When the Church Got Slavery Wrong

A Sad Chapter in History

This is one of the saddest chapters in American history. You can look at the history of the ancient church—as Kyle Harper has in a couple of important books that he has published—and see how Christianity, the effects and consequences of Christianity, played a part in the waning and the dissolution of slavery in the old Roman Empire.

The fact that Christians had played that part in the dissolution of slavery that was not racially based, that was not marked chiefly as it was in the American context by race, is very sad. It’s one of the great tragic notes in all of church history that in the 1500s, when African slavery came into view and came to such prominence, the church in all of its quarters (though it had criticisms of the institution and particularly of the slave trade) did not take a clear stand against it.

Now, it is the case that in 1818, the PCUSA General Assembly issued a magnificent statement basically condemning slavery—chattel slavery as it existed in America—and calling for its extirpation, calling for the end of slavery. But after that point in 1818, if you know American history and how things went, what happened was slavery was becoming more and more profitable.

Many had thought that it would wane in the late eighteenth century, but the invention of the cotton gin meant that slavery was going to become a profitable enterprise. It’s sad to say that, but it became a very profitable enterprise, and a lot of money was being made so that by the 1830s and 1840s, more and more it became enured, as far as many people were concerned, from criticism. It became sacrosanct for many people.

The spirituality of the church began to be used as a way of saying that because the church is not to concern itself with politics as such, the church should keep its mitts off this question of slavery. Charles Hodge of Princeton did not agree that the church, as part of its task of prophetic moral calling, could not address the wrongs of slavery. And he called for the end of slavery. He was an emancipationist, and he took up that cause in that respect. But it’s very sad to see how there were some particular prominent figures in the American Presbyterian church, the Baptist church, and the Methodist church. This led to splits in the church. In the 1840s, the Baptist and Methodist split. The Presbyterians didn’t split until 1861.

Among the Presbyterians, this doctrine of the spiritual independence of the church that the Scots had, calling for the church not to be under the state, was used, and I think wrongly so. It was mistaken and misused to say the church should not address this issue. The fact of the matter is that some of the biggest proponents of slavery in the southern Presbyterian church were not shy about preaching sermons that instructed slaves to obey their masters.

So they would address the subject in that manner, but not in the manner that the Covenanters addressed it, which was in terms of 1 Timothy 1:10, which said that man stealing was contrary to the law of God. And the slavery—certainly chattel slavery—involved man stealing. And as Charles Hodge said very frankly in his work on the unity of the race, we would never have done this were these white men. We’ve done this to black men from Africa. And that wasn’t a mistake. There was a racial bias there that was throughout much of the country.

Alan D. Strange is the author of Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, and the Spiritual Mission of the Church.

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