How We Learned That Slavery is Wrong - Professor Alec Ryrie

so this is the first of a series of four lectures on the history of Protestant Christianity this is a broad quarrelsome religious family which is now almost 500 years old at present around one in eight of the human race depending on how you count our professing Protestants of one kind or another but the significance of this tradition lies in more than just numbers this is I think the religious tradition that has worked harder and more constructively than any other to assimilate the conditions of the modern world whether or not you think that's a good thing and indeed because of its historical dominance in northern Europe and North America it's helped to define what the modern world is and to set the intellectual and cultural patterns by which non Protestants as well as Protestants still live in these four lectures I'm going to be dropping in on some of what seemed to me to be the key episodes in the history of Protestantism encounter with modernity episodes which I think are interesting in themselves but also have bigger stories to tell and so we have to start with Atlantic slavery in briefest outline between the 15th and the 19th centuries around 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic by European slave traders an unknown additional number died resisting capture or before embarkation around 10 to 15 percent of those who took ship died on the voyage and the same or more died within a year of their arrival the survivors and any children that they might have were faced with perpetual enslavement beyond those numbers it's worth recalling what this actually meant in terms of a human life we are talking of course about irrevocable abduction from home and family a voyage of weeks chained in the dark aboard tiny heaving ships packed in with hundreds of naked strangers living dying and debt if you've survived this then you've faced the prospect of being literally worked to death sometimes working the sugar boilers on shifts lasting for 24 hours or more death rates are generally significantly higher than birth rates so fresh captives were always needed to keep the system working such families as enslaved people might managed to form were always fragile their so-called owners could and did separate couples at will and normally separated parents and children enslaved women were routinely raped defiance of which there was a good deal was met with astonishing brutality after a slave rebellion in Suriname for example adults were hanged from the divet by an iron hook through his ribs until dead or bound to a stake and roasted alive over a slow fire while being tortured with glowing tongs children by contrast were tied to a cross to be broken alive in their head severed atrocities like this were by design exemplary deterring you not only from open resistance but from such heinous crimes as trying to learn to read or attempting to discover the date of your own birth which is a reminder that the atrocities are in a sense a distraction from the underlying horror of arbitrary subjection to another human beings will now plainly Atlantic slavery was one of the greatest crimes in human history but one good thing at least has come out of it which is that the world now at least professes to believe that slavery in any form is wrong that idea would have seemed almost incomprehensible to most of our pre-modern forebears so then slavery was like poverty an undesirable but inescapable fact of life individuals might escape it but to abolish the category completely was was inconceivable and of course while the modern world may have abolished slavery in law we're very far from abolished it in reality it is a pervasive fact of human history Christians are of course as deeply implicated in this as anyone the Hebrew Scriptures are full of matter-of-fact references to enslavement to regulations governing both slaves and their masters and Christianity was formed in the Roman Empire one of the most slave based societies ever seen the early Christians responded to that context with a typically spiritualizing non confrontational approach they insisted on the spiritual equality of all believers and taught that in Christ the distinction between slave and free vanishes and they therefore argued that physical slavery was of lesser importance that Christian slaves or tumbly to submit to the Masters whom God has providentially given them and masters should treat their slaves as their brothers in Christ which might or might not entail setting them free in medieval Europe though economic changes that this does seem to be an economically driven process mean the Christian slave holding morphed into serfdom and after the plagues of the 14th century even serfdom eased or disappeared but in the 15th century an entirely new form of Christian slavery appeared Portuguese navigators exploring western Africa began to enslave that people's they encountered and then the Spanish and Portuguese empires established in the Americas were from the beginning intended to run on slave labor and since the indigenous population was nearly wiped out by disease and imperial brutality that meant importing africans those first empires were of course Catholic ones Protestants came late to the Atlantic Imperial race and had definite moral qualms about slavery from the beginning there's several pious early rejections of slavery most early Protestant Imperial projects