accident.
At the end of his Narrative, Douglass addressed
concerns that he was anti-Christian. No, he
wrote, he was not. He was, he explained, opposed
to what he called “the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial
and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
The religion of this land was not the religion
of Christ.
Not all Christians agreed with Douglass. In
1850, James Henley Thornwell, a white Southern
Presbyterian minister, preached a sermon at
the dedication of a new church built for black
Christians in Charleston. In his sermon, “The
Rights and Duties of Masters” he argued
that slavery was not, as some people argued,
unchristian. The Bible, after all, allowed
it. Moreover, even though slavery was a system
of the fallen world, on this side of paradise
it was one of the systems in place to keep
society functioning. And, Thornwell contended,
slavery was a condition in which slaves could
“make moral progress.” Not, of course,
that he or folks like him would be able to
make moral progress as a slave. “The free
citizens of England and America,” he claimed,
“could not endure the condition of African
bondage—it would defeat his individual development.”
But “subjection to a master” was “the
state in which the African is most effectually
trained to the moral end of his being.”
According to Thornwell the Bible allowed slavery
and black people needed it.
By the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was
the central question of U.S politics. It was
also, as Frederick Douglass and James Henley
Thornwell show, the central religious question
of the day. Indeed, the political and religious
questions were linked. Historian Mark Noll
has called the Civil War a “theological
crisis.” That may seem strange. Obviously
the war was a political and military crisis,
but a theological one?
But Noll’s point is this: in 1860, Protestant
Christians, specifically white Protestant
Christians, held a lot of power in America.
The majority of people, both black and white,
who were religious, were Protestants. Yet,
on the key issue of the day, slavery, these
evangelical Protestants not only could not
help the country resolve the problem, but
in many cases their churches split over slavery
before the country did. As Noll points out,
Generals Grant and Sherman—two men who were
not, by any measure, evangelical Protestants—were
left to resolve the issue of slavery because
people who claimed to share the same faith
couldn’t do it in their own churches, must
less for the country.
In this episode, we are going to explore why.
Why couldn’t evangelical Protestants come
together and address the problem? Why did
so many white Protestants—including smart
folks like James Henley Thornwell who believed
in the shared humanity of black and white
people—believe slavery to be compatible
with Christianity? Why?
Religiously-inflected debates about slavery
were not new in the mid-nineteenth century,
but, by the 1840s and 1850s, they had developed
a new urgency on both sides. Starting around
the 1820s, the slavery debates had become
largely sectional, North against South. During
the early years of the nation, slavery had
largely ended in the North. That meant that
by around 1820, arguments against slavery
were not arguments directed at an institution
existing everywhere in the country, but arguments
against a system that existed in one part
of the country. It was a recipe, in other
words, for the kind of “us versus them”
scenario that hardens positions. You may have
noticed a bit of that thinking in our current
politics. When New York representative James
Tallmadge proposed two anti-slavery amendments
to a bill for Missouri’s statehood in 1819,
southern congressmen united against them.
In 1820, Congress passed the so-called Missouri
Compromise. The Compromise admitted Missouri
as a slave state, Maine as a free one, and
declared that slavery could not advance north
of the 36.30 parallel in the Louisiana Territories.
The compromise aimed to keep the balance of
power equal between free and slave states
and avoid more sectional strife. It didn’t
work.
In the decade or so after the Missouri compromise,
several events further heightened tensions
over slavery and Christianity’s relationship
to it. In 1829, Nat Turner, a slave, led a
revolt in Virginia, killing dozens of white
people. After he was caught, Turner gave an
account of the religious visions, rooted in
the Bible, that drove his rebellion. Turner’s
revolt catalyzed new laws prohibiting slaves
from reading the Bible and outlawing slave
gatherings, including religious gatherings,
without white people present. At the same
time, Northern abolition sentiment was growing.
The religious revivals associated with what
some historians call the Second Great Awakening
made some Northerners think about not only
eradicating personal sin but social sin as
well. The most famous revivalist of the time,
Charles Finney, called slavery a sin and other
folks, black and white, said the same.
