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

by Joel McDurmon

some northern Evangelicals expressed their own racism in just as overt terms. Ohio minister Josiah Strong achieved national fame with his 1885 book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, proclaiming the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race and its mission to the world—a clear expression of the “White Man’s Burden” before Kipling coined the phrase. As General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance of the United States, Strong doubled down in 1893 with The New Era; or, The Coming Kingdom, quoting his own earlier work: “It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future. . . . The time is coming when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence will be felt here as it is now felt in Europe and Asia. Then will the world enter on a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States will assert itself. Then this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can any one doubt that the result of t...