deliberately set out to staff their colonies with freely employed indigenous laborers whatever that might mean or with European immigrants but the economic realities of the new world were already set and were not easily defined when the Dutch or the British conquered Spanish or Portuguese colonies they took over the slave economies that they found functioning in them and kept them supplied by importing their own slaves when they tried to use European colonial labor they found that their colonists kept tediously insisting on tolerable working conditions and even then they died in the tropics at a prodigious rate all the while the Spanish and Portuguese slave trade meant that African slaves were readily available for purchase throughout the Caribbean how could they resist the opportunity on every Protestant held Caribbean island slavery began as marginal and quickly became dominant or take the North American colony of Georgia founded in the 1730's and initially intended by its founders to be free of slavery the attempt only lasted months the colonists reported back to London that a white man in these lands if he cannot buy a slave must work himself like a slave to be blunt it is very hard to compete with unpaid laborers who can be worked literally to death and once your importing slaves for yourself and you may as well to others as well by 1700 English ships were taking a dominant place in the transatlantic slave trade without ever quite actively deciding to do so but the Protestant powers had immersed themselves in African blood now some Protestants did continue to disapprove there's a famous Quaker manifesto from Pennsylvania from 1688 which is the world's first unreserved a denunciation of slavery but there are distinctly mixed motives from those who disapprove the Quaker petitioners seem to fear chiefly that a slave economy would cut their own wages and they and a great many others opposed importing black pagans into their New Jerusalem but until the late 18th century anti-slavery is very much a minority opinion and if you harped on the subject you looked like a crank take for example this man benjamin lay essex quaker serial troublemaker who pitched up in pennsylvania in the 1730's four foot seven inches tall dressed in homemade clothes never wearing leather a strict vegetarian opposed to alcohol opposed to tobacco opposed to tea opposed to capital punishment and opposed to slavery once he burst into a Quaker meeting dressed as a soldier delivered a diatribe against slavery and then stabbed his Bible with his sword declaring that slave owning was tantamount to murder and the Bible dramatically spurted read he's hidden a bladder of juice between its pages for the purpose this man's moral clarity is admirable but we can appreciate that his neighbors may have laughed rather than change blank opposition to slavery was a distinctly eccentric position most mainstream Protestants couldn't afford this kind of simplemindedness slavery might be regrettable but better to work with it and improve it rather than just rail against it we can dismiss many of these defenders of slavery as self justifying hypocrites not all of them in 1742 a book in defense of slavery by Jacobus capitaine a newly ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church became a best-seller it ran through five editions within a year and the books argument is eloquent enough but it's real selling point was its author's story because capitain was African by birth he'd been enslaved himself as a child before being freed and sent to the Netherlands for education and his ambition was to take the Protestant gospel back to his native land as a missionary he's the first black African ever to be ordained a Protestant minister and he represented everything that Europe's Protestant establishments hoped for from their empires the lights of Christendom spreading into heathen darkness in 1742 the same year as his book he sent to the Dutch trading post of El Mina in modern Ghana of the 240 other employees of the Dutch West India Company stationed there only the governor had a higher salary than he did and the Netherlands cheered him on his way the the poem here published to celebrate his mission written by a friend of his says his skin is black but his soul is white with him the Africans once whitened will always honor the lamb it was kindly meant in reality he found himself isolated in Elmina resented by most of his colleagues without meaningful support from the church that had ordained him back in Amsterdam stymied in his attempts to build links with the local population he tried to resign but was forbidden so he forged on he created a school only to die in 1747 aged only thirty his school died with him the experiment had failed and the Dutch ordains no more Africans but why did he defend slavery well the argument of his book is pretty routine that he argues that the Protestant gospel of Christian freedom means spiritual rather than bodily freedom but what I think is noteworthy is why he chose to make this argument he insisted that his book arose from his determination to preach the gospel to the unconverted but as he wrote some Christians fear that the preaching of the Protestant gospel might lead to slavery disappearing entirely from those colonies which Christians own and so not wishing to jeopardize their slave holdings the colonists opposed the preaching of the gospel therefore if he could reassure