Slavery's Long Shadow

Race and Reconciliation in American Christianity

James L. Gorman, Jeff W. Childers, Mark W. Hamilton, James L. Gorman, Jeff W. Childers, Mark W. Hamilton

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467452571
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

How interactions of race and religion have influenced unity and division in the church

At the center of the story of American Christianity lies an integral connection between race relations and Christian unity. Despite claims that Jesus Christ transcends all racial barriers, the most segregated hour in America is still Sunday mornings when Christians gather for worship.

In Slavery's Long Shadow fourteen historians and other scholars examine how the sobering historical realities of race relations and Christianity have created both unity and division within American churches from the 1790s into the twenty-first century. The book's three sections offer readers three different entry points into the conversation: major historical periods, case studies, and ways forward.Historians as well as Christians interested in racial reconciliation will find in this book both help for understanding the problem and hope for building a better future.

Contributors:

Tanya Smith Brice

Joel A. Brown

Lawrence A. Q. Burnley

Jeff W. Childers

Wes Crawford

James L. Gorman

Richard T. Hughes

Loretta Hunnicutt

Christopher R. Hutson

Kathy Pulley

Edward J. Robinson

Kamilah Hall Sharp

Jerry Taylor

D. Newell Williams

Race and Unity/Division in American Christianity

Evangelical Revivalism and Race Relations in the Early National Era

JAMES L. GORMAN

Barton Stone filed papers to free his slaves in 1801 because he believed God detested slavery and it would be abolished due to the revivals of his day. A minister of two frontier Presbyterian congregations in central Kentucky, Stone had encountered a type of slavery near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1797 that he identified as the “exciting cause of my abandonment of slavery.” “My soul sickened,” he recounted forty years later, “at the sight of slavery in more horrid forms than I had ever seen it before; poor negroes! some chained to their work—some wearing iron collars—all half naked, and followed and driven by the merciless lash of a gentleman overseer—distress appeared scowling in every face.”¹ A few years after that experience, Stone filed a deed of manumission for his two slaves, Ned and Lucy, whom he had received from his mother at her death. Stone later recalled, “I had emancipated my slaves from a sense of right, choosing poverty with a good conscience, in preference to all the treasures of the world.” But Stone acknowledged more at work than his personal moral choice; the revival had become an active emancipator: “This revival cut the bonds of many poor slaves.”² Some evangelicals believed that the goal of Christian unity in the revivals and the renunciation of slavery were harbingers of the imminent millennium and the end of slavery.³ For many evangelicals, the revivals were a sign of the last days that made urgent the abolition of slavery and conversion of enslaved people.

African Americans did not become Christians in substantial numbers until the awakenings of the mid-eighteenth and especially the early nineteenth century, and both the spatial arrangements and the message of revivals shaped black-white race relations in American Christianity.⁴ Amid revolutionary ideology that suggested that all people had unalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness, evangelical revivals in the early national era of American history (1780s–1810s) gathered black and white people together for shared divine encounters where revivalists preached an egalitarian message of freedom from spiritual bondage. As historian Peter Heltzel avers, “Revivals were sites for increased spiritual interaction between blacks and whites, functioning as new space for racial integration where all were equal at the altar of God. . . . Revivals provided African Americans with both a message of equality before God and a physical space where they were free to express themselves through singing, shaking, running, dancing, chanting, and shouting.”⁵ Historian Paul Harvey argues that the awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “effectively implanted the seeds of a biracial culture of popular evangelicalism into the ground of American religious expression.”⁶

This chapter interacts with scholarship and primary sources to explore several questions and issues related to evangelical revivalism and race relations in the early national era. After describing evangelical revivalism and the political context, the chapter explores major questions historians have engaged:⁷ What was the nature of evangelical opposition to slavery and why did it change by 1810? Why did enslaved African Americans critically appropriate evangelicalism at that time, and in what ways did they contribute to the construction of it? What continuity existed between evangelical revivalism and traditional African religions? How did enslaved people experience evangelical Christianity in general and revivalism in particular, and in what ways did these religious, cultural, and racial exchanges shape race relations in American Christianity? How did those exchanges lead to unity or division in the church? Although evangelical revivalists of the era did at times break down some barriers—between free and slave, poor and rich, male and female, black and white, Baptist and Methodist—due to the egalitarian and democratic effects of conversion (i.e., spiritual equality no matter the sex, race, or denomination), and though some did advocate for enslaved people, they failed to create a lasting biracial unity in their Christian tradition.

Revivalist and Revolutionary Contexts

The “evangelical” movement arose in the eighteenth century, especially in the heat of the Great Awakening revivals of the middle of the century.⁸ Evangelicals located on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean de-emphasized denominational creeds and confessions, pointing instead to the new birth conversion experience as the essential marker of Christian identity.⁹ Therefore, evangelicals conducted revivals primarily to lead people to conversion. Revivals ostensibly created space for what evangelicals called the “outpouring of God’s Spirit,” manifested primarily in God’s work of “new birth” conversion—a moment when God changed a person’s corrupt nature and saved the person from eternity in hell.¹⁰ This new birth had potentially subversive ends, as some evangelicals used its egalitarian message of spiritual equality to challenge or momentarily transcend gender, racial, and other social constructs and mores. That certainly became the case for many enslaved people who experienced conversion.

