Abolitionism and the Enlightenment

People might still go to church, as Americans were doing in record numbers, but, increasingly, the God they worshiped was less the God of the Bible than a god of their own creation who sanctioned unbridled material progress and the liberation of people to do their own thing.

In early nineteenth century America, the liberals who were coming to dominate the northern churches appealed to the doctrines of the Enlightenment more readily than to the Bible, and, in effect, they forced a shift in the nature of the religious discourse even among the orthodox. And, sad to say, by the 1830s the abolitionists took the lead in the war against Christian orthodoxy, as they unfolded an interpretation of natural or higher law that, first, played the Spirit of the Bible against the Word, since the Word did not condemn slavery as sinful. They then transformed the Spirit from the objective Holy Spirit, as manifested in the Word, into the subjective spirit or opinion of every man. Thus, they transformed conscience from being the impress of the Holy Spirit on our minds into a claim against the Word. As the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, himself partial to the abolitionists, ruefully acknowledges, they plunged into antinomianism and reworked the very definition of a Christian: "Slaveholding became the cardinal sin in the antinomian theology, for men were judged solely according to their relationship to slavery, a radical departure in scriptural interpretation…. Something of the dignity and awesomeness of divinity, as it had been perceived for centuries, was displaced by an identification of sin with certain cultural arrangements and virtue with others."

The abolitionists declared slavery a sin, but they could not make their scriptural case against the southern theologians. Many abolitionists, including leading clergymen, ended by declaring that if the Bible could be shown to sanction slavery, it should be discarded as the Devil’s own book. When Henry C. Wright was asked if he would accept slavery in the light of proof that the Bible sanctioned it, he gave a thunderous no: "I would fasten the chain upon the heel of God and let the man go free." Such a Bible, he said, would be "a lie and a curse." William Herndon, Lincoln’s abolitionist friend and law partner, saw no need to fret: he declared that the day would come when enlightened man would be his own Providence and Redeemer. But the palm goes to John Pierpont, who asserted that if it could be shown that Jesus had not actually preached against slavery, "then I say, he didn’t do his duty."

— Eugene Genovese, essay: “Secularism in the General Crisis of Capitalism,” American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 42, 1997, page 195.

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