slaveholders that they truly did own men's and women's bodies maybe the preachers would be given a chance to save their souls that caught the mood of the moment the the need to Christianize slaves was becoming a truism amongst Europe's pious classes but not so much amongst those on the ground in the tropics Protestant ministers in the colonies generally put the unappealing task of preaching to slaves at the bottom of their list of priorities although not many go so far as the Reverend William Davis of Antigua who actually murdered one of his own slaves and most slaveholders openly opposed missionary work they feared that Christian slaves might refuse to work on Sundays or might want their marriages recognized in law making it difficult to split up families for sale of course Christian slaves might even discover notions of Christian Brotherhood of spiritual equality one South Carolina slave holder is said to have asked with almost disarming honesty is it possible that any of my slaves could go to heaven and I must see them there how they might feel about seeing him there would not have occurred to it more immediately though he and his peers feared the argument that Christians can't be enslaved and so should be freed as soon as they're baptized behind all this always is the slaveholders perennial nightmare rebellion and therefore missionaries and their converts tended to meet with pre-emptive exemplary violence during one of the first serious slave missions to the Caribbean island of San Tomas in the 1730's a missionary was beaten to death one master set fire to the Bible's his slaves had been given and then beat the flames out on their faces another man Abraham a slave turned to church leader was attacked on the road one night tied up viciously beaten and then dumped at the Mission Church as a warning an exquisite example of steely Christian humility Abraham sent the ropes back to his attackers by name apologizing for the damage that their property had suffered while on his person like capitaine most Protestant missionaries responded to this not with denunciation but by arguing that it was actually in the owners best interests to let them try to convert slaves Christian slaves they argued were loyal honest hard-working it's therefore the most heartfelt Protestant advocates of slave missions the sternest opponents of slaveholders atrocities and the most passionate apostles of spiritual equality these are the people who work hardest to defend and to legitimize slavery itself these ministers are only as they see it able to buy their own freedom to preach by trading away slaves hope for liberty it's easy for us to condemn this maybe almost too easy in 1676 an English Quaker named Dallas Kerwin wrote a brief impasse and appeal to a slaveholder whom she met in barbados Kerwin begged not that the ladies slaves should be freed but that they should be free to worship and then she promised the Lord God will set them free in a way that thou knowest not for there is none set free but in Christ Jesus all other freedom will prove but a bondage now could any serious Protestant believing that the souls fate does matter more than the bodies disagree some slaves were drawn to missionaries preaching in the hope that it might end or ease their captivity the missionaries weary of being used in this way insisted that they offered something different if slaves converted they were clear their bodies would remain enslaved but the missionaries asked why should you be men's slaves and Satan's - since the option of not being slaves at all was not on offer there is as you'll have noticed one aspect of this system that I've not really touched on yet and that's the racial basis of Atlantic slavery and the reason for that is that Protestantism is view of this is pretty simple racial slavery as such simply could not be justified the implicit belief of many slaveholders was that Africans were not truly human and therefore not really capable of being Christians you find slaveholders comparing giving the sacraments to slaves to baptizing dogs or giving communion to horses this sort of thing isn't an accident but no serious Protestant ever tried to defend that kind of view what they did do sometimes making use of the the scant biblical cover provided by the weird story of Noah cursing his son ham but well they did do is sometimes try to explain something which most 18th century white observers took as a self-evident fact that is the Africans are human in theory but they seem subhuman were almost bestial William Knox who's an outspoken Anglican advocate of converting slaves himself also a slave holder admitted that what he called the dulls stupidity of the Negro was a problem for his cause he said he didn't know whether Africans were actually created as a lesser form of humanity or whether they'd merely degenerated to that state but he took it as fact certain it is that a new Negro as those lately imported for Africa are called is a complete definition of indolence stupidity when you meet people who've been systematically dehumanized it's easy to conclude that they are there for less than for the human only slowly does the notion begin to dawn on some Europeans that slavery might be the cause rather than the consequence of slaves degradation but even that doesn't change the facts on the ground if you come to that conclusion then you decide that slavery itself has made Africans unfit for freedom and