Many other white Christians—even people
who didn’t like slavery and hoped it would
end—disagreed with Finney’s claim. And
they believed Finney was wrong because of
how they read the Bible. I want to say that
again. The argument that holding slaves was
sinful—an argument that for many of us today
just seems self-evident—was not a winning
argument for many white Americans, even white
Americans who didn’t like slavery. Many
white evangelicals, both those who supported
slavery and those who opposed it, agreed that
the Bible, their ultimate religious authority,
permitted slavery. And they feared the theological
implications of the arguments of those who
asserted otherwise.
Before explaining how this reading worked,
I should stop here and again give credit to
Mark Noll. If you are interested in a deep
dive here, you should look at his book, The
Civil War as Theological Crisis. I’m going
to give an overview of his argument, but if
you want more details, you should read the
book.
Here goes. The way evangelicals, North and
South, read the Bible was shaped by a philosophy
called Common Sense Realism. You wanted to
dive into nineteenth-century philosophy, didn’t
you? Great. Common Sense Realism said that
God had given all people a common sense—meaning
a sense common to all not the common sense
my brother assures me all academics lack.
That common sense enabled all people to apprehend
or understand the world as it really was.
So, when I was a little kid, I would look
up at the sky and think “I wonder if everyone
sees the same color blue as I do when I look
up or if my mind is tricking me.” I wanted
to know if what I saw was real or if my mind
created it. Common sense realists said that
the color was real. God had made the world
so that our minds could apprehend the world
as it was, without interpretation. And—for
us this is the kicker—God had made the Bible
the same way. The Bible was clear—the word
they used a lot was perspicuous. God had made
it so you could comprehend the Bible without
interpretation.
Okay. Well, what does the Bible say about
slavery? First, does it clearly, unequivocally,
in plain words say “slavery is wrong.”
No. “Thou shalt not own slaves?” No. “Free
slaves if you currently own them.” No. What
it does say clearly is “slaves obey your
masters.” And it says that a couple of times.
It is the clearest statement the Bible makes
about slavery.
Now, the Bible does say some other things
that might be pertinent, but they are all
a little ambiguous. In Exodus, God frees the
Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but, also
in Exodus, God makes provisions for how the
Israelites are supposed to treat their own
slaves. God, in other words, allows the institution
of slavery to continue even after Israelite
enslavement ends. To take another example,
in Galatians Paul says that there is neither
male nor female, slave nor free. But, again,
the text doesn’t go on to say “and therefore
free your slaves.” Finally, the Book of
Philemon has some intriguing possibilities
with regard to Paul’s thinking about slavery.
In that book, Paul sends a runaway slave,
Onesimus, back to his owner, Philemon. Now,
that could be read as a validation of slavery—Paul
sends the runaway back. But Paul also tells
Philemon to welcome Onesimus as a brother
and then suggests that he, Paul, might be
visiting soon and will check on the situation.
So, maybe Paul was suggesting that he thought
the relations between masters and slaves should
be remade. Maybe. Still, note that none of
these passages say that slavery is sinful
or that it should be ended. Nothing here is
as clear—as perspicuous—as the passages
telling slaves to obey masters.
There were people in the nineteenth-century
making all sorts of arguments about why Christianity
and slavery were incompatible. You had arguments
like Frederick Douglass’s. Douglass contended
that you simply could not reconcile slavery
with the witness of Jesus. You had a tradition
in African American preaching that focused
on God’s liberating work for the Israelites
specifically and the arc of liberation in
the Bible generally as a way to show that
slavery thrawted the liberation God desired
for humanity. And you had people making historical
and textual arguments. Angelina Grimke, daughter
of a slaveholder and ardent abolitionist argued
that slavery in the Bible was more akin to
what we think of as servanthood and that all
the biblical provisions regarding slavery
aimed to make it more humane and less like,
well, slavery. Grimke, like other anti-slavery
interpreters both black and white, argued
that the American system of slavery was so
radically different from the biblical systems
of slavery that whatever the Bible said about
slavery was irrelevant to the American case.
She also turned to the example of Jesus and
the Golden Rule, arguing it was impossible
to love your neighbor as yourself and enslave
him or her because it was impossible that
you would ever want someone to enslave you.
