Why did it take a war to end slavery in America, and not revival?
Are you familiar with the two Great Awakenings? In the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Americans were turning to Christ. It wasn’t just lip service; society was transformed by Christianity. The Industrial Revolution, the modern missions movement, and even our unique political system are all credited to these revivals.
Yet slavery carried on, unchallenged. Human beings, made in the image of God, were bought and sold because of the color of their skin. Children were torn away from their parents, strong men were forced to work themselves to death, young women were beaten at the slightest whim. Even while Christianity was sweeping the nation.
Since the Great Awakenings brought about such stirring influence in politics, business, and individual character, why wasn’t there nationwide repentance over slavery?
Sure, many slaves were part of these revivals. And some abolitionist movements were awakened. But it wasn’t enough. Because it didn’t take revival to end slavery in America, it took war.
Yet even the war didn’t change hearts. Not long after the Civil War, Christians all over America enacted laws and policies that kept black people dehumanized, brutalized, terrorized for another one hundred years. While millions of Americans sang hymns and pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and sent missionaries to foreign lands, black Americans were being lynched in front of immense cheering crowds of men, women, and their children.
This shakes me to my core.
What happened? Why did Americans allow the power of God to transform them in so many ways, yet stay stubbornly devoted to such a horrendous evil? I have no explanation other than the scary reality that we are capable of ignoring the Holy Spirit’s conviction when it feels like it’s in our best interest.
I am terrified by this. It causes me to do deep soul-searching, looking for places in my life where I might be capable of the same thing.
This also makes me ask the question: Our darker-skinned brothers and sisters are begging us to pay attention to how the atrocities in our nation’s history are affecting their lives today. Why can I be quick to dismiss their pleas? Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered only 52 years ago. Do I assume that there are no lingering effects of racism in America only half a century later?
The more I am drawn into this part of our nation’s history, the more horrified I become. Over the Christmas break, I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which opened my eyes to the nationwide (not just southern) opposition to interracial sex and marriage, even into the 21st century. Stevenson’s story gives compelling evidence of how racism affects our justice system, particularly with the death penalty. I grew up believing that racism is essentially over in America. But the more I listen, the more I understand that’s not true.
But that’s not me, it’s easy to protest. I would never think that. I would never be cruel or intolerant to someone of a different race.
But have I really examined myself? I grew up breathing the air that I should be proud to be American, that I live in the greatest country on earth, that I live in a Christian country. These things were ingrained in me, and yet why did it take me so long to come to grips with the hundreds of years of evil that were equally ingrained in my country? Do I really think that the vestiges of that wickedness wouldn’t have been transmitted to me, become such a deep part of my thinking that I don’t even realize it’s there?
In Mother to Son, Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope, Jasmine Holmes writes to her son, “You will have people who consider themselves your allies until you make them uncomfortable.”
Sure, it’s easy to welcome black people into churches and communities when they become like me. But what if their unique perspective causes them to challenge me on the way I do church, the way I interpret that Scripture passage, the way I interact with my community? Do I continue to insist that my way is the best? Or am I willing to stop, listen, learn, change?
Jasmine writes, “As a black young woman in predominantly white spaces, I was often tempted to stifle my concerns because they were in the minority. Under the guise of promoting peace, I embraced an unhealthy silence about how I felt when certain comments were made or certain statements went unchallenged.”
I have heard similar sentiments from black friends. Is this not racism in a different costume? Why am I often unwilling to hear other perspectives from those who are equally committed to Scripture, but see life very differently than I do? I get my way because I am the majority. Isn’t this a kind of privilege?
In case you’re worried, I’m not a Marxist, and I think parts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are dangerous. But I can find some truth in every worldview. I’m not going to be so frightened by CRT that I reject the truth that undergirds it: America has a despicably racist history which was very much entwined with Christianity. As an American Christian, I am compelled to dig deep to discover how that has influenced me.
So I can reject CRT but then be equally as quick to acknowledge that racism is a real problem in our country and our churches. I am broken over our country’s history. Reconciliation requires my repentance and will most certainly require change. If it is not uncomfortable, then is it possible that just like our ancestors, I am ignoring the Holy Spirit?
As I look out at the fractured shards of the American Church, I pray for a new Great Awakening. May it start with God showing me my blindspots, humbling me and changing me and redeeming me. Lord, have mercy.
Related posts:
Parents Brought Their Children to John Hartfield’s Lynching
What Your Grandmother’s Piano Had to Do With Slavery In Zanzibar
Daryl Martin
History has shown that not everyone who professes to be a Christian is a Christian. Paul said, II Cor 13:5, to “test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” You must ask yourself have you changed? Do you see yourself as a new creation with a new enlightenment? Has the Holy Spirit sanctified you? Until that happens you are still of the world and remain blind to sinful actions. Pray for and allow for the Holy Spirit to perfect you. Then the world we take notice and see the Lord with in you. Thank you for your post.