therefore it would obviously be irresponsible to set them free unsurprisingly Africans themselves had a different view and this is one of the crucial points in our story at which that view starts to change European minds for capitain working with the slave system had seemed unavoidable a generation later the plates are starting to shift in large part thanks to other exceptional individuals like him who had acquired a European education and so we're able to speak in terms that Europeans found respectable about what slavery really meant take take Philip Kwok way like capitain before him sent from cape coast in modern Ghana to London in his case for education in 1754 in 1765 he became the first African to be ordained in the Church of England and he returns to Cape Coast as a missionary we don't have a portrait of him sadly but that's the delightfully welcomed welcoming mission station where he worked his career was longer than capitainesj but it wasn't any happier unlike capitain though he openly recognized the impossibility of what he was trying to do of being a missionary amongst slave traders the vicious practice of purchasing flesh and blood like auxins in marketplaces he wrote drove out all attempts at religion the slave trade did based Europeans models quite apart from what it did to my poor abject countrymen whom you without the bowels of Christian love and pity hold in cruel bondage and he went on to be a vital informant for British abolitionists collecting information about the reality of the slave trade in the end the cautious liberal pragmatism of those who wanted to free slaves just as soon as they were ready to be freed was left behind by the moral urgency of a particular kind of Protestant conscience the first generation of missionaries had reckoned that Africans couldn't be converted until they were first civilised quite quite and with him many others of his age concluded that Africans couldn't be converted until they were freed in the last quarter of the 18th century there's a decisive shift in Protestant attitudes towards slavery the consensus view that slavery had to be worked with is disrupted by a new conviction that slavery in general and the slave trade in particular were intolerable evils this is not it should be said a general phenomenon across the Protestant world the Netherlands for example is almost entirely untouched by abolitionism it preserves slavery until 1863 longer than almost any other European power Protestant Denmark whose slave economy was modest does have the honour of being the first state to outlaw that Atlantic slave trade in 1792 very much the personal initiative of this man count em Chimel Minh the Danish Minister of Finance and himself a slave holder he'd been moved by the piety of some of his slaves and he hoped that by ending the trade he would force masters to treat their slaves better since dead slaves couldn't be so easily replaced unfortunately the 1792 law allowed the trade to continue for a further 10 years as a transitional measure and naturally Danish slaveholders spent the decade importing record numbers of slaves in the Maine though abolitionism is an english-speaking drama first British Quakers and Methodists then American Methodists Baptists and Presbyterians the traditional starting point is a 1772 lawsuit which established that any slave setting foot on English soil was immediately freed in 1777 the the briefly independent republic of Vermont adopted the world's first constitution which outlawed slavery and in Britain a campaign against the slave trade materialized with bewildering speed in the late 1780s the petitioning effort against the trade which swept the country gathered some one-and-a-half million signatures between 1787 and 91 that from a population of around 12 million nothing like this had ever happened before on that scale and British abolitionists almost succeed in that first headlong rush in 1790 to William Wilberforce his bill to abolish the British slave trade passes the House of Commons by 230 to 85 only to fail in the House of Lords and that turns out to be the high-water mark the panic spiraling around the French Revolution made it a bad time to mount an idealistic campaign about human equality and worse a slave rebellion in the French colony of sander mangu that's modern Haiti produced a wave of atrocity stories which made abolitionism dangerously naive but rather than crumbling British abolitionists knuckled down to a further 15 years of campaigning mixing the hard graft of building and sustaining a mass movement with the tortuous intricacies of parliamentary maneuvering and finally in 1807 for a brief moment the mass movement the legal arguments the military interests the shifting party political forces all aligned the actus past and Britain bans a huge and lucrative trade which was one of the props of its own global dominance this has often been portrayed as a moment of heroic national virtue but it's worth noticing that the wealth generated by the slave trade was concentrated in relatively few hands most British people indeed most British parliamentarians had no personal stake in this beyond access to cheap sugar and tobacco and there are reasons of secular self-interest at play as well still once we finished carving this was unmistakably a religious movement first and last even if the Bible hadn't expressed explicitly condemned what is called man's stealing the so-called New