The American Church and the Failure of Nerve

Today's Reading

Read Amos 5:21-24, where God refuses the worship of a society built on injustice: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies... But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Read Isaiah 1:11-17 ("When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood... cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression").

Read Jeremiah 6:14: "They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace."

End with Matthew 23:23-24, Jesus on the meticulous tithers who have neglected "the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness."

Reflection

In 1845, two things happened that ought to be read together. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded — its founding occasioned by a dispute over whether a slave-holder could serve as a missionary. (The Methodist Episcopal Church had split the year before, in 1844, over the same question; the Presbyterians would split formally in 1861, after a longer fracture.) And in the same year, Frederick Douglass — a man born into slavery in Maryland, who had escaped to the North seven years earlier — published his Narrative. He included an appendix because, he said, he was afraid his readers would conclude from the body of the book that he was an enemy of Christianity. He wanted to clarify.

What he wrote in that appendix is one of the most theologically serious sentences ever written about American Christianity:

"Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked."

He goes on, in the same appendix, to specify what he means: "the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land." Douglass was not an unbeliever. He was a believer with eyes. He had seen Christian masters quote the Bible with one hand and wield the whip with the other. He had seen the same hymns sung over the same backs that bore the marks of cruelty. He had seen, with the clarity that only the victim has, what was being done in the name of Christ.

The temptation, two centuries later, is to read Douglass as if he were attacking only the worst of the South — the cartoonish villain of a black-and-white film. He was not. The defenders of slavery were not, mostly, cartoon villains. They were sincere, learned, often pastorally tender men who genuinely loved their people and genuinely believed they were reading Scripture rightly. James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian, was one of the most respected theologians in the antebellum South — author of careful, intelligent works on the church and on Christian doctrine. Robert Lewis Dabney, Thornwell's heir in the next generation, was a Confederate chaplain, a professor of theology, a defender of Stonewall Jackson, and a man whose systematic theology is still read today in some Reformed circles. These men were not stupid. They built biblical defenses of slavery — appealing to the patriarchs, to Paul's instructions to slaves and masters, to the so-called "curse of Ham" in Genesis 9 (a misreading that has been doing damage for fifteen centuries).

And they were wrong. They were catastrophically, soul-darkeningly wrong. And the question every honest Christian today has to ask is: how?

Part of the answer is that they were reading from inside the system that benefited them. Their churches were funded by slave-holding members. Their salaries were tied to plantation wealth. Their families' security was bound up with the institution. As one nineteenth-century abolitionist put it bluntly, it is hard to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it. It was not, at the level of conscious thought, dishonesty. It was something subtler and more universal — the way the human heart, as Jeremiah said, is deceitful above all things, and self-interest dresses itself up in exegetical robes.

Part of the answer is that they had built theological habits that allowed them to honor Galatians 3:28 ("neither slave nor free") with one hand while honoring "slaves obey your masters" with the other, and never let the first verse touch the second. The conquest texts were on the shelf, ready to be invoked against the Native Americans. The Pauline household codes were on the shelf, ready to be invoked for the Black slave. The image of God in Genesis 1 was, somehow, kept on a separate shelf altogether, where it did not contaminate the others.

And part of the answer is that the white Northern church, which was theologically opposed to slavery, was so often quietly racist — willing to oppose slavery without being willing to integrate its pews — that the moral force of its opposition was blunted. Charles Spurgeon, preaching from London, was sharper than most American Northerners, and he was attacked from both sides for it. American slave-holding pastors burned his sermons. Some Northern moderates wished he would tone it down for the sake of unity. He refused, and he understood exactly the dynamic: the church will heal the wound of God's people lightly, crying "peace, peace," whenever the cost of peace is borne by someone weaker than itself.

This is the diagnosis Jeremiah gave — and it is one of the most relevant Old Testament verses for the American church in any era. They have healed the wound of my people lightly. The healing is real. The wound is not. The peace is real. The injustice is not. The healing covers without curing. The peace silences without satisfying. And God says: this is not healing.

Frederick Douglass was not a Jeremiah. He was an American slave who had taught himself to read by tricking white children into showing him their letters. But he saw what Jeremiah saw — that a religion can be perfectly orthodox in its creed and perfectly captive in its conscience, and that when the second is true, the first becomes a sword in the hands of injustice.

What does this require of us today? Three things, at least.

It requires us to take seriously that we could be wrong in similar ways — that there are issues, right now, on which our self-interest may be reading the Bible for us, and we will not see it because we are inside it. The right response to "the Southern theologians were wrong" is not "thank God I'm not them." It is, "Lord, where am I doing what they did?"

It requires us to listen to voices outside our own ethnicity, our own class, our own comfort. The white American church has, for most of its history, read the Bible in conversation mostly with itself. That is part of how this happened. Black Christians, Native Christians, Asian Christians, Latino Christians, and Christians from the global South have seen things in the text that we have missed — not because they are smarter but because they are reading from outside the blind spots we built around the text. We need them.

And it requires us to refuse the cheap peace. When the church heals the wound lightly — when the suggestion is "let's not talk about that, it's divisive" — Jeremiah is the answer. There is no peace the wound is not healed.

Going Deeper

Find one primary-source document from the era of slavery that is not by Frederick Douglass — perhaps a sermon by Thornwell defending the institution, or a letter from a Northern abolitionist Christian, or one of the spirituals composed by enslaved Black believers (the spirituals are themselves a profound theological library, almost entirely overlooked in white seminaries until recent decades). Sit with it. Notice what kind of Christianity is in it. Notice what is being said in the name of God.

Then ask: in 175 years, what document of our Christianity — sermons, op-eds, podcasts, book chapters — would future Christians read with the same horror? It is a worth-asking question precisely because the slave-holding Christians of 1845 did not think they were the bad guys either.