Evangelicalism, abolition and slavery.

The theocratically inclined World Net Daily web site is promoting the film Amazing Grace, as to be expected with their Christianist agenda. Their “film reviewer” writes that this is the story of Wilberforce who lost his father and went to live with an aunt “in whose home he first met the great evangelist George Whitefield, and John Newton. Newton had converted to Christianity and left a lucrative life as a slave trader, and wrote the words of the hymn Amazing Grace."

Anschutz’s film also tells the story of John Newton, the man who authored the song Amazing Grace because Newton was a covert to Christianity and had once been an active merchant in slaves himself. I’ve not seen the film so I can’t say how accurate it is on this matter. I can, however say, that the web site for the film merely claims that Newton repented "over time" but gives no indication of the time involved. Newton’s conversion to Christianity was real. He was on a ship that he thought would sink during a storm and prayed that God would save the ship. When it didn’t sink, and most ships don’t sink during storms, Newton changed his life.

But when I say he changed his life he stopped swearing, he stopped gambling (so he wouldn’t be at Anschutz’s casino) and he stopped drinking. What he didn’t do was stop working in the slave trade. That continued for several more years. Then he had a violent fever and got converted all over again. This time he said it was total conversion and he was at peace. And still he continued working in the slave trade. Trading in human beings didn’t disturb his peace at all. Apparently having a beer was a problem, as was saying “damn” but helping transport human slaves didn’t bother him and if it did then it didn’t bother him enough to stop.

Only in 1754, six years after his conversion, did he retire from the maritime industry but not in moral revulsion against slavery but because he wanted to become an Anglican priest. One has to wonder how many more additional people were sold into slavery because the converted Newton found nothing in his evangelicalism that opposed slavery.

For seven years Newton was rejected for the priesthood. He also tried to be ordained by the Methodists, Presbyterians and others but no one was that keen. He eventually used the influence of a friend and was ordained. It was only in 1779 that Newton ended up in London preaching and it was here he met William Wilberforce, the main character in the Anschutz film.

And it was only now that Newton became an abolitionist. He was a Christian and a slave trader for years. Only after he left the maritime trade, and decades later, did he find himself opposing slavery. He wrote a booklet against slavery in 1787, 33 years after he left the slave trading enterprise. His conversions to Christianity did not stop him from engaging in the transport of slaves whatsoever.

And what of the other prominent “evangelical” influence on Wilberforce: George Whitefield? Whitefield is certainly a far more important figure in the development of evangelicalism than Wilberforce. Whitefield is the man who is often credited with bringing revivalist fundamentalism to America. He toured the American colonies preaching the message of fundamentalist Christianity winning many converts. His campaign was called “The Great Awakening” but what is forgotten, or ignored, is that Whitefield didn’t just support slavery he actively extended it.

The state of Georgia, where Whitefield preached and established an orphanage, prohibited slavery. But in 1749 there was a move to legalize the ownership and trading of human beings and the great evangelical leader George Whitefield was a leader of that campign. His orphanage owned slaves and upon Whitefield’s death those slaves were bequeathed as property to the Countess of Huntingdon, a benefactor of Whitefield who helped pay for his revival campaigns and was a major benefactor of the British evangelical movement.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography discusses the role of evangelical Christians in ending slavery and it notes: “During the first half-century of religious revivalism, from the 1730s to the 1780s, evangelicals showed little interest in the Atlantic slave trade or the enslavement of Africans. The mid-century progenitors of Anglican evangelicalism.... left no record of opposition to slavery in their deeds or words.”

More importantly it notes that “several important evangelicals... had a vested interest in human bondage.” Rev. Martin Madan was a slave owner who used involuntary human labor on his plantations in the Caribbean. The profits from this venture were used to build a chapel for evangelicals in London. Like Newton, his fellow evangelical slavery, he also wrote hymns.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that the few “evangelicals who took an interest in the enslaved focused exclusively on the African’s spiritual welfare.” Slaves, in accordance with the New Testament, were told to accept their bondage and improve their spiritual condition.

