A History Lesson

I began my professional career as a historian, and, although the job market for historians in the mid-1970s sent me to law school, I have managed to keep up with developments in my field. Two of the most exciting areas in recent decades have been the increasingly sophisticated study of slavery and slave society and the rediscovery of the importance of religion in American life. A recent book, Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, touches on both of these subjects in a way that raises questions about how the church relates to injustices in society.

Ford's book is a study of how white Southerners thought about slavery from the 1780s to the 1830s. During this period Southerners moved from looking on slavery as an unfortunate evil that would someday disappear (although no one could quite say how) to seeing it as a positive good that was both essential for the masters and beneficial to the slaves. Christians played an essential role in that transformation. The story is complicated, but a simple summary is sufficient for the points that I want to make. In the late eighteenth century southern evangelical Christians, particularly Methodists and Baptists but also a few Presbyterians, were in the forefront of criticizing slavery. Many evangelical churches had substantial numbers of black members, slave and free, with the black portion of the congregation often led by blacks. The churches recognized the spiritual equality of all members, who often addressed each other as brothers and sisters without regard to race. There were also black congregations, and the laws that required that white ministers lead them were not always strictly enforced. This was not racial equality, but there was a willingness to accept at least some black initiative in church matters.

The southern evangelical criticism of slavery was always much stronger among the clergy than the laity, and for that among other reasons it did not survive changes in Southern society. For a number of reasons, including the increased profitability of slavery and terrors raised by real and imagined slave revolts, after 1800 white Southern society came to fear anything that suggested slave or free black autonomy. Laws placed restrictions on slaves and, to a lesser extent, free blacks, including restricting or prohibiting them from meeting on their own, even with white leadership, and prohibiting teaching them to read and write. White church leaders resisted some of those laws, but primarily they refocused their efforts. They stopped criticizing slavery and instead sought ways to work within it to achieve their primary goal, the salvation of souls; freedom for the slaves had always been a secondary goal. They developed a mission to the slaves whose purpose went beyond converting slaves to Christianity and focused on making them better slaves--more obedient, harder working, willing to accept their position in life without protest. In the process these Christians--the most prominent of whom was a Presbyterian minister and slaveholder--led an ideological transformation in which slavery supposedly was no longer based on coercion and power but, instead, was a benevolent paternalism. In this new understanding, the master was the head of a family whose subordinate members included his wife, his children, and his slaves. He took care of the slaves and saw to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare; in return they gave him loyalty, respect, and lifetime service. Because, according to this view, black slaves were racially inferior to whites, this arrangement allowed both whites and slaves to achieve their greatest potential; no longer did southerners need to apologize for slavery or claim to hope that it would eventually disappear. White society as a whole eventually accepted the new ideology and used it to defend itself against the increasing attacks on slavery from outside the South. Some masters even tried to make the ideology reflect reality. In short, what began as a Christian attack on slavery because their status as humans in need of conversion implied that slavery was wrong turned into a Christian justification for slavery that a slave's conversion would not change.

I think that this short history suggests the temptations that face the church when it seeks to confront a deeply entrenched evil. When it attacks evil directly it will often run into overwhelming opposition from those who have power. It will then turn to less threatening alternatives in the hope of at least ameliorating the evil. The risk in doing so is that the church will forget that it is dealing with something that is evil and will see the amelioration as achieving all the goals of the Gospel. It will adapt to society's acceptance of the evil and simply try to soften the rough edges. Thus, when the early hopes for eliminating slavery proved illusory, it was reasonable for Christians to decide at least to bring the slaves the knowledge of Jesus to sustain them in their travails. The problem was that in doing so they capitulated to their society's slavery-based economic system and its fundamental racism. Rather than providing the slaves hope for ultimate freedom (a hope that the slaves quite properly found for themselves in the story of the Exodus), white Christians both taught them to be content with their lot and provided a new and supposedly Christian justification for their enslavement. They lost sight of the ultimate goal but convinced themselves that in doing so they were serving both God and the slaves.

The history of the church over the centuries contains other examples of adapting the Gospel to the current power structure. One is the church's tradition of giving help to the poor while supporting economic and political systems that keep the poor in poverty. Another is the development of just war theory in a way that, rather than keeping the ultimate goal of peace in the forefront of our thinking but to provide a veneer of support for whatever those in power decide to do. Indeed, the Crusading spirit shows the church entirely losing sight of the Gospel of peace and instead actively promoting warfare.

The church exists in an imperfect world, where God's kingdom is not yet established. Its choices will always be between imperfect alternatives. What this history lesson shows is the danger that comes from forgetting that those choices are imperfect. When the church loses sight of God's perfect kingdom and treats its limited choices as themselves perfect, it can become the servant of the evil that it seeks to oppose.