How should white evangelicals take into consideration slavery and past evangelical heroes who affirmed its practice? A latest book by historian Sean McGever, Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield, helps us process these matters with historical accuracy and Christlike humility.
For many white American evangelicals, the problem of slavery is just not much of an “issue” in any respect. After all, we live in a day where every country on this planet outlaws the practice (a minimum of on paper). We are rightly repulsed by practices harking back to slave ownership, like human trafficking and sweat shops. And we have a good time past evangelical leaders, like William Wilberforce, who tirelessly campaigned against the institution. Our denominations not split over slave ownership as they did prior to the American Civil War. Slavery, we thankfully conclude, lies within the rearview mirror of history.
Without denying the reality in these claims, there are two problems with this assessment. First, slavery, broadly construed, remains to be a live issue for a big variety of Americans, a lot of whom are believers in Christ. Just like Jews and Muslims carry with them a historical sense—a “communal memory,” should you will—of atrocities done to their ancestors by Christians (like pogroms and the Crusades), many Black Americans carry a remembrance of their ancestors’ subjection to slavery, segregation, and other types of injustice. Consequently, they experience slavery and its aftereffects as painfully present realities.
Second, a lot of our white evangelical heroes have a fancy relationship with slavery, a indisputable fact that can complicate our contemporary witness. What are white evangelicals saying once we honor such historical figures as towering exemplars of Christlikeness while treating their slave ownership (if we mention it in any respect!) as a minor character blemish, something “everybody was doing” on the time?
In Ownership, McGever helps readers confront these issues by examining the ministries of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), John Wesley (1703–1791), and George Whitefield (1714–1770), three 18th-century figures who’re arguably the founding fathers of recent evangelicalism. Each affirmed the institution of slavery in some unspecified time in the future of their lives, yet just one (Wesley) got here to vary his mind on the topic.
Working throughout the system
Ownership is split into 4 sections. The first takes up the influences, regarding slavery and its place on this planet, that Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield inherited. The second examines how each was involved with the institution. The third considers how Wesley got here to oppose slavery and his actions against it. And the fourth reckons with the legacies of every leader in light of their relationships to slavery.
The book gives introductory biographies of every man before launching into two informative chapters that provide historical context: one on the history of slavery, and one surveying English and Puritan views on the topic. Here, McGever describes the attitude that prevailed in much of Christianity until the 1700s. As he puts it, “Slavery existed on this planet because of this of sin and evil, and … the perfect plan of action was to work inside that system.”
Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield naturally adopted this outlook. In their ministerial training, as they studied the consensus present in English and Puritan writers on slavery, they likely absorbed the next lessons: White Christians must avoid the improper acquisition of slaves (“man-stealing” is forbidden, but enslaving prisoners of war or the offspring of slaves is allowable); the slave relationship have to be guided by Christian virtue (slaves are to be obedient, masters temperate); and slaves ought to be evangelized, but conversion doesn’t imply emancipation.
This framework had centuries of the Western Christian tradition preceding it. It was thus quite natural, as each man engaged the encompassing socioeconomic world, for them to take part in slavery to various degrees.
Edwards ministered in colonial Massachusetts and is often called America’s foremost evangelical theologian. Several of his disciples (including one among his sons, Jonathan Jr.) were known for his or her strong stances against slavery, which they derived from Edwards’s ethical writings. Yet Edwards himself failed to totally appreciate the antislavery implications nascent in his own works.
Consider that he and his wife, Sarah, enslaved quite a few Black Africans, including Venus, a 14-year-old girl they purchased in 1731, and Titus, a 3-year-old boy purchased in 1756. While manumission was an option for handling one’s estate in those days—Sarah’s mother, as an illustration, arranged to free her slaves upon her death in 1740—the Edwardses didn’t select this for young Titus, who was passed on to their eldest son Timothy after their deaths in 1758.