Pete
Exactly
Marjie Yates
I think part of why racism continued to thrive in the US after the Civil War is the general acceptance of Darwinism. It taught that the white race was the most highly evolved, while the darker the skin, the closer that person was to the apes. (Check out the full title of Darwin’s book: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” This is pure, unadulterated evil that was swallowed whole by the church in the rush to embrace the advances of modern science. It is the basis of the whole Eugenics movement, and the abuses of the Nazis in Germany. It is a complex subject, but every generation that doesn’t fully affirm the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture will continue to have blind spots that defy logic. Satan’s devices are all based upon plausible lies from the beginning. (John 8:44) I pray that your beautiful children will thrive here and rise above racist voices who claim to be anti-racist, but believe they cannot excel unless they get a leg-up from society because of their disadvantages due to the color of their skin. (Watch Candace Owens for her courageous stand on this.) The Bible teaches there is ONE race – human!
Pete
Insightful
Dotty
Very well written. I think many people fail to see that America is not just a Christian nation. It was founded by Christian men, but for everyone to have religious freedom. The United States is not the only country guilty of disenfranchising people of color. When I have gone on short term Mission trips, I am looked at differently. Fortunately I grew uo in an environment where my father, a Baptist minister spoke in synagogues, mosques, different Christian denominations. Think about countries with white minorities, they go through the same thing as people of color minorities. We are all part of the same body of Christ. “For just as each of us has onbody with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
Romans 12:4-5
hp7285katgmail
I echo the above comments that though we are a Christian nation, the people who accepted Christ must let the Lord work within to overcome our prejudices, hate and self-love. When the body of sin has died, we can experience the freedom of thought and actions that mark us as those who can embrace all people regardless of color of the skin or race. May God give us the courage to become ambassadors of love to bring a change to the way people think.
Pete
Perhaps the answer is, they weren’t truly Christian. Christian in name only – “so called believers”. American doesn’t equal Christian.
amy.medina
I totally agree that America doesn’t equal Christian! But I am referring to the periods of the Great Awakenings, when hundreds of thousands of Americans were professing to be Christians under the teaching of preachers like Edwards and Whitfield. Do you think that all of the people who came to Christ during those revivals weren’t true Christians?
Debbie
However , the second Great Awakening was part of what stimulated a reform movement that included abolitionism. As it did in England, where it got better results. Without the abolition movement, there would have been no Civil War. I agree with you that not enough Christians rose up in that effort. Too many were tied up in the slavery based economy. And probably unwilling to join forces with the people of other philosophies in the movement.
Lucille Gaither
If the church had not endorsed slavery in the United States, it would not have existed. The church went along with society, instead of influencing it in what is right. Christian masters even used the scriptures to justify their attitudes and actions toward slavery. The real cause was to make money, to get free labor, off the backs of others, thus affirming “…For the love of money is the root of all evil…” But God intervened with the US Civil War, so much so that men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, though Christian, could not prevail against the righteousness of God and they lost in the rebellious war. Abe Lincoln waged the war for the reason of keeping the states united but ultimately God’s intention was to abolish slavery. And he did. That was his goal.
Stephen Matlock
You echo thoughts I’ve had as well. For 400 years (well, longer, but let’s pick 1619) we’ve had the Christian Gospel preached in America, and for 400 years white people have been supremacist, Black people have been oppressed, and Indigenous people have been shoved aside. In Jesus’ name.
I don’t think the Gospel itself is disempowered. It is, as Paul says, the power of salvation.
Yet the Gospel as it has been preached in America has been shown for 400 years to be largely ineffectual in changing the hearts and minds of white Christians, who have a white Jesus and a white God and a white heaven. Reading Howard Thurman, for example, has shown me just how incredibly strange our American Christianity appears to those outside this nation–his interaction with Gandhi led to some soul searching in my own life for ways that I have nationalized Jesus and made him the American savior.
Maybe your going away to Tanzania for so long and then coming back has helped you to see some of this very disorienting and broken relationship between what the Gospel is supposed to be and what the distortion of it is here in the United States.
I am tempted to doubt, sometimes, that the Gospel that I’ve heard is able to change the lives of people who believe it, because so little has been changed. But then I think of the way the Black church has formed and thrived and deeply embedded itself as the energizing soul of Black folks. And I think it is not that the Gospel is powerless or even that a Gospel once eviscerated by white folks attempting to remove the message of liberty from the message shared with Black folks is not powerful to redemption–because even with the mangled Bible and and distorted teaching of white ministers, God was able to move in the hearts of Black Christians to develop in them a faith that withstood torture and abuse, and a faith that is founded upon the Biblical text and message.
Something else is at play, and I wonder if the formation of the white character in Europeanized nations is simply a mighty stronghold that has yet to be directly addressed by faithful men and women who preach the Gospel. Maybe it’s time for the preachers and teachers and leaders and saints to call out the blatant, continuous racism that so deeply infects and damages not just the Christian witness of the white American church but also distorts the freedom of the soul of white folks.
I don’t know. I’m still looking for answers to your question, and I’ve been asking it for a few years now.
Blessings to you on the journey. I appreciate your blog and your stories.