from the AFCF
America’s God Panel Discussion
on February 24, 2007
When I started graduate school at UCLA, the academic discipline of history was undergoing some significant changes. One that was especially important in the eyes of history graduate students was a new approach to writing history that adopted a perspective described as “from the bottom up.” This trend in the discipline would soon yield important new insights and bring significant changes in research methods that would impact scholarship for years to come. There was considerable resistance from scholars whose work focused only on the powerful and privileged. Nevertheless, young historians brought the lives of ordinary people into the narrative of human history with remarkable success. They scoured census records, public documents of all types, baptismal records, and oral histories to write accounts of the life-ways and struggles of workers, slaves, peasants and others who could not leave autobiographies, correspondence, diaries, speeches and reports like their wealthier and more powerful contemporaries.
Now we have a better understanding of the importance of women and so-called minorities in the development of American society and culture. Today we need to consider what these “other” people - the majority of the population - were saying and how they were thinking and acting. By doing so we can reexamine and sometimes correct notions about our collective history that were established when historical research focused only on a few at the top.
While reading Mark Noll’s
America’s God, I noticed that this exciting book was written from the older, “top down” perspective, despite the author’s occasional attempts to acknowledge other perspectives. In my view, we should consider African-Americans, Native Americans, and women whenever we examine American history. It is also important to avoid seeing them as victims without agency. When people are regarded simply as victims, their influence is often overlooked or dismissed. We need to consider what these groups were thinking and how they entered the conversation, even if they were usually uninvited and sometimes unwelcome.
The group that first came to mind, a group that is central to many of the topics discussed in
America’s God, was people of African descent, both enslaved and free. Their ideas made an impact on the whole narrative concerning religion and politics. If we were to look at African Americans from the colonial period to the Civil War, we would find a nation within a nation struggling with the contradictions inherent in being enslaved in a society where most people were free. They developed their own agendas and addressed at length the various issues that drove the national debate over slavery. It is because they addressed the major issues of the time that we have documents that they generated. These documents were written by the free people of color, the African Methodists, the A.M.E. Zion leaders, the Africans who were involved in the anti-slavery movement, etc., and many of them address issues of morality and religion.
I was fascinated by Noll’s discussion of Garrison’s struggle with the references to slavery in the Bible. Garrison apparently asserted in essence that we ought to dismiss the Bible’s commentary on slavery. Garrison’s view parallels that of historian Eugene Genovese, who claims in his own writings that the Bible has not one word against slavery. The Bible’s commentary on slavery stimulated long and passionate debates in
ante bellum America. Each side brought scripture to their side, creating a rift in some denominations that never healed.
I agree with a scholar who died just last week. Frank Snowden was an African-American expert on race in ancient times. In his book,
Before Color Prejudice, he argued that the concept of white supremacy did not exist in the Bible times. Slavery as practiced in the United States was white supremacy. Therefore, when slavery is discussed in the American context it should be distinguished from the slavery of ancient times.
Of course, when white American politicians and opinion leaders voiced their conflicting views about slavery, their debate was largely a discussion among white supremacists. Support for black equality was hard to find among white American political and religious leaders of the mid-19th century – whether or not they opposed slavery. In most cases, the white abolitionists and Free Soilers’ vision for America after slavery was not racial equality, but a less oppressive form of white supremacy. Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction after the Civil War (plans that he did not live to carry out) favored reconciliation among whites over equal citizenship for blacks. After a brief experiment with African American citizenship, the nation reverted to a type of oppression resembling slavery: debt peonage, a convict lease system, and anti-black terrorism.
An African-American religious figure who was significant in the
ante bellum discourse on slavery and freedom was Nat Turner. Perhaps most of you are not familiar with his story. He was a slave preacher who ran away to a Maroon community and thereby obtained his freedom. He chose, however, to return to the slaveholder, who took his voluntary return to be a very good sign. He apparently thought that Turner had repented of his bad deed and that he had come back to resume his duties as a slave. Turner was now given extraordinary freedom to preach and minister to both blacks and whites. His slaveholder, however, was unaware of Turner’s newly-acquired belief that freedom was to be won by violence. Turner proceeded to lead a slave rebellion in 1831 that ended the lives of about sixty whites in Virginia. In the wake of this rebellion Southern legislatures introduced new policies on what slaves were allowed to read and to preach. Moreover, the stormy debate provoked by this important event had enormous importance to religious communities. Here was a man who had turned slavery on its head and used the most violent texts in the Old Testament to justify what he had done. Turner’s Rebellion soon represented a continuing threat to white slaveholders. After Turner was captured and hanged, the rumor that he was returning from the grave to complete his work permeated Virginia’s black communities for years.