Only in the late 1700s did a significant group of evangelicals become persuaded that slavery was wrong and this was more due to the lobbying of Quakers than to any biblical morality. This group of evangelicals “had initially shown more concern with the promotion of religion than the cause of liberty. If left to their own devices, it seems likely that they would have pursued an ameliorationist programme, rather than the abolition of the slave trade.” They only embraced abolitionism in 1786.

If one group deserves praise in the fight against slavery it is not the evangelicals. It is the Quakers. This sect is not evangelical in any sense of the word and were often persecuted by evangelicals for their teachings. But Quakers consistently opposed slavery, which is one reason for the persecution they suffered at the hands of orthodox believers. Quakers were petitioning parliament to abolish slavery while the evangelicals were still counting the profits from the trade.

The campaign to portray evangelicals as the force behind abolitionism is a false one. And even the major evangelical influences on Wilberforce, Whitefield and Newton, were slavers. Newton’s conversion didn’t stop his slave trading as is claimed by the Religious Right. And Whitefield was a major leader of the campaign to bring slavery to the state of Georgia.

Thanks to George Whitefield by 1810 there were over 100,000 slaves in the state of Georgia. And by the time of the Civil War there were close to half a million. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that this prominent evangelical revivalist alone made it possible to enslave over 1 million people from the time he pushed for the legalization of slavery in Georgia until it was abolished by the Civil War just over a century later. Whitefield helped establish one of the largest slave trading regions in the world. Anyone think Anschutz will make a film about that?

I can’t find a firm figure regarding how many slaves were freed by the 1833 abolition act but I found several references to the compensation paid out by the British government to slave owners. It is said that £100 per slave was paid to the owners who “lost” their property. Elsewhere I read that £20 million in total compensation was given out. That would seem to indicate 200,000 slaves were freed.

If evangelicals wants to take credit for those 200,000 I’m happy to let them do so (though it is not quite accurate). But I would like them to take credit for the additional slavery that existed because of the efforts of George Whitelfield. And from what I see Whitefield’s actions lead to the enslavement of five people for every one that Wilberforce helped free. That comes to a deficit of 800,000 slaves. Evangelicals ought not celebrate and sing Amazing Grace too loudly. Their history in the slave trade is far, far dirtier than they are admitting.

Illustration: Our illustration is of evangelist George Whitefield, slaver.

The Christianist mogul behind the film.

The man who is ultimately behind the film Amazing Grace, which has evangelicals swooning and claiming credit for ending slavery, is Philip Anschutz, a Right-wing Christian billionaire who was also behind the big Christian push for his film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As the New York Times wrote, the films produced by Anschutz “are often designed to accommodate a religiously devout audience.” Anschutz admits he intends his films to push his moral values. He told an audience at a Christian college that he expects the films he produced “to carry a moral message” and that he’s in this “to attempt some small improvement in the culture.”

Anschutz puts his money into films that push a more personal agenda as part of America’s “culture wars” and he is a major funder of the Discovery Institute, the people behind the Intelligent Design fraud. Anschutz is also generous with other far-right groups such as Colorado for Family Values and Morality in Media.

But Anschutz has more ambitious goals than to just fund theocratic groups. He wants to mold America’s culture. And his films are not the only way to do that. He has purchased dozens of major newspapers across the United States including the San Francisco Examiner, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald.

Anschutz, who is worth more than $5 billion is often described as a “devout Presbyterian” but his form of Presbyterianism is not what most Americans think of when they hear the term. His is the old fashioned Calvinist kind of Presbyterianism. But a little hypocrisy doesn’t worry him either. He is the owner of the white elephant Millennium Dome in London and plans for it include a super-casino. But the profits from the dome will help Anschutz push his morality agenda even if gambling will be a major source for those profits.

And he admitted guilt in a plot where he inflated the value of his company, Qwest, pushing up the stock price and then dumping his shares at the higher price. For that he was fined $4.4 million.

Anschutz has also been generous to political candidates, almost all of them Theopublicans, particularly to anti-gay candidates. He has donated to Marilyn Musgrave, Richard Santorum (several donations but he lost anyway), anti-immigration advocate Tom Tancredo, George Bush, John Ashcroft, Sam Brownback, Robert Knight (extremely Right) and others.

