With regards to religion, many slave owners, such as, Zephaniah Kingsley and Judge Wilkerson believed that religious expressions were a form of independence and would threaten slave control. They believed that their slaves’ would become more empowered and have more bravery and be more difficult to handle and more disobedient. However, other slave owners believed that it should be used as an instrument of control. When slaves were actually able to attend Christian services, it was by a white minister who taught them to obey their masters in order to be saved by God. However, if they disobeyed them, they would not be saved, but destined for damnation.…
Albert J. Raboteu’s, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South, seeks to provide an overview of the history and institution of slaves in American history. By providing samplings of hymns, songs, and stories of first hand accounts, Raboteu provides the reader with earnestness and a desire for self-reflection. In this paper I will provide a brief summary of Raboteu’s major themes and a short response.…
Nineteenth-century Brown University president Francis Wayland has been celebrated for his contribution to antislavery arguments on the basis of the Bible. His arguments amount to a “signal moment in American moral history” (Noll 2006) because, more than simply providing a biblical articulation of the injustice of the slave racial regime, they entailed a practical method for its gradual, civil, and nonviolent abolition (Marsden 1996). Taking Francis Wayland’s arguments as a historical case study, this paper shows how his antislavery writings contributed to the production of racialized difference by mapping race as the criteria of tolerable and intolerable violence. This paper therefore aims to complicate the reception of Wayland by attending…
He describes how the Egyptians are taught to be the devils, but the American Christians are the “enlightened”. Treating American slaves more barbaric than any civilization known to man. The Americans considered themselves Christians, however, black slaves were not considered to be worthy of redemption. David Walker wants to know what justifies the American Christian’s cause. They believe themselves to be holy, moreover, treat slaves and blacks on a level lower than citizens.…
In the year 313 AD, Emperor Constantine I adopted the Edict of Milan, allowing Christians to practice their faith without persecution. Although Christianity had been around for more than three hundred years by then, this was a foundational building block of the institution known as the “Church”. When we look back at the history of Europe we can see that the church played an important role in shaping social ideals such as tolerance, beliefs and morals. These concepts were shipped across the Atlantic during the colonial era and long after the American Revolution, remained fixed in the minds of the people. By comparing the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave Written by Himself and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, we can see the injustices in which the Church displays towards coloured people in American in order to gain wealth. We also, get a sense that the churches influence over society has changed from the original revolutionary concepts of peace and love, to the totalitarian concepts of domination and control. Both men shared a vision of a pure Christianity. Both men shared the condemnation of the church’s position on equality and justice. Both men shared the feelings of societal manipulation inflicted by the church. Both men shared their talents with the world in order to cure prejudice and demand equality.…
Throughout human history, man has found himself fascinated with the Gods and the mysticism that surrounds them. The idea of praying to a higher power has always appealed to the ethos of mankind, as a way of comfort. Divine intervention has led to the construction of grand temples, churches, and mosques while, the rest of the people lived in shacks battling destitute poverty. Religion has ignored many problems of the human condition in favor of the fantasy of revelation and salvation. It has led to vicious wars, disenfranchisement of entire groups of people all because of the sweet promise of salvation. In John D. Caputo's essay, Caputo highlights the divisive nature of religion and how the promises of revelation and salvation result ultimately lead to further perpetuate the lies and violence that religion has brought…
When taking a look at America’s short but significant history, we find that this nation was partly founded through religious ideals. Since its beginning, religion has helped to define the American Identity into what it is today. And this was explored throughout American literature especially in the Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown.…
