Many people today think of America as a Christian nation, and since America has committed throughout her history many crimes against humanity in the name of Christianity, the national guilt has often been imputed to the Christian faith. Let’s not talk about recent history such as Bush’s war in Iraq, because it is too early for us to understand this piece of history and pass our verdict on it to deem it as a crime. No careful historian should form a definite thesis on pieces of history as recent as Bush’s war in Iraq. So, let’s talk about something from a little more distant past of which we have come to have a clearer understanding. How about slavery in America’s past? Curiously, despite the well-known fact that abolition of slave trade and slavery in both Britain and America were carried out primarily by Christians (e.g. Wilberforce and Lincoln), many people today still impute the guilt of slavery to Christianity because many slave owners justified the practice of slavery by asserting a grossly distorted version of the Christian doctrine of election, to which none of the great Christian theologians had ever agreed. I do not need to clarify the doctrinal issues here, because there are plenty of sermons and articles on my website that expound the right doctrine of election. In this entry I will show by historical investigation that it is utterly erroneous to hold Christianity guilty for America’s crime of slavery, and I will demonstrate that America did not commit this crime as a Christian nation, but as a pagan nation. I will show the efforts of American Christians who brought this criminal activity to an end.
Yes, America is a pagan nation. She has never been a Christian nation, even though some of the greatest Christians in the past few centuries have come from America. It would be erroneous to assume that America has ever been homogenously Christian in her culture, even in early colonial periods and the early decades following Independence (this should be obvious to any student of the social sciences). During the days of colonialism, British subjects inhabiting the New World included both Puritans who fled England for the freedom of religion, explorers who came to the new continent to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, as well as merchants who came to exploit the resources of the fertile land. It is true that the majority of them called themselves Christians, but there were already a small fraction of the British settlers in North America who identified themselves as deists or atheists. Aside from the British, there were also other Europeans trying to establish colonies in North America, notably the French who were mainly Roman Catholic with a very significant deist or atheist population.
Let us now only concern ourselves with the British who came to North America. Although the majority of them were nominally Christian, only a small fraction of the population was true to the Christian faith, and they were mainly the Puritans. Though the Puritans were not great in number, they were the leaders of society, the ones who tried to establish social values of God’s Kingdom in the land in which they dwelled. While others were busy making money, the Puritans were the ones who tried to change society (notwithstanding Weber’s famous and correct observation of the connections between Puritan work ethic and Western capitalism).
As you can see, British colonialism endorsed exploitation of the colonies for the profits of trade and wealth, and this led to inhumane treatments of North American aboriginals and African slaves, as well as the shameful practice of opium trade in China–all sanctioned by British law which upheld parliamentary supremecy and public interest of the nation at the expense of the freedoms and rights to which all humans are entitled. In a history paper that I wrote in 2007, I tell the story of how British missionaries, church leaders and Chritian politicians sacrificed their lives and put their careers on the line to fight their own people and their own government in their decades-long struggle to abolish British opium trade in China. We are also familiar with the story of William Wilberforce’s life-long political war to outlaw both slave trade and slavery, and of course Wilberforce was not alone–he was the leader of an under-dog Christian Coalition in Parliament as well as a small but stubborn Christian population in Britain that stood in solidarity with the African slaves.
The social situation of the Puritans in colonial North America was similar: They were the minority who tried to stop their fellow countrymen from exploiting the aboriginals and abusing the Black Slaves. Their influence was significant. This is immediately evident in the Declaration of Independence, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
The Declaration, of course, was a mixture of Puritanism and deism (the belief that the world is created by a God who ceases to intervene with the course of history after creation, and that there are absolute moral values in this world endowed by the Creator, values that need not be revealed by means of holy scriptures but can be known by humanity’s natural reason). The deist influence is evident in phrases such as “the pursuit of happiness.” The idea that the truths of unalienable human rights and equality of all men are “self-evident” is endorsed by both the Puritan doctrine of general revelation and the deist notion of natural knowledge (a term that deism borrowed from Puritanism). Among the Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson is reputed to be a deist, though Andrew Allison convincingly challenges this view in his book, The Real Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin might have adopted a deist political philosophy (this understanding is also subject to challenge), but he grew up in a Puritan home and was heavily influenced by the social values of the Puritans. Franklin’s father, by the way, was not a Puritan, but converted to Puritanism later in his life; this case gives us a glimpse of the fact that America was not a homogenously Christian nation even during the early years of Independence.
Despite deist participation (to whatever degree it might have been) in the drafting committee of the Declaration, it is a generally acknolwedged fact that John Adams, second President of the United States and a devout Puritan, was the genius behind the Declaration who ensured that the “unalienable rights” would be implemented without discrimination. The thrust of Adams’ genius is his recognition that in a government of parliamentary supemacy or a society where the majority rules, the rights of the minority is easily trampled upon by the majority. It was Adams’ contribution that the essential rights of all humans not be subjected to the opinion of the majority or the decisions of legislative branches of the government. This understanding of a supreme natural law to which all authorities (legislative, executive, administrative) are subject was in fact a distinctively Puritan product, and the Enlightenment only borrowed it and gave it a deist twist. This idea is called the Rule of Law (Latin: Lex Rex, meaning “The law is king”), and it was coined by Samuel Rutherford, the 17th-century English Puritan pastor and theologian who participated in drafting the Westminster Confession of Faith. To say that the “law is king” is to say that God has given all humans an innate knowledge of how to uphold the dignity of God’s creation, and no human is above this “natural law”; all laws should spring forth from this natural law; the law reigns over kings and vagabonds alike, and all men are equal befor the law.
