Who Owns Slavery?

Beware Biased Reporting on Racial Theories That Ignores History

In a July episode of All Things Considered, NPR religion correspondent Tom Gjelten argues that "White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity."¹ The piece focuses first on two nineteenth-century Southern pastors, Henry Lyon, Jr., and James Henley Thornwall, who defended slavery from their pulpits. A review of these men and others leads Gjelten to conclude, "Elements of racist ideology have long been present in white Christianity in the United States."

He goes on to catalogue a few other historical and living Southern clergy, whom he believes have focused on the salvation of souls to the detriment of social justice. "Evangelicals in particular generally prioritize an individual's own salvation experience over social concerns," Gjelten believes. "The primary mission of the church in this view is to win souls for Christ. Working for racial justice, in contrast, may be seen as a 'political' issue."

Gjelten is employing a certain sleight-of-hand here, insofar as many of the things he and the left consider necessary aspects of "social justice"—such as so-called abortion and LGBT rights—have nothing to do with race and are rightly opposed by Christians. But even putting that aside, his story ignores the many, many Christians who fought for racial justice in the past two millennia, and also the many Christ-haters who actively sought to oppress their fellow man.

Christians Against Slavery

Christians were among the first to speak out against slavery. Historian Rodney Stark argues that Christianity is actually the reason that European slavery was eventually abolished. "Slavery ended in medieval Europe," writes Stark, "only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition."² Increasingly, church officials preached against slavery, and many converted kings began to outlaw the practice within their lands.

Fast-forward some centuries. In an impassioned speech before the House of Commons in Britain, abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759–1833) proclaimed, "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." British preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) was also fiercely opposed to slavery, writing, "I do from my inmost soul detest slavery . . . and although I commune at the Lord's table with men of all creeds, yet with a slave-holder I have no fellowship of any sort or kind."³

Many key players in the American abolitionist movement were also devoted Christians. Tim Stafford writes in Christian History that abolitionists were "the most hated men and women in America." They were also, he argues, "inescapably Christian in their motives, means, and vocabulary," even when they weren't connected to an actual church. Indeed, a "large proportion" of abolitionists were "orthodox Christians."⁴ Charles Finney (1792–1875), a notable preacher of the Second Great Awakening, saw slavery as an abomination, and believed that "Christian indifference" to the issue of slavery was an impediment to the work of sharing the gospel.⁵ Leading abolitionist Theodore Weld (1803–1895) was also a Christian, having been converted in one of Finney's revivals.⁶

So while a few so-called Christians in the history of the South tried to justify slavery through their particular reading of the Bible, a rather greater number tried to abolish the "peculiar institution" because of their conviction of the equality of all men before God.

Darwin & Eugenics

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the modern eugenics movement picked up steam from the writings of none other than noted agnostic Charles Darwin. Darwin's work on species led him to conclude that there were vast physical and intellectual differences between the races, which made some races superior to others. Specifically, Darwin believed that the white races, and particularly Europeans, were more "advanced" than Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and other races which he classified as "savages."⁷

An example of Darwin's social hierarchy appears in his book The Descent of Man (1871). In Chapter 6, Darwin discusses the seeming "breaks" that appear in "the organic chain in between man and his nearest allies," and how these breaks do not invalidate his arguments, because the extent of the breaks depends only upon "the number of related forms which have become extinct." He elucidates as follows:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

The implications here are obvious. Darwin saw the Caucasian race (and, he hoped, something more advanced than it in the future), the black race, the indigenous Australians, the gorillas, and the baboons on a kind of continuum, with "the negro or Australian" being closer to the gorilla than the Caucasian. (Darwin's views on the place of women in this scheme weren't much better, incidentally.)

A little later in that chapter Darwin discusses skull dimensions and brain sizes, asserting that since Caucasians have the largest brains, they must also possess the greatest intellect. Indeed, writes neuroscientist Steven Rose, Darwin "enthusiastically endorsed his cousin Francis Galton's view of hereditary genius transmitted down the male line, and nodded cautiously towards eugenics"—the idea that the human race can be improved via selective breeding. Darwin's Origin of Species was actually the taking-off point for Galton, who is considered the father of modern eugenics.

Nazi Race Theory

Some 60 years after Origin of Species was published, Darwinism fathered one of its most horrifying children: Nazi racial theory. Historian Richard Weikart writes that, contrary to what many Darwinists would like to believe, "the historical evidence is overwhelming that human evolution was an integral part of Nazi racial ideology."⁸ Hitler identified with Darwin's theories, and the official Nazi school curriculum taught Darwinian evolution.

According to Nazi race theory, the Aryan or Nordic "race" had become superior because it had faced greater pressure during the Ice Ages, which had weeded out the weak and unfit. The Nazi goal of the purification and dominance of the Aryan race depended, among other things, on eliminating intermarriage between white and black Germans. Thus, many programs targeted not only the Jews and Romani (Gypsies), but also African-descended Germans, who were sterilized by the busload.⁹

It is also worth mentioning that Margaret Sanger—certainly not a Christian, and a hater of Catholicism in particular—bought into these racial theories and was an ardent eugenicist herself. She was particularly interested in spreading birth control centers throughout the American South to limit the growth of the black population (though Planned Parenthood claims this was due to her compassion for African-Americans and not racism).

Suppressing the Truth

Gjelten's NPR piece is merely an attempt to disguise an anti-Christian hit piece as high-quality journalism. By cherry-picking a handful of nineteenth-century pro-slavery pastors, Gjelten pretends to be able to demonstrate that racism has always been an intrinsic feature of American Christianity. Some putative Christians were, in fact, white supremacists, and mishandled the Word of God so as to justify slavery. But Gjelten actively seeks to suppress the truth: at its core, Christianity is radically impartial.

As Stark writes, "That God treats all equally is fundamental to the Christian message: all may be saved."¹⁰ Jesus caused scandals by publicly associating with those considered the dregs of society: the prostitutes, the poor, the leprous, the tax collectors. History makes it clear that Christianity was key to the beginnings of many abolitionist movements worldwide, while those who rejected the faith were the originators of some of the most horrifying, destructive programs and theories the world has ever seen.

Notes

1. Tom Gjelten, "White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity," All Things Considered, National Public Radio (July 1, 2020): npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity.
2. Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason (Random House, 2005), p. 28.
3. Quoted in "The Reason Why America Burned Spurgeon's Sermons and Sought to Kill Him," The Spurgeon Center (Sept. 22, 2016): spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/the-reason-why-america-burned-spurgeons-sermons-and-sought-to-kill-him.
4. Tim Stafford, "The Abolitionists," Christian History 33 (1992): https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/abolitionists.
5. James David Essig, "The Lord's Free Man: Charles G. Finney and His Abolitionism," Civil War History 24.1 (March 1978), p. 25.
6. Stafford, "The Abolitionists."
7. Steven Rose, "Darwin, Race and Gender," EMBO Reports 10.4 (April 2009), pp. 297–298.
8. Richard Weikart, "The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought," German Studies Review 36.3 (2013), pp. 537–556.
9. Nosmot Gbadamosi, "Human exhibits and sterilization: The fate of Afro Germans under Nazis," CNN (July 26, 2017): cnn.com/2017/07/21/world/black-during-the-holocaust-rhineland-children-film/index.html.
10. Stark, The Victory of Reason, p. 29.