The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Why did Jonathan Edwards support slavery? In part, the answer may have to do with his social status. Edwards represented an educated and elite class in New England society. Wealthy and influential people populated his congregation. Slave owning signified status. More deeply, though, the particular brand of evangelicalism developing in America during the Great Awakening made an antislavery stance unlikely for many. Mark Noll explains, “As a revival movement . . . evangelicalism transformed people within their inherited social setting, but worked only partial and selective transformation on the social settings themselves.”23 Evangelicalism focused on individual conversion and piety. Within this evangelical framework, one could adopt an evangelical expression of Christianity yet remain uncompelled to confront institutional injustice. Ironically, Edwards’s second son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., more fully grasped the revolutionary applications of his Christianity. A pastor himself, the younger Edwards had grown up around Mahican and Mohawk tribes and spoke their languages better than English as a boy.24 Beginning in the 1770s, Edwards became an outspoken abolitionist. For instance, he wrote an article entitled “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes” and in 1791 preached a sermon called “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.” Edwards Jr.’s impact, however, would not come near to his father’s, nor could the son’s outspokenness about slavery drown out his father’s con...