One of his first film ventures was a dud on the second coming of Jesus. The co-producer of the film, Bob Beltz said: "We wanted something that we thought would have more of a mainstream impact, that would expose unchurched people to the person of Christ in a way that they might walk out of the theater saying, 'Is it possible that Jesus could really be that wonderful?’” It didn’t quite work out that way and Anschutz learned to be a more subtle with his message.

Anschutz wants to make a profit. He doesn’t want to just dump money down fundamentalist blackholes that suck in resources and produce nothing. Amazing Grace is meant to do just that. Just the title and song will push his agenda and he knows it. The song is a favourite in fundamentalist churches during the “altar call” when people are urged to come forward and “accept Jesus”. It pushes the born again message hard and heavy.

Part of the agenda here is to make fundamentalists look good to the public. And if evangelical Christians can get the credit for ending slavery, even if they were, for the most part, avid supporters of slavery, so much the better.

Slavery and Christian Mythology

Christians, especially fundamentalists, are mounting a campaign for another God film they are behind: Amazing Grace. The story goes that a British MP, William Wilberforce, gives his heart to Jesus and is saved and abolishes the evil of slavery. See how great Jesus is.

Understand that there is an organized campaign to falsely tie Christianity to the abolition of slavery in ways not justified by history. They have even organized hundreds of churches to sing the song Amazing Grace (the title of the film) on the Sunday before it’s release. The churches are acting as free advertising agencies for this business venture.

Just as Mel Gibson did with his film the produces of Amazing Grace are giving special preview tickets to ministers to see the film before it opens to the public. Again it’s advertising for the film. They even have a special web site for churches to register their Sunday promotion of the movie. They are shamelessly calling it “Amazing Grace Sunday”. Think of this. Thousands of churches openly promoting a business venture. I counted over 100 churches in Georgia alone that were involved in this promotional campaign. Here is a map showing churches involved in the publicity campaign for this private company.



According to the web site for the film “more than 5,000 churches” have signed up for this publicity stunt. It may be advertising, it may be a publicity stunt but it is given a pious veneer and the Christians are eating it up.

No doubt Wilberforce did oppose slavery. Thomas Jefferson pushed to abolish slavery years before Wilberforce did and Jefferson was no Christian. He failed in light of heavy Christian opposition. And the fact remains that for centuries Christians had no major issues with slavery. Christianity was the official religion of the West since the time of Constantine who made it the official religion in 312. Wilberforce comes along one and half millenniums later.

So exactly what were Christians and God doing for 1,500 years?

Neither were actively involved in any move to abolish the evil of slavery. And the reason for this inactivity is obvious. The Bible condones slavery. The church condoned slavery for most of it’s history. Christianity actively supported slavery for 1,500 years and has only opposed it for 200 years. They have about another 1,300 years to go before they even up the score, so to speak.

The Old Testament didn’t just condone slavery but has God allegedly telling his chosen people to actually enslave others. God actively encouraged slavery. And the New Testament didn’t change a thing. Jesus never had an unkind word to say about slavery.

The closest we come to opposition, and it fails by a long shot, is Paul telling Christian slave owners to remember that slaves, who are Christians, are brothers in Christ. He never thought to tell them to free their brothers in Christ. He never had a word about ending the practice. And he didn’t say the same thing about slaves who weren’t Christians.

That Paul was speaking to Christian slave owners indicates that the early followers of Jesus never thought it wrong to own slaves. As for the slaves Paul told them to obey their masters, Christian or not. In fact Paul told Christian slaves that they should work even harder for their masters “as though you were working for the Lord.” And since that is what he wrote in the New Testament most Christians would say that is God speaking. God wanted hard-working slaves not free men.

Christians were so fond of slavery and servitude that they often used this imagery to describe the relationship between believers and God. And non Christians often spoke out against slavery. Prof. JL Holden said that Paul’s failure to condemn slavery “falls below the human ideals of Stoics of his time like Seneca.” Don’t expect any fundamentalist to finance a film about Seneca. But the church fathers and leading theologians continued to support the practice for centuries.

