worldly practices as drinking, gambling, dancing, swearing, fornication, and adultery, and even for giving the impression of sinful behavior. Mount Olive Baptist
Church in North Carolina, for example, expelled Mary Bivens because she was
“too thick with young men.” While they patrolled their own congregations, how-
ever, southern evangelicals seldom thought about changing the world.
Southern evangelicalism rested on the sovereignty of God, a conviction of
human imperfection, and an acceptance of disappointment and pain as part of
God’s grand and unknowable design. When the young son of a planter family
died, his mother was certain that he died because his parents had loved him more
than God: “But God took him for he saw he was our idol.” Francis Pickens of
South Carolina lost his wife and child, and wrote, “I had almost forgot there was a God, and now I stand the scattered ... and blasted monument of his just wrath.”
It was a far cry from the middle-class North’s sentimentalism and the romantic,
redemptive deaths of children in sentimental fiction.
Within this flawed and dangerous world, patriarchal social relations were
crucial to Christian living. Southerners revered the patriarch and slaveholder
Abraham more than any other figure in the Bible, and John C. Calhoun would
proclaim “Hebrew Theocracy” the best government ever experienced by human-
kind. The father must—like Abraham—govern and protect his household, the
mother must assist the father, and the women, children, and slaves must faithfully act out the duties of their stations. Eternal salvation was possible for everyone, but the saved lived out their godliness by striving to be a good mother, a good
father, a good slave. By the same token, a Christian never questioned his or her
God-given social role.
Pro-Slavery
In revolutionary and early national America, white south-
Christianity
erners had been the most radical of republicans. Jeffersonian
planter-politicians led the fights for equal rights and the
absolute separation of church and state, and southern evangelicals were the early republic’s staunchest opponents of slavery. By 1830, however, the South was an
increasingly conscious minority within a democratic and capitalist nation. The
northern middle classes proclaimed a link between material and moral progress,
identifying both with individual autonomy and universal rights. A radical northern minority was agitating for the immediate abolition of slavery (Chapter 12).
Southerners met this challenge with an “intellectual blockade” against outside
publications and ideas and with a moral and religious defense of slavery. The Bible provided plenty of ammunition. Southerners preached that the Chosen People of
the Old Testament had been patriarchs and slaveholders, and that Jesus had lived
in a society that sanctioned slavery and never criticized the institution. Some ministers claimed that blacks were the descendants of Ham and thus deserved enslave-
ment. The most common religious argument, however, was that slavery had given
millions of heathen Africans the priceless opportunity to become Christians and to live in a Christian society. Thornton Stringfellow, a Virginia Baptist minister,
insisted that “their condition … is now better than that of any equal number of
laborers on earth, and is daily improving.”
Family, Church, and Neighborhood: The White South
365
Like their northern counterparts, southern clergymen applauded the material
improvements of the age, but they insisted that moral improvement occurred only
when people embraced the timeless truths of the Bible. The South Carolinian
William F. Hutson put it simply: “In religion and morals, we doubt all improve-
ments, not known to certain fishermen who lived eighteen hundred years ago.”
Northern notions of progress through individual liberation, equal rights, and universal Christian love were wrong-headed and dangerous. The Presbyterian John
Adger asserted that relations of dominance and submission (and not “barbarism
and personal savage independence”) were utterly necessary to both social and
individual fulfillment, and that the distribution of rights and responsibilities was unequal and God-given. “The rights of the father are natural, but they belong
only to the fathers. Rights of property are natural, but they belong only to those who have property,” and such natural rights were coupled with the awesome
duties of fatherhood and proprietorship. In the end, southern pro-slavery intellectuals rejected Jefferson’s “self-evident” equality of man; Edmund Ruffin, for
instance, branded that passage of the Declaration of Independence as “indefensi-
ble” as well as “false and foolish.”
The Mission to
By the 1820s, southern evangelicalism had long since
the Slaves
abandoned its hostility toward slavery, and slaveholders
commonly attended camp meetings and revivals. These
prosperous converts faced conflicting duties. Their churches taught them that
slaves had immortal souls and that planters were responsible for their spiritual
welfare. A planter on his deathbed told his children that humane treatment and
religious instruction for slaves was the duty of slave owners; if these were
neglected, “we will have to answer for the loss of their souls.” After Nat Turner’s bloody slave revolt in 1831 (Chapter 9), missions to the slaves took on new
urgency: If the churches were to create a Christian society in the South, that
society would have to include the slaves. The result after 1830 was a concerted
attempt to Christianize the slaves.
To this end, Charles Colcock Jones, a Presbyterian minister from Georgia,
wrote manuals on how to preach to slaves. He taught that no necessary connec-
tion linked social position and spiritual worth: there were good and bad slave-
holders and good and bad slaves. He also taught, preaching from the Epistles of
Paul (“Servants, obey your masters”), that slaves must accept the master’s authority as God’s, and that obedience was their prime religious virtue. Jones warned
white preachers never to become personally involved with their slave listeners—
to pay no attention to their quarrels, their complaints about their master or about their fellow slaves, or about working conditions on the plantation. “We separate
entirely their religious from their civil condition,” he said, “and contend that one may be attended to without interfering with the other.” The catechism Jones
prepared for slaves included the question, “What did God make you for?” The
answer was, “To make a crop.”
The evangelical mission to the slaves was not as completely self-serving as it
may seem. For to accept one’s worldly station, to be obedient and dutiful within
366