So there definitely were biblical anti-slavery
arguments. But, all of those arguments violated
Common Sense Realist readings of the Bible.
Rather than focusing on the plain meaning
of individual verses—the Common Sense way—anti-slavery
biblical arguments invoked history, culture,
and the general spirit of the Bible. To a
lot of white evangelicals, they all seemed
to be trying to get around the clear, plain
meaning of the text. George Armstrong, a minister,
responded to such arguments by saying that
if people couldn’t assume that the word
slavery in the Bible meant essentially what
it meant in antebellum America, Christians
couldn’t be sure about what any biblical
words meant. Words have to have determinative
meaning for the Bible to be perspicuous. The
specific details of Roman slavery and American
slavery might be different, Armstrong conceded,
but, fundamentally, slavery in the Bible meant
what slavery in America did. Armstrong claimed
that all attempts to use historical investigations
into the nature of Israelite slavery or the
example of Jesus were just attempts to get
around what the Bible clearly taught.
Some white Southerners began to claim that
defending slavery was part of defending the
Bible. Unlike anti-slavery Northerners who
were making claims that simply were not biblical—claims
like “slavery is sin,” or that “the
general spirit of the text undermines slavery,”
white Southerners claimed that they were taking
the Bible literally and seriously. They were
not trying to get around what the Bible said;
they were not ignoring the words for some
generalized meaning. By being clear about
the Bible on slavery, they were defending
the clarity of the Bible.
That some abolitionists were not orthodox
Christians helped the Christian slaveholder
position. William Lloyd Garrison, a leading
abolitionist, had come to believe that the
Bible stood in the way of emancipation and,
therefore, found fault with the Bible. So
Southerners played the association game—this
should sound familiar because our political
discourse still stinks and we still do this.
Here’s how the game goes: devout Christians
who opposed slavery were allied with non-devout,
dangerous-to-the-faith folks like Garrison
ergo the anti-slavery position was dangerous
to Christianity.
Noll points out one more twist in this story.
There actually was a pretty compelling argument
about American slavery that could be made
on Common Sense Realist terms. It goes like
this: “White Southerners, you are right.
The Bible permits slavery. So let’s enslave
white people. If you think slavery is so biblical,
let’s extend the benefits to white folk.”
That argument, if taken seriously, might have
caused white people to stop defending slavery
as such a good system because it seems unlikely
that many white Christians would have wanted
to risk continuing slavery if they and their
children could potentially be slaves. But
here’s the thing. According to Noll, about
two white evangelicals, even among those who
opposed slavery, thought to make that argument.
Here’s why: slavery had become so identified
with being black that it did not occur to
many white people that the biblical argument
they were making could just as easily be applied
to white people. They were reading into the
Bible something—namely, race-based slavery—that
wasn’t there. Slavery in the Bible, after
all, wasn’t confined to people from Africa.
It didn’t even include many people from
Africa. Much of New Testament slavery involved
people of what we would consider the same
race owning each other. There simply is not
a Common Sense Biblical argument for race-based
slavery. But, racialized thinking had become
so ingrained among white evangelicals that
they read race-based slavery into the text.
To see how this worked, go back to James Henley
Thornwell. Much of his discussion treated
slavery as a somewhat abstract category, not
attached to particular times and places. He
considered whether the Bible allowed slavery—and
decided it did—and whether slavery was compatible
with belief that slaves were human—he thought
it was. But then remember what happened when
he got into specifics: “The free citizens
of England and America,” he claimed, “could
not endure the condition of African bondage—it
would defeat his individual development”
but “subjection to a master, [is] the state
in which the African is most effectually trained
to the moral end of his being.” Wait, what?
What just happened? The Bible doesn’t talk
about different moral needs for the “free
citizens of England and America” and Africans.
It doesn’t talk about slavery in racial
categories at all. But here, all of a sudden,
slavery is a moral training ground for a certain
group of people who—shocker—aren’t the
group of people James Henley Thornwell belonged
to.
Yet again, we see the importance of race as
a construction. By 1850, a smart man, and
James Henley Thornwell was a smart man, believed
that there was such a thing as the needs of
Africans as a group and the needs of white
people as a group and that they were different.