Slavery advocates and abolitionists now debated the meaning of the rebellion. In later years, some scholars argued that white fear now made oppression worse for the enslaved population. Laws against educating enslaved people, and forbidding literacy among them, multiplied. Punishment for violations stiffened. Enslaved black preachers were denied the opportunity to preach to their congregations. Indeed, some slaveholders began bringing enslaved people to their own churches, where they were seated in a special section and forced to listen to white preachers extolling the virtues of the slave system. At the same time, new laws creating a maximum work day for slaves and specifying minimum provisions (food, clothing, shelter) represented an effort to head off rebellions based on physical deprivation. Garrison and other abolitionists argued that the Turner Rebellion showed how awful slavery was - that it had turned Turner and his comrades into revolutionaries who slew whites in the manner they had all witnessed in the treatment of slaves by slaveholders. Abolitionists also argued that slavery was a danger to the nation and that slaveholders would be safer if slavery ended.
We have sermons by enslaved people. We have sermons by African-American abolitionists. I think the ideas found in them would enrich the discussion Noll’s book stimulated. Albert Raboteau’s
Slave Religion has become a standard work on religion among blacks in bondage. Benjamin Mays’
The Negro’s God, written in the 1930s, might serve as a useful reference.
The Black Abolitionist Papers, edited by C. Peter Ripley, offers five volumes of correspondence, speeches and commentary that are worth examining. The earlier issues of the
Christian Recorder, the official organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, have observations that scholars would find of interest. The papers of the
American Negro Academy, established in 1897, include studies of black religion during slavery. The fact that black abolitionists such as Henry Highland Garnet, and emigrationists like Alexander Crummell were trained in theology would make their sermons and books worth considering.
Another rich source would be the ex-slave interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. Here we have hundreds of interviews with former slaves covering a wide range of topics, including their religious beliefs, and the beliefs of others, during their time in bondage. It is important to determine whether America’s God was also the God of the oppressed.
You asked me to talk about Abraham Lincoln, Noll’s choice as the greatest American theologian. Noll is very kind to Lincoln, and I think that this is deserved in many ways. Lincoln’s view that God’s disapproval was shared by both North and South, and that both sides deserved punishment for tolerating slavery, leaves little doubt about his convictions on the immorality of the Peculiar Institution. Perhaps we expect too much when we look for statements supporting human equality. Nevertheless, there were others, such as Thaddeus Stephens and John Brown, who clearly held that view. Without that commitment, the door to a future of tragic racial oppression, which we see in the post-Reconstruction period, remained open. As a matter of fact, some historians would argue that people of African descent were in some ways worse off after slavery than before, particularly during the period of the 1880s through the1920s. Why is this? Slaves had been property, subject to sale or transfer. They could be mortgaged, given away as prizes or passed to a new owner to settle a debt. Therefore the casual murder of enslaved blacks by slaveholders was sometimes curbed by economic concerns. This, of course, did not prevent the slaughter of enslaved people by slave traders who showed little concern for their lives. However, after slavery, blacks were not property. Therefore, the same men and women who were troublesome to white slaveholders were often lynched in the America of the Reconstruction and afterwards.
What I have read of the views voiced by enslaved and free blacks leads me to believe that their God was a defender of their humanity and an advocate of freedom. Some historians of the
ante bellum black experience detect a sense of moral superiority among some of them, and a firm belief that most of their “masters” would not do well in the judgment or enter heaven afterward. The annual “watch meeting” ceremonies that still bring in the new year in some black congregations began in 1863, when blacks, both enslaved and free, celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation which , in their view, was brought about by a God of liberation.