Testament golden rule do as you would be done by is quite difficult to make to justify kidnapping people shipping them halfway across the world in hellish conditions and then selling them into perpetual slavery even if you accept slavery itself it's almost impossible to construct a Christian defense of the slave trade and hardly anybody tried the question I think is not why did British Protestants condemn the trade rather given that earlier Protestant generations hadn't been moved to abolitionism and that those beyond the english-speaking world seemed to be largely untouched by it why does Britain see this sudden localized change of heart well abolitionism origins as a public movement seemed to lie in the Seven Years War of the 1750s when some Protestant colonists in North America begin to suspect that their wartime sufferings are divine punishment for some great national sin and then to suspect that that sin might be slavery in the late 1760s and early 70s as British oppression began to grate on the American colonists against slavery resurfaces as an explanation for the judgment that was so evidently being visited on them it's during the Revolutionary War of 74 1775 to 81 but American abolitionism first begins to win real victories wiping the new nation's slate clean of the guilt of slavery isn't just an opportunity it's an obligation now in the event slaveholding interests in the new United States were too strong and the battle against slavery was frozen by the constitution of 1787 but in Britain the American War has the opposite effect American independence makes abolitionism politically possible with the American colonies dawn Britain's slave holding Lobby is badly weakened and the shock of unimaginative oakes the question for what sin are we being punished in 1783 in the year Britain conceded American independence there's an answer ready to hand it's also the year of a grotesque lawsuit in which the crew of a British slave ship the zong tried to exploit a legal loophole they had deliberately drowned 131 men and women from their cargo hold in the hope of making an insurance claim for their value the lawsuit was about insurance fraud not about mass murder and the crew actually wanted but abolitionist publicists seized on the case a British public for whom slavery had been both distant and abstract was suddenly confronted with what it really meant the first petition to Parliament has organized the same year and the line from there to the mass petitions of 1787 in the parliamentary campaign was a straight one now the moral and spiritual horrors of slavery were nothing new what made them urgent was national self-interest the slave trade was or so it seemed a national sin for which the nation as a whole had already been punished in the American War and from which it could expect far worse to come the slaving cities of Liverpool and Bristol William Wilberforce warned should expect the judgment once visited by God on the ancient slaving cities of tyre and sidon Josiah Wedgwood famous abolitionist minature asked am I not a man and a brother that's not a question it's an accusation there is only one answer to that question and to give it is for an inkling for a British viewer to speak judgment on yourself and therefore to be stirred to act and act they did they petitioned they subscribe to periodicals they boycotted sugar and other slave grown produce if we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime one pamphlet Ward for a growing swathe of the British public men and women who had never met a slave and who had rarely seen blackface the prospect of participating in this far-off crime suddenly became intolerable and so it ended that should should have almost been the end of the story Britain's abolition of the slave trade led the way to a general abolition far more slowly than campaigners wished but fast enough to leave businessman all over the Atlantic fazed by this moral spasm that Britain had gone through the United States bans the import of slaves in the same year in 1807 Britain dominant in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 progressively strong-armed the other European powers into banning the trade in theory and the British Navy strangled it in practice over the remainder of the century slavery itself remained legal in Britain's colonies until the 1830s it seemed then though it may not know that emancipating existing slaves was a much more complex issue than merely abolishing the trade most British abolitionists hoped that with the trade abolished the whole ugly system would simply wither away when a new anti-slavery society was formed in Britain 23 it called itself the Society for the mitigation and gradual abolition of slavery you get some sense of their the level of urgency and play from that this time the pace was forced not by idealists at home but by missionaries in the field in 1823 John Smith an Anglican missionary on the island of Demerara died in prison after being arrested for his role in a mostly peaceful slave insurrection his death far more than the deaths of the two hundred and fifty odd slaves killed his death caused a storm in Britain Parliament debated the case of the Demerara martyr Britain's pious politicians did not like slaveholders who killed missionaries the story repeated itself in the so called Baptist war in Jamaica in 1831 - - this is the biggest slave rising Britain ever faced a Baptist deacon and slave named