He believed, in other words, that race named
real differences among groups of people. When
it came to taking his abstract defenses to
concrete situations, James Henley Thornwell
took what the Bible says about a slavery and
married it to ideas about race that people
had been developed over time. Thornwell assumed
that what the Bible said about slavery couldn’t
apply to folks like him—even though there
is nothing in what the Bible says about slavery
that would preclude slavery applying to folks
exactly like him. James Henley Thornwell looked
around him, saw that all slaves were of African
descendent and thought that meant that people
of African descent were natural slaves and
that what the Bible said about slavery generally
applied naturally to them. And James Henley
Thornwell didn’t think he was interpreting
the Bible at all. Common Sense Realism told
him he was simply reading what was there.
To make matters worse, many white people who
opposed slavery agreed with Thornwell’s
racist thinking. Black people were, they thought,
different from white people…and inferior.
Many white people who opposed slavery thought
that black people shouldn’t be enslaved,
but they also shouldn’t be equal, they shouldn’t
be citizens, they shouldn’t, in fact, be
in the country. Groups like the American Colonization
Society, a major force in pre-war America,
claimed that the way to end slavery was to
send black people to Africa to colonize it.
They couldn’t imagine people of African
descent as part of American society. Like
Thornwell, these white people saw people of
African descent in degraded, poverty-stricken
conditions and assumed that they were therefore
degraded, poverty-prone people.
To sum up: white Protestants shared a way
of reading the Bible. That way of reading
the Bible made it hard to argue against slavery
on biblical terms. For white Southerners who
supported slavery, defending slavery became
enmeshed with defending the Bible—which
was really defending a particular way of reading
the Bible. Many white Northerners, on the
other hand, found themselves unable to beat
the white Southern argument, at least on Common
Sense Terms. What very few white Protestants
noticed was that their biblical arguments
did nothing to justify race-based slavery.
That slavery was only for black people was
something they just assumed. They read race
into the biblical argument. And, because they
told themselves that they were just reading
what was there, they blinded themselves to
the reality that they were reading their own
assumptions into the Bible.
The slavery debates, as we know, did not end
with consensus. As Noll reminds us, they were
decided not by theologians but by Generals
Grant and Sherman. Or, at least, the slavery
question, as a political matter, was decided
by Generals Grant and Sherman. They did not
solve the race question, nor did they settle
what the Bible really said about slavery.
Those unsettled questions mattered and matter
still. As Noll points out, one consequence,
particularly in the North, was an undermining
of biblical authority. When the country most
needed Christians to reach agreement, to use
their shared biblical commitment to resolve
a crisis, Christians and, some would argue,
the Bible failed. It’s not surprising, then,
that in the years after the Civil War, many
educated, elite Northerners grew disenchanted
with Common Sense readings of the Bible and,
in some cases, all claims for biblical authority.
That might be worth remembering when we Christians
talk about secularization and frustration
with a society that has moved away from the
Bible. There are good reasons to be concerned
about secularism, but folks who are skeptical
about using the Bible to determine policy
do have some powerful history on their side.
In the 19th century, some of the most strident
defenders of the Bible used it to defend chattel
slavery and, rather than compromise, they
want to war over it. Christians have given
people plenty of reasons to be skeptical about
relying on the Bible for public policy.
There were two more consequences. First, the
Civil War ended slavery, but it did not end
racism. The racist ideas that drove people
like James Henley Thornwell and the American
Colonization Society remained operative for
many white Americans. White Americans were
still not convinced that black people were
equal, were capable of being free citizens.
Many white Americans remain convinced that
black people were naturally prone to degradation
and poverty. Those stereotypes would endure
and would underwrite discriminatory laws and
practices for more than 100 years. In fact,
those stereotypes are with us still.
Finally, the white Southern notion that they
were defending the Bible stayed with them
after the Civil War. Even in defeat, many
white Southerners believed that their society
had been a biblical society. Racial stratification
was, they contended, God’s will. Jim Crow
replaced slavery as the means to a biblical
society. As we will see in the next episode,
racism and Christianity would continue to
be entangled. Douglass’s question would
remain: would white Americans follow the Christianity
of this land or of Christ?
