In this guest post by Lori Ferguson we learn about the views of slavery of Evangelical Christians in the second generation following the Great Awakening.
Evangelical Christians’ View of Slavery Before the American Revolution
So far we’ve seen that the Christians of the Great Awakening didn’t consider the slave industry as a problem that needed to be solved. Although the Quakers developed an effective abolitionist movement in the couple of decades before the American Revolution, evangelicals did not. Even in the second generation of Christians following the generation of the revival, there was little progress. Historians explain that the sense of most Christians continued for a long time to be that the system could bear reform, but need not be overthrown. It was not seen as a systemic problem.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the drive for any change in the status quo gradually lost its momentum as black people became Christian. Also, as the social setting changed, so did the focus and effects of preaching. Many of the preachers addressing white Methodists and Baptists in the south denounced slave-ownership as yet another manifestation of the worldliness, greed, and indolence of the affluent. When these men were physically beaten and socially persecuted because of this message, they identified and associated with oppressed blacks, which made them even more suspect in the south’s racist culture. The ones who went so far as to diagnose an evil system were ostracised. Social stability was always of more importance to the ruling classes than social justice.
An interesting exception to the trend of ignoring the problem was Robert Carter III, heir of a prodigiously wealthy Virginia family. Carter was converted and joined a Baptist church in 1777. He is noted for liberating over 500 slaves in 1791, probably the largest emancipation by an individual person in the United States before 1860. His reasons for doing so were religious, although by that time he had gone over to the heretical Swedenborgians, a mystical sect that had an influence on abolitionists in Britain because of its utopian ideals.
An abolitionist message was preached with more lasting effect in the north, not so much by Baptists but by New Light Presbyterians such as Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr. Hopkins, a Rhode Island pastor who had studied under Jonathan Edwards, spoke on behalf of the second generation of evangelicals in a pamphlet that he sent to all the attendees of the Continental Congress in 1776. “Behold the sons of liberty, oppressing and tyrannizing over many thousands of poor blacks, who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves.” Cases where entire congregations took a stand against slavery are rare, but do include those of Hopkins and Jacob Green, another Presbyterian. Their congregations excluded slaveholders from membership in decisions taken in 1784 and 1782 respectively.
At higher levels of church organization, neither Presbyterians, Methodists nor Baptists had any success at forming a denominational anti-slavery statement in the 18th century in either North or South. Essentially, the churches claimed that this simply wasn’t their job. It wasn’t until after the American Revolution that Christians began to grasp that sins could be societal as well as personal, and that abolitionism should be part of their witness to the world.
In the next post of the series, we’ll begin to look at the attitudes of men in politics rather than church.