Samuel Sharpe led a general strike as he urged the protest was astonishingly peaceful even though some 60,000 slaves were involved but there were a few violent incidents and that was more than enough to provoke vicious reprisals Sharpe himself spent his brief time in prison preaching to his fellow inmates he told a missionary friend that he learned from his Bible that the whites had no more right to hold black people in slavery than black people had to make white people slaves and he declared I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery and on the 23rd of May 1832 that's what he did again though what outraged the contemporary British public was the reprisal against white missionaries one of the de Macon missionaries was tarred and feathered by a white mob his still soiled neckerchief was solemnly taken home and exhibited around the country - fascinated horror when he himself was fine once you've cleaned up but this hit at a febrile moment in British domestic politics and it helped to precipitate the formal abolition of slavery the following year not the 1833 act was a very heroic triumph it tried to enforce a transitional period unpaid so-called apprenticeship on freed slaves which was cut short when it was manifestly not working and slaveholders were also compensated handsomely for their financial loss it is a sorry fact of nineteenth-century emancipations that in every case but one to which I'll return slaveholders were financially compensated compensation which has never been returned whereas no systematic compensation has ever been given to those who'd been enslaved or to their descendants all they received was their freedom which often meant freedom to be a near destitute plantation laborer stop freedom it was and is in the new world's most anomalous slave society though the stories of stranger unlike in the Caribbean slavery in the southern United States didn't depend on imports slaves birth rate exceeded their death rate thanks to a milder climate and to an agricultural economy centered on tobacco and cotton rather than sugar American slavery looked not just sustainable but lucrative southern slaveholders began to argue not only that they were designing an alternative modern world but that this was a more truly Christian model than the free North offered abolitionists could not quite believe it but they were being challenged for the moral high ground now this idea of a conscientious Christian argument for slavery now seems so obviously ridiculous that it's worth dwelling on for a minute pass over the secular argument saying that slavery was a feature of a well-ordered hierarchical society that it's more truly benevolent than the irresponsible anarchy of the free labor market in which labor is a throat thrown over as soon as they become unfit to work that it's a time hallowed human institution which works with the grain of inherent racial difference lot on that there's also a compelling biblical case that they make the Bible never condemns slavery as such it often regulates it it implicitly condones it true Christian slavery white Southerners argued doesn't reduce human beings to me a property it treats slaves as a sacred trust people over whom their owners have admittedly rather extensive rights but for whom they have equally extensive responsibilities slave and slave holder abounds together by bonds of mutual godly obligation if Abraham had bought slaves if some Paul had sent a runaway slave back to his master if Christ himself had never spoken a word against slavery then who are these upstart prophets to proclaim an abolitionist gospel of their own invention well the obvious retort was that this idealism bore no resemblance to the realities of American slavery I even leave aside slavery's open cruelty and its racial basis the lack of any legal status for slaves marriages and the widespread laws prohibiting slaves from learning to read are both an acute embarrassment for Protestants but abolitionists who turned gratefully from the general principle to these specifics found their argument dissolving in their hands southerners freely acknowledged that their system needed reform they argued that the chief obstacle to reform was the dangerous discontent which abolitionist agitators were stirring up if the abolitionists would only shut up then the result could be a reformed godly slavery America's gift to the world many instinctively anti-slavery white Protestants felt the power of these arguments if this was you you might for example concede that slavery is tolerable in principle under some circumstances simply very undesirable but in that case while you might press for emancipation you've conceded that the matter is debatable and in the American context that means that you're likely to recognize each state's right to make its own rules and you're not going to break a Christian Fellowship over the issue and you're not going to find force the pase it's the southern churches which break away from the northern ones not vice-versa unsurprisingly black American Protestants found it rather easier to answer the pro-slavery arguments they tended to focus not on textual niceties but on the real evils which clustered around slavery like maggots and once again this is but this is what becomes crucial because a few white Americans actually listen to those voices and find their worlds changed William Lloyd Garrison the publicist who becomes abolitionism