The Problem of Slavery in Christian America: An Ethical-Judicial History of American Slavery and Racism

by Joel McDurmon

just as certainly as Noll is wrong about this particular angle, he is almost certainly right that the antislavery arguments failed due to a “widespread commonsense [not Bible-based] consensus about race.” This overwhelming racism was cultural, and it was as widespread among Christians in the North as in the South. The same Charles Hodge, for example, who opposed slavery nevertheless joined the mainstream view that blacks were not prepared for freedom, would be a danger to the public welfare, and thus needed the State to regulate their lives. For this reason, church historian Philip Schaff could conclude in 1861, “Of all forms of slavery the American is the most difficult to dispose of, because it is not only a question of domestic institution and political economy, but of race. The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.” Would that more theologians could have both understood this profound statement, and overcome the truth of it.82 Unfortunately, the few thinkers of the day who did understand this problem also had to lose much respect for the orthodox theologians and the divinely inspired text they associated with their proslavery positions. Frederick Douglass, for example, discerned the racism at the root: “[N]obody at the North, we think, would defend slavery, even from the Bible, but for this color distinction…. Color makes all the difference in the application of our American Christianity.”