In essence, then, Edwards’s relationship with slavery followed the cultural norms of the day. While his writings led many to oppose slavery within the a long time after his death, his example didn’t live as much as his ideals.
Whitefield’s example is much more unsettling. Early in his North American ministry, the famous evangelist stopped wanting fully supporting legalized slavery in Georgia, where it had been outlawed because the colony’s founding in 1733.
Whitefield oversaw an orphanage in Savannah named Bethesda (“house of mercy”). Bethesda was one among the central ministries of his life, but the cruel economic realities of sustaining it led him to reconsider slavery, viewing it as an option for addressing financial woes on the orphanage. In time, he got here to consider that Black slaves were higher suited to work amid hot Georgia summers than white indentured servants, who were far dearer to employ.
Following a form of anti-Wilberforce trajectory, Whitefield soon became a distinguished proslavery lobbyist each in Georgia and England, campaigning for a decade until the colony legalized slavery in 1751. By his death in 1770, he owned 49 slaves, all associated together with his orphanage. Though Whitefield was an excellent evangelist, McGever reveals that he was a short-sighted businessman whose mishandling compelled him to rely on slave labor in order that his “beloved Bethesda” could survive.
Of the three men, John Wesley’s relationship to slavery was essentially the most distinct, and McGever devotes significant attention to his long and slow awakening. Wesley had no exposure to slavery until he visited the Southern colonies within the mid-1730s. There, he and his brother Charles learned of the cruel brutalities committed by some slave owners.
Wesley’s response, nonetheless, was to not call for social change but to double down on commitments to evangelize enslaved people. For almost 40 years, as he led the Methodist movement back in England, he wrote nothing on the topic. As McGever suggests, this silence reveals a significant blind spot in his social conscience.
Yet Wesley had a present that neither Edwards nor Whitefield enjoyed: long life. (The latter pair each died of their mid-50s.) When Wesley was almost 70, he began seriously reading antislavery works, and over the subsequent 20 years his views modified. He first opposed all types of slave acquisition and called for slave traders to right away quit their jobs. In his mid-80s, he got here to champion full emancipation.
Though we must always be grateful that one among our evangelical founding fathers made the journey to antislavery views, it’s stunning to notice that it took him 50 years to finish the method, an affidavit to the indisputable fact that sinful cultural norms are extremely difficult to eradicate from society.
Their blind spots, and ours
McGever excels at narrating the history of Edwards, Whitefield, and Wesley with an irenic tone. While he is obvious that their proslavery actions are contemptable, he issues no fiery condemnations. Instead, we come to the standard realization that they were deeply flawed Christians like the remainder of us. They could have ascended to the heights of theological acuity, sanctified holiness, and evangelical proclamation, but they did in order individuals who also participated in a system fraught with moral conundrums and evil. They are, in a way, failed heroes, and we must always acknowledge this complexity while telling their stories.
Ultimately, Ownership gives readers a profound historical sense, a recognition that, even amongst the perfect of us, social and cultural conventions shape believers in ways in which future generations might find troubling. When history is written this fashion, we naturally ask ourselves, “What are my ethical blind spots, and people of my church and tribe?”
In the last chapter, McGever leads readers in an exercise of self-reflection patterned after the book’s fourfold framework: Have we inherited cultural influences which might be biblically and ethically problematic? How are we letting these influences shape our thoughts and behaviors? What actions can we take to like others in additional Christlike ways? What form of legacy will we seek to depart for posterity?
While applying history in this way is just not without its pitfalls, McGever recognizes that humble self-examination, inspired by failed heroes, is a useful exercise for individual Christians and for the church at large. Sinful hearts are infinitely resourceful, and sinful patterns are remarkably proof against change. The lessons of McGever’s book should aid the church because it pursues the Reformation emphasis of semper reformanda, “all the time reforming” in response to the Word of God.
Robert W. Caldwell III is associate professor of church history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the creator of Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney.