Revivals occurred between what historians call the Great Awakening that flourished in the 1740s and the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century; therefore, historians debate when the Great Awakening stopped, when the Second Great Awakening began, and whether the labels are even helpful.¹¹ Nonetheless, most historians describe the Second Great Awakening as a nationwide series of revivals from the 1790s to the 1830s with several geographic centers—the Great Revival in the West (1797–1805), New England revivals (1790s–1800s), and New York revivals (1820s–1830s).¹² The Great Revival in the West became known for its multiple-day revivals sparked especially by Presbyterian sacramental occasions, Methodist camp meetings, and Methodist quarterly meetings. These revivals, which were often interdenominational (Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) and biracial, included religious exercises such as falling, barking, running, dancing, laughing, singing, and jerking.¹³

Revivals under consideration in this chapter occurred in the wake of the Revolutionary War and the formation of the new nation’s government, which led to heightened rhetoric of liberty, assumed “unalienable rights” of all people, and a thoroughgoing democratization of American society. These ideas and practices of freedom, equality, common sense, natural rights, popular sovereignty, and religious liberty drastically shaped Christianity, even as Christianity informed many of these sociopolitical ideals, as illustrated in Nathan Hatch’s classic study The Democratization of American Christianity.¹⁴ Evangelical revivals often became sites where political and religious egalitarianism combined to forge powerful challenges to hierarchies and assumptions about children, women, and black people.

Evangelical Opposition to Slavery

Although antislavery sentiment began on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle of the eighteenth century, the American Revolution, with assertions that all individuals had unalienable rights, unintentionally intensified the public debate about slavery and abolition in America. The idea that “all men are created equal” and are imbued with natural rights was difficult to reconcile with involuntary lifetime slavery, unless black people could be construed as less than human. That is one reason all northern states had either abolished slavery or set in place laws for gradual emancipation by 1804. In the South, however, economic interests and whites’ racial anxieties precluded abolition. The two sections of the country justified their positions with differing political, social, racial, and theological arguments, setting the stage for the American Civil War (1861–1865). From colonial times to the eve of the Civil War, some evangelicals were leaders in the antislavery cause.¹⁵

An important factor contributing to the conversion of African Americans to evangelical Christianity in the early national era was evangelical opposition to slavery, even if evangelicals were always divided on the issue. John Wesley and the Methodists led evangelical opposition to slavery. Wesley unequivocally condemned slavery in Thoughts upon Slavery (1774): slavery could not be reconciled with justice, mercy, or Christianity, and God would atone for the blood of the slaves with the blood of traders and owners.¹⁶ Bishops Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke advanced an antislavery platform in America, though proslavery Methodists persistently rejected it. The 1780 Baltimore Methodist conference declared slavery “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society” and encouraged all Methodists to free their slaves.¹⁷ The 1784 conference even voted to expel those who bought or held slaves if they had been previously warned and if they lived where emancipation was legal. This rule created a firestorm among Methodists until another Baltimore conference in 1785 suspended it. Still, in Maryland between 1783 and 1799, for one example, 1,800 slaves were freed in predominately Methodist territory. And Methodist ministers in the South, such as Virginian James O’Kelly in 1789, continued to condemn slavery, calling slave overseers “devils incarnate.”¹⁸

In 1800, the Methodist General Conference unequivocally condemned the hypocrisy of proclaiming liberty of all people and owning slaves in their broadside “Address of the General Conference” (1800), which bore the signatures of bishops Coke, Asbury, and Richard Whatcoat. “The Address” “lamented the great national evil of NEGRO-SLAVERY” because it was “repugnant to the unalienable rights of mankind, and to the very essence of civil liberty, but more especially to the spirit of the Christian religion.” Methodist leadership attempted to hasten the “universal extirpation of this crying sin” by leveraging Methodist social capital to change US laws.¹⁹ “The Address” infuriated slaveholders, who found new ways to challenge leaders: many stopped letting their slaves attend meetings. In South Carolina in early 1801, for example, Asbury wrote that the “rich among the people never thought us worthy to preach to them: they did indeed give their slaves liberty to hear and join our Church; but now it appears the poor Africans will no longer have this indulgence.”²⁰ In the wake of this opposition, the Methodists softened their emancipationist voice.

Baptist churches and associations in Virginia, Kentucky, New York, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio also publicly opposed slavery, though Baptist opposition usually followed. John Leland, a leading Baptist pastor in Virginia, produced an antislavery resolution for the Baptist General Committee in Virginia in 1790, resolving that slavery was a “violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican government.” The resolution encouraged members to use “every legal measure, to extirpate this horrid evil from the land, and pray Almighty God, that our Honourable Legislature may have it in their power, to proclaim the general Jubilee.”²¹ Such antislavery movements sometimes led people to free their slaves: Virginian Robert Carter III freed more than 450 slaves beginning in 1791, though his action was not typical of elite evangelicals. Leading Baptists Shubal Stearns and Elhanan Winchester carried Baptist antislavery revivalism to slaves and poor whites in the South, accelerating the Christianization of enslaved people. In England, Baptist leader William Carey argued that missions were becoming successful in the 1790s in part because of an increase in efforts to “abolish the inhuman Slave-Trade.”²² Like Methodists, however, some Baptists immediately opposed resolutions like the one in 1790. In fact, after much debate, the General Committee in Virginia refused to discuss slavery in 1793 because it claimed such a discussion belonged to the legislative body.²³

Congregationalist evangelicals also worked against slavery in this period, and none were more vocal than Jonathan Edwards’s student, Samuel Hopkins. In 1776, he published an antislavery work that argued that slavery was “contrary to the whole tenor of divine revelation” and urged Americans to free their slaves.²⁴ In a 1793 sermon to the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, he said slavery was an instrument of Satan and an obstacle to Christ’s command to spread the gospel. Supporters of slavery were the “emissaries of satan.” Slavery would be abolished anywhere the gospel was preached and obeyed. Hopkins advocated for coloniz...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Slavery’s Long Shadow: Race and Reconciliation in American Christianity (James L. Gorman, Jeff W. Childers, and Mark W. Hamilton)
• Race and Unity/Division in American Christianity
• Case Studies on Race and Christian Unity
• Proposals for the Future
• Index