The first Western nation to free its slaves was not the England of Wilberforce. Even Wilberforce himself mentioned that in the House of Commons, Feb. 18, 1796. What nation represented the forces of godlessness to organized Christianity? It was France, the France that had gone through the French Revolution and was roundly condemned (and often with very good reason I should point out) by the Christians of the West. The godless revolutionaries in France freed slaves in the French colonies decades before Christian England managed to do so.

No one will produce a film about that. They don’t have thousands of French churches across America willing to act as advertising agents to boost movie profits. But on February 4, 1795 the revolutionary First Republic passed a decree which said “the Convention declares the slavery of the Blacks abolished in all the colonies consequently, all men, irrespective of colour, living the colonies are French citizens and will enjoy all the rights provided by the Constitution.”

Revolutionary France did not survive. The forces of Napoleon and order took control and in 1802 they re-established slavery. And over the next few years the cozy relationship between church and state was reinstated. But apparently, in the process, the Christians forgot to tell Napoleon that reinstating slavery was wrong.

Two decades before Revolutionary France had made the first steps to abolish slavery the great American opponent of Christianity, Thomas Paine, wrote his essay about how “Christianized people should approve” the stealing and enslavement of “men by violence and murder for gain”. He was disgusted and called for the end of the practice. The church didn’t listen.

What I find a bit odd is that across the American South, the Bible Belt, churches are joining this publicity campaign. Yet many are affiliated with denominations that came into existence because of their support for slavery. When abolitionism finally came to America it was the godless North that embraced the cause. The good Christian people of the South consistently defended the practice as Biblical. As pressure from the North mounted Southern churches severed their ties with their denominations and formed their own groupings in defense of slavery. (Much as you have Episcopal churches rushing off to embrace an authoritarian bishop in Africa because some of their fellow churches won’t bash gays anymore.)

The fundamentalists of the past were advocates of slavery for the most part and it is no coincidence that today's American fundamentalist movement is strongest in those states that were slave states. Slavery and Bible-believing Christianity went hand in hand.

James Gillispie Birney, in 1842 wrote his pamphlet on American slavery. It was entitled: The American Churches: The Bulwarks of American Slavery. He told his English audience: “The extent to which most of the Churches in America are involved in the guilt of supporting the slave system is known to but a few in this country.”

Four years later another report was written: American Slavery: Report of a Public Meeting held at Finsbury Chapel, Moorefields to receive Frederick Douglas, the American Slave, on Friday, May 22, 1846. It contained a transcript of a speech given by Douglas that day. He said:

“I have to inform you that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While America is printing tracts and Bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of the Gospel in foreign lands, the slave not only lies forgotten--uncared for, but is trampled under foot by the very churches of the land. What have we in America? Why we have slavery made part of the religion of the land. Yes, the pulpit there stands up as the great defender of this cursed institution, as it is called.”

Douglas said the most difficult obstacle to end slavery was how closely Christians had connected it to their religion.

“This I conceive to be the darkest feature of slavery and the most difficult to attack, because it is identified with religion, and exposes those who denounce it to the charge of infidelity. Yes, those with whom I have been labouring, namely, the old organization Anti-Slavery Society of America, have been again and again stigmatized as infidels, and for what reason? Why, solely in consequence of the faithfulness of their attacks upon the slave-holding religion of the southern states, and the northern religion that sympathizes with it.”

That being an abolitionist caused one to be labeled an “infidel” ought to be a badge of honor to infidels the world over.

People pleaded with Douglas to mention some instances of the church standing up against slavery. He replied:

“The church and the slave prison stand next to each other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master. The church-going bell and the auctioneer’s bell chime in with each other; the pulpit and the auctioneers’s block stand in the same neighbourhood; while the blood-stained gold goes to support the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support missionaries, and babies sold to buy Bibles and communion services for the churches.”

A voice cried out that this couldn’t be true. Douglas lifted the Birney booklet and quoted an advertisement announce the sale of “field negroes” being sold by the church that owned them. He read another account of a woman’s estate, where a quarter of slaves were given to the church so that it could sell them “for the purpose of sending the Gospel to the heathen and particularly to the Indians of this continent.” Douglas says in that case the church turned down the bequest but would have been happy to accept the money directly had the slaves been sold first.