brilliant polarizing standard-bearer is converted through a series of encounters with articulate African Americans who manifestly deserve respect as well as sympathy I'd converted is I think the right word garrison described hearing a speech by Frederick Douglass Douglass is an escaped slave who becomes the century's most searing and subtle critic of slavery I believe there's a film of his life on the way Garrison describes listening to Douglass speaking and says I shall never forget to the extraordinary emotion is excited in my own mind I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment this is classic revivalism a very Protestant moral awakening the Gospels power piercing and transfiguring the hearts of hardened sinners innocent blood is crying out from the ground to ask abolitionists to wait to be patient garrison said was to tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it's fallen he's not a politician looking for workable solutions he's a prophet rousing his people from a deathlike moral sleep to see the horrific evil that's in front of them and so his fury is directed not just at the slavers but at the gradualists slavery's watchdogs he calls them whose mealy-mouthed compromises give the slavers all the moral cover they need slavery was a sin and all slaveholders whether individually benevolent or not they're a terrible and immediate guilt the trouble is that this sort of moral outrage wasn't easily backed up with biblical citation so you find for example one presbyterian abolitionist who simply asserted that the whole Bible is opposed to slavery the sacred volume is one grand scheme of benevolence beams of love and mercy emanate from every page which sounds like an admission that he's got no case likewise the freed slave and self-taught lay preacher whom we know only as Elizabeth who condemned Scripture Ian's as she called them who would rather parse the text than meet God in their hearts some abolitionists accepted the logical conclusion and began to leave their Bibles behind we know slavery is wrong one Baptist minister argued not because scripture says so but as a matter of immediate moral consciousness we just know it's not too far from there to the abolitionist Mercer who in 1860 preached that slavery is not to be tried by the Bible but the Bible by freedom and this leads a fringe of abolitionists to open alienation from Christianity amongst whom is Frederick Douglass himself but importantly there was another way out of this problem some abolitionists started to argue that the Bible's tolerance of slavery only applied in specific historical circumstances or that Christ stayed silent on the subject for fear that an anti-slavery message would stir up conflict and drown out the gospel or even that revelation is progressive that God has only now judged the world ready to hear the truth that slavery is and must always be an evil but these are not the strongest arguments possible in debating terms the pro-slavery party seemed to have the upper hand but American slavery fate wasn't decided by a debate instead trusted progressively evaporated between the two halves of the nation by the 1850s the southern establishment felt that it's so-called way of life was under siege by fools fanatics and barbarians while safeguards and rights that the southerners demands chiefly the the return of escaped slaves seem increasingly intrusive and unacceptable to the north in 1860 Abraham Lincoln an avowed abolitionist is elected president on northern votes alone eleven southern states respond by seceding from the United States the North treats that as rebellion and the resulting war lasted from 1861 to 65 and left over 600,000 people dead so it turned out that the immediate avoiding of Roth and blood had been true when the war was almost over Lincoln framed it as a divine judgment on the nation he prayed for the fighting to end but echoing garrison echoing the British abolitionists before him he added yet if God wills that it continue that the war continued until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether instead within weeks it was over and Lincoln himself was dead the victorious North dictated the terms all slaves were freed no compensation was paid in this one case and black and white alike for granted citizenship the century of systematic discrimination and segregation which were followed wasn't maybe much of an improvement but no serious Protestant would ever actively defend it slavery again so what does it all mean well two lessons that I'd like to draw from this before I finish first priority's it's easy and entirely fair to point out that slavery bent Protestantism completely out of shape such that pro-slavery is religion main and religion main and central doctrine was that slavery was right but the same can be said in Reverse of abolitionism which some hand became a religion whose beating heart was worldly freedom both of them had left behind that 18th century consensus that the gospel matters more than slavery one way or the other but even in the midst of America's crisis that consensus doesn't completely disappear for example the the free african-american revivalist preachers Zilpha ll certainly condemned slavery she occasionally attended abolitionist meetings but her heart was elsewhere in 1828 she bravely went to preach in the slave state of Maryland and while she was there heard another preacher who was himself a slave and she wrote