While the Declaration proclaims the equality of all humans, the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights enumerate what the Declaration calls “unalienable rights.” The Puritan character of the Bill of Rights is much stronger than that of the Declaration. Unlike the Declaration that combines the contributions of several great minds, there was one dominant mastermind behind the Bill of Rights, namely, James Madison, fourth President of the United States known as the “Father of the Constitution”, “Father of the Bill of Rights” and “Author of the Bill of Rights.” Madison was a devout Puritan. He received his education at Princeton University (then College of New Jersey) under the Rev. John Witherspoon, a Puritan pastor and theological scholar. Madison’s contribution to the checks-and-balances in US government structure, as laid down in the Constitution, was inpired by the Reformed-Presbyterian model of the church, which the Puritans had adopted. More important, however, was the enumeration of the freedoms and rights of all humans in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
The efforts of thse Puritans in constructing Christian values in Amercan society, as mentioned, were not easily accomplished in a homogenously Christian nation. The Puritans were fighting upstream against unchristian values and practices that a vast majority of Americans had adopted, including the inhumane exploitation of the aboriginals and the abuse of African slaves. America has never been a “Christian nation”!
The Christian efforts did not reach their intended purposes overnight. Although the Puritans had laid down the foundations for the rights and equality of all humans in the Declaration and the Constitution, the vast majority of nominally Christian (that is, essentially non-Christian) Americans still owned and mistreated slaves. However, the Puritan vision of a loving society did begin to bear fruit. In 1783, a court in Massachusetts tried a case in which a Black slave was severely beaten by his White master, who claimed that the slave–the master’s property–was trying to run away. The Black man, named Quock Walker, courageously stood up to sue his master, Nathaniel Jennison, for having violated his basic human rights enumerated in the Constitution. At that time, beating of Black slaves was completely in accordance with slavery and property laws, but those existing laws clearly contradicted the Constitution. In the end, Chief Justice William Cushing (a deist) gave his opinion on the case and passed the verdict, an opinion which had lasting effects leading to the Civil War:
…. As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in Perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that (it is true) has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage―a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, which with Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the People of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal—-and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property―and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract… Verdict Guilty.
Though Cushing was a deist, the reasons he listed for the unconstitutionality of slavery all had their Puritan roots, as mentioned earlier. The debate about slavery eventually led to the Civil War. The Civil War occurred after the final periods of Puritanism, but American Christians of the time still held to the core values of the Puritans. Among these devout Christians was President Abraham Lincoln. Before becoming President, Lincoln was already a strong advocate of the abolition of slavery. Therefore, before he was sworn into office, seven “Slave States” in the south declared secession (“cutting-off”) from the United States, forming the Confederate States of America. Four more southern states joined the Confederacy later. In the Confederate States, trade and wealth depended largely on the exploitation of Black slaves, and the abolition of slavery was sure against public interest even though slavery was against the Constitution.
In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Procamation that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in all of the United States after the defeat of Confederacy in 1865. Like his British counterpart William Wilberforce, Lincoln pressed on with Christian convictions that all humans are created equal in the image of God. While a good majority of Americans cared about economic profit more than loving one’s neighbours, Christians like Lincoln fought upstream to protect the rights of the Black slaves. The price that Lincoln paid was his own life: He was assassinated in 1865, just six days after the defeat of the southern Confederacy.
And was not the great Martin Luther King Jr. a Christian who, unlike Malcolm X, loved his oppressed brothers as much as he loved his oppressors? Without the Christian roots of people like Martin Luther King Jr., could America have come so far today from her shameful past?
Yes, America committed many evil crimes against humanity and against God. Even when slavery was abolished, segregation still existed! Failure to understand the historically heterogenous religious composition of America might lead to the conclusion that America committed all those crimes as a Christian nation. However, one who has any basic understanding of history or sociology should know that America is not really a “Christian nation” and as such America did not commit those evil crimes as a Christian nation. One who understands a little bit of history should not be ignorant of the Christian efforts against those evils that America has committed.
Some Afterthoughts: The British Christians who helped to bring the Opium War to an end never thought of their efforts as merits that made them great (see my paper on the Opium War in the link in the text above). They felt shameful about their nation’s crime and they felt responsible for it. I do not think that people like Wilberforce or Lincoln would think of themselves as great people either. They did what they had to do. America stopped doing the evil that she was not supposed to be doing. And yet politicians use this to evoke American nationalism and patriotism, and call America a “great nation” because she stopped doing the evil that she used to do. A true Christian should never take pride when he or she finally overcomes a certain sin of his or her own.