Wilberforce did speak out agaisnt slavery. As did many agnostics, deists and freethinkers who history forgets. But as Charles Bradlaugh put it, for Wilberforce to condemn slavery he had to have become an unbeliever as to some passages from the Scriptures. And even as he campaigned for freedom he failed for decades because of the opposition from his fellow believers. Bradlaugh said:

When William Lloyd Garrison, the pure-minded and most earnest abolitionist, delivered his first anti-slavery address in Boston, Massachusetts, the only building he could obtain, in which to speak, was the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland, the "infidel" editor of the 'Boston investigator,' who had been sent to gaol for blasphemy. Every Christian sect had in turn refused Mr. Lloyd Garrison the use of the buildings they severally controlled. Lloyd Garrison told me himself how honored deacons of a Christian Church joined in an actual attempt to hang him.

Much of the inspiration for abolitionism in the United States came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. His stirring words in the Declaration of Independence preached a different gospel, where “all men are created equal” and endowed with rights. And the good Christians of the south recognized this. At the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, on November 21, 1861 a minister rose to preach against the Declaration of Independence. H. Shelton Smith summarized the argument:

“It was this very atheistic Declaration which had inspired the “higher law” doctrine of the radical antislavery men. If the mischievous abolitionists had only followed the Bible instead of the godless Declaration, they would have been bound to acknowledge that human bondage was divinely ordained. The mission of southerners was therefore clear; they must defend the word of God against abolitionist infidels.”

Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia preached in 1862 that the libertarian revolution of 1776 was against the Bible.

“Carried away by our opposition to monarchy and an established Church, we declared war against all authority and against all form. The reason of man was exalted to an impious degree and in the face not only of experience, but of the revealed word of God, all men were declared equal, and man was pronounced capable of self-government.”

At the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, in 1860, Rev. Benjamin Palmer told the gathered faithful that:

“The Abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic, The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. From a thousand Jacobin Clubs here, as in France, the decree has gone forth which strikes at God by striking at all subordination and law. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air: “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted, means bondage, confiscation, and massacre. With its tricolor waving in the breeze—it waits to inaugurate its reign of terror. To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religions and of all truths. In this trust, we are resisting the power which wars against constitutions and laws and compacts, against Sabbaths and sanctuaries, against the family, the state, and the church, which blasphemously invades the prerogatives of God, and rebukes the Most High for the errors of his administration. . . .”

The preachers of the day knew from whence came the spirit of abolitionism. It came from Englightenment thinking not from Scripture. Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinker, says: “"The religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights--or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public--in building the case against slavery"

The Jeffersonian concept of natural rights was not Biblical in origin. And it permeated the American abolitionist movment. In opposition to that campaign was the church. That the church eventually surrendered to the spirit of Enlightenment is now being held up as a victory for God.

Christians are celebrating the emancipation of slaves as if their faith had not condoned the practice for millenniums. Their Bible, to this very day condones the practice for it is God’s word and can’t be rewritten by sinful man. They ignore the non-believers who laboured against slavery. They equally ignore the theologians, the ministers, the pastors and church elders who not only condoned the practice but owned human beings a pieces of property themselves.

Churches in denominations founded to defend the inhumanity of man owning man spent a few minutes singing a song promoting a film about one of their own. Instead they should have been on their knees begging forgiveness for the thousands of others who defended the atrocity of slavery. But Hollywood knows that if you want to promote a film and make a profit you want people to feel good. It Hollywood were being honest it would make hundreds of films showing the church advocating slavery for each one showing it opposing the practice.

It is no coincidence that after the liberal values of the Enlightenment spread throughout the Western world that nations began abolishing slavery. Christianity had been there for centuries and nothing changed. But as liberalism spread so too spread the shame of owning slaves. Eventually even the Christians started to feel condemned for their immoral practice. But they stood condemned, not by their Holy Bible, but by the spirit of their age, a spirit that had not come from Christianity and which was repeatedly condemned by the church.

Eventually the church succumbed to liberal temptation. Eventually it recognized rights which their own Bible denied. And now you have Christian after Christian using this movie to tell the story how Evangelical Christianity freed the slaves. Pardon me while I throw up.

Photo: Map of churches in this campaign. Photo of Frederick Douglas.