rather sniffily this poor brother seemed to manifest an undue anxiety for his freedom she recalled that some Paul had told slaves to be content with their condition but this man anxiously sighed for liberty but this story has a happy ending the man's prayers were soon heard in the same week he was taken ill and he finally fell asleep in Christ Jesus departing to be where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest so that's all right then this kind of attitude infuriated abolitionists who despaired of the way that promises of heaven were used to keep slaves quest but if you truly believe that this life is a passing shadow and that humanity's greatest and only true happiness lies in God then how can temporal slavery or freedom compared to the momentous and eternal question of salvation or damnation I don't pronounce on the rights and wrongs of this but to point out that the underlying logic of Protestant Christianity tugs inexorably in this direction one flashpoint in the struggle between gradualists and immediate establish inist s-- in the United States was the mission to the Native Americans the Cherokee and the Choctaw both practiced slavery abolitionists back east consistently demanded that missionaries denounced this as sinful the missionaries themselves retorted that if they did that it would bring their mission to an immediate end and they proposed treating slavery the same where they treated polygamy as a social wrong to be righted slowly by forbearance they don't defend slavery but they're willing to tolerate it for the sake of spreading the gospel while many Protestants became extremely exercised about slavery one way or the other it was ultimately their religious principles which taught them that slavery was wrong or indeed that it was right those principles also taught them that the gospel of salvation mattered more than any political issue of any kind those who hoped to recruit Protestants to a whole range of secular causes down the ages have often found this kind of insistence awkward but it will not go away having said that my second and final point is that abolitionism history especially its American crescendo is of enduring significance for the history of Protestantism as well as for the history of slavery its first phase trade abolitionism exemplifies one of protestantism classic tropes repentance Protestants knew that their sins were all pervasive they're committed to self-examination to discover them not least to avert the judgments which God threatens to visit on individuals and on Nations this restless search for sin eventually settled on a vast and indefensible atrocity now that was an insight which took a degree of imagination and moral courage but it's no surprise that it eventually happened in 19th century America however faced with an articulate and principled Christian defense of slavery this abolitionism turned into something new because in order fully to repent of the sin of slavery immediate ists also had to repent of an error they had to repent of believing that slavery was not a sin now for many Christians to condemn a previously held orthodoxy is deeply problematic any church which claims to be able to determine doctrine authoritative Lee is going to have trouble admitting the dismayed a mistake for Protestant this is easier even instinctively conservative Protestants know that being sin for means being fallible they will tear up and discard cherished interpretations and doctrines if they have to and as the abolitionist confrontation with the Bible shows when what they think is the heart of the gospel at stake they will not let the Bible stand in their way in the great matter of slavery Protestantism performed this maneuver in full dress for the first time generations of Protestants had condoned worked with or even actively defended slavery yet since the later 19th century the doctrine that slavery is an intolerable evil has become a fixed reference point on Providence isn't immoral map despite that doctrines shaky biblical basis the precedent was and remains momentous the world is full of long tolerated even long cherished practices and convictions seemingly based in the Bible and in the tradition which some Protestants may suddenly come to see as intolerable evils Protestant advocates of feminism of gay rights of vegetarianism or indeed if that sounds like a left-wing shopping list Protestant opponents of abortion all have to face the fact that their campaigns lack explicit biblical grounding but the anti-slavery cause has established beyond respectable doubt that Protestants can and sometimes must champion a cause in defiance both of established tradition and of textual proof when that cause is at the heart of their gospel you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 115,921

Rating: 4.8000002 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham short, gresham talk, gresham lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, gresham professor, free video, free lecture, free talk, public lecture, Event, free public lecture, Professor, professor ryrie, alec ryrie, apologetics, Christian, christianity, Christians, Christian writing, christian theology, theology, philosophy, Ministry, divinity, atheism, faith, agnostics, atheists, richard dawkins, Science, science and faith, protestant, Protestantism

Id: lxWDAazMwsE

Length: 52min 35sec (3155 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2015