Christianity served an important role in mobilizing and uplifting black people before and during the Civil Rights Movement. Christianity provided a means of freedom, hope, a platform for advocacy and activism since the first African slave reached the shores of what is now the United States. In slavery, Christianity was used as a method to keep slaves bonded mentally, however, slaves saw Christianity as something else. Slave believed that Christianity would bring them their freedom. Of course, under the words in the bible leaned more towards freedom than servitude of other human beings. In Paul Harvey’s Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History, which dives into different eras of American History and its dealings with race and religion, Harvey states, “the 1723 letter from the slaves to the bishop made clear, slaves recognized that conversion implied that they should have the rights of free men” (Harvey 29). Slaves believe that the conversion to Christianity would bring them freedom. Would allow them to be a citizen of the world they were brought her to be slaves. Although slave masters did everything in their powers to make it impossible to be free once converting to Christianity, it did not take the Christian spirit and hope from them. This could be seen “in South Carolina, [where]…
In the antebellum South, slavery existed not only as an economic staple, but also was seen by many as a key component of the Christian religion. African-American slaves were subject to the will of their owners who believed the Bible supported their every action. As a slave himself, Frederick Douglass quickly realized that the ideals of Christianity strictly opposed the practice of slavery. The false form of this religion, explained as “The hypocritical Christianity of [the] land,” is practiced by whites, most notably Mr. Covey, and is a complete mockery of the true ideals behind genuine Christian thought (Douglass, 95). Douglass refutes Covey among others to expose the underlying hypocrisy of the slaveholding South while revealing his version…
Life in America during the 1600s was far from easy; in fact, each day was filled with many dangers one can hardly imagine in this day and age. Not only did the British people have to adapt to a new, freshly discovered and hardly understood land still—for the most part—unmolested by human progress, they were moving to a land filled with a people whose culture was very different, and seemingly barbaric. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a narrative by Mary Rowlandson, tells of a very frightening time for the colonists, and gives an account of what it was like to live among the natives.…
This article reflects the work of and lecture delivered at the University of Notre Dame on October 15 1990 by Professor Dr. Nicholas Lobkowicz. The article titled “Christianity and Culture” was eventually published in the journal “Review of Politics”, Vol. 53, No.2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 373-389. The article reflects the author’s research into the diminishing effects of Christianity on the human experience, and how it has served its historical perspective. Dr. Lobkowicz ascertains that his purpose in this article is that the Church still has an opportunity to engage modernity, while giving witness to human dignity and promoting a more human culture.…
In the fifth chapter, this thesis will assess the abolitionist effort to denounce the legitimacy of using the Bible to sanction southern slavery by arguing that biblical slavery was not based upon the inferiority of one race whereas southern slavery was based upon the inferiority of one race. In short, these abolitionists sought to highlight that southerners were using a book which sanctioned a system of slavery that was not based upon the inferiority of one race to sanction a system of slavery that was based upon the inferiority of one race. The Bible was being wrested from its original context to support something that it did not support. A very small number of Abolitionists such as Elijah Porter Barrows would make this argument. Barrows argued that in the Old Testament, the basis for slavery rested not on the idea that one race was inferior and thereby especially suited for slavery, but rather, anyone who was a foreigner to the Israelites, irrespective of race, was suitable for enslavement. Barrows would point out that if southerners, who likened themselves to the Israelites, were truly following the Biblical model of slavery, then they would have to permit the enslavement of many different…
Determining whether the God you praise and worship is choleric because of your presence by the sins you’ve created is a never ending battle in the 17th-18th centuries. Upon the Burning of Our House is a poem, with nine stanzas, written by Anne Bradstreet explaining her understanding and able to live and learn from sin with God. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a work, written as a sermon, by Jonathan Edwards who preaches to all the non-Puritan sinners, that if they don’t convert and take blame for their sins, God’s anger toward them will be unbearable and force them to the pits of hell. Analyzing Bradstreet’s and Edwards’ works, a reader can distinguish the personality of the two writers and the different views of God that people acquire.…
The slaveholders of America were leading hypocritical lives during Douglass’s time. They were religious but devilish as well. Those monsters who claimed themselves “Christians” prayed with the same hand they tortured slaves with. They were like devils dressed as angels. An example by…
In his book “Defending Slavery”, Finkelman presents a collection of historical documents written by politicians, lawyers, clergymen and an anonymous author supporting proslavery. In the first part of the book, Finkelman, gives a briefly introduction to the arguments supporting pro slavery in America during the Antebellum. The thoughts defending slavery have in common that slavery in America was justified based on racial aspects.…