Might as well say it up front: I am one of many progressive Christians who choose to believe that for every 10 MAGA Christians there’s at least one (and possibly even three) standing up on the other side and working for justice and peace. More than that, I’m also among the prideful who believe that progressive Christians played a heroic, if little appreciated, positive role in 19th and 20th century struggles to define what kind of country this was going to be.
An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
Matthew Stewart
W.W. Norton & Co.
March, 2024
Alas, I must now surrender at least some of this idolatry, thanks to the work of one Matthew Stewart, a resourceful independent scholar who celebrates some bold 19th century human rights advocates who were denounced by respectable Christians and Unitarians as dangerous infidels. Stewart documents how the respectable religious element accommodated slaveholding and reinforced patriarchy long past their sell-by dates. He exposes their timidity and dishonesty. He lays out the whole story in a brisk and entertaining way.
The infidels of primary interest, profiled by Stewart in a whole new light, are renegade Unitarian minister Theodore Parker and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who greatly respected each other. These two were connected, in turn, to infidel-in-chief Abraham Lincoln, both before and during Lincoln’s years in the White House. Lincoln’s junior law partner, William Herndon, a freethinker himself, carried on an extensive correspondence with Parker and made sure that Lincoln read Parker’s voluminous speeches and articles (which Lincoln was happy to do). In fact, Lincoln’s famous line about a “house divided” originated with Parker.
The energetic and prodigiously gifted Parker, still claimed by today’s Unitarians as a denominational demigod, was, back in January of 1843, actually chucked out by the Unitarians during a tight-lipped confrontation over teacups. His chief accuser was the exalted head of Harvard Divinity School, Andrews Norton. Parker considered himself “excommunicated” and went on to found his own 28th Congregational Society in Boston as a haven for freethinkers and committed abolitionists.
Which is not to say that Theodore Parker was without his own blind spots. Like many other “enlightened” New Englanders, Parker hated slavery but also clung to racist views, viewing Black people as naturally “docile,” while viewing so-called “Anglo-Saxons” as a superior strain of humanity.
Douglass, who found ways to read bits of the Bible while still enslaved and who even aspired to become a minister himself, evolved into a bitter critic, not just of pro-slavery Christians but of US Christianity as a whole, at one point exclaiming: “Welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! In preference to the gospel as preached by these divines!” Douglass’s journey into freethinking was greatly abetted by his German-born collaborator and paramour, Ottilie Assing, who introduced him to the work of notorious infidels Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss. In later years Douglass kept busts of these radical thinkers prominently displayed on his mantel.
As Stewart tells it, the early approach to abolition favored by William Lloyd Garrison—denouncing slaveholding as sinful and calling on slaveholders to repent—backfired in a major way, prompting a well-organized counteroffensive from well-placed theological “redeemers” who had little trouble showing that the Bible nowhere condemns slavery. Stewart notes that well over half of the leading pro-slavery theologians and preachers were trained at elite Northern seminaries, where most faculty members likewise had no real quarrel with plantation slavery (a largely unexplored topic deserving of its own book).
The deeper problem that Stewart brings to light—and a problem with obvious contemporary resonance—is US Christianity’s heavy investment in property, patriarchy, and propriety (i.e., subordination). The core problem is nationalist Christianity as a totalizing system, commanding obedience and submission to the powers that be and envisioning God as the ultimate dominator.
In this context the counterrevolution mounted by the Christian and Unitarian establishment against the radical abolitionists during the 1830s and 1840s was fairly easy to execute. Not only were the abolitionists’ ranks significantly infiltrated by infidels during a period in which the Second Great Awakening had made freethinking a scandalous thing, but the radicals also had outspoken women addressing their assemblies (a definite no-no). And perhaps most troubling of all, if property in the form of human beings could be canceled, what other threats might there be to property rights more broadly? Cotton Whig Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster spoke for the oligarchs when he declared, “The great object of government is the protection of property at home and respect and renown abroad.”
Parker and the radicals could see all of this clearly, needless to say. “The Slave Power has its vassals all over the North,” Parker thundered. “The Money Power and the Slave Power go hand in hand.”
Nearly all intellectual leaders in both North and the South thought of chattel slavery as an engine of vast national wealth production, whereas in fact it generated wealth primarily for those at the very top of the pyramid—the Southern planter “lords of the lash” and the Northern textile “lords of the loom”—while impoverishing working-class Whites in both regions.
The freethinking radicals could see this as well, with many—especially the leftist German emigres of 1848—taking up militant labor advocacy along with their abolitionism. Here, too, is a lesson for our times: the grotesquely unequal “financialized” economic system we inhabit today—what the late James M. Lawson, Jr. aptly called “plantation capitalism”—is a failed system for the vast majority, poisoning not just our politics but degrading our culture more broadly and setting us up for fascism.
Stewart has written a compelling revisionist US history that also serves as a useful intellectual history. I especially recommend a chapter titled “A Brief History of God” as a refresher course in the important philosophical tradition originating with Kant and proceeding through Hegel and Feuerbach to Marx. These figures were far from unknown to the American radicals, many of whom (like Douglass) learned German in order to read their works.
My quibbles with Stewart are few and far between. Yes, Lyman Beecher supported the revivalism sweeping the nation at the time (and some old-line Calvinists charged him with heresy for doing so), but this indefatigable Presbyterian was hardly a huckster or a camp-meeting clown. And, probably because it doesn’t quite suit his thesis, Stewart has very little to say about several White Christian leaders who did, in fact, commit themselves wholeheartedly to abolition—Elijah Lovejoy, Theodore Dwight Weld, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, etc.—not to mention fearless Black Christians like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and so many others.
John Brown poses a special challenge for Stewart, as Brown was obviously a serious Bible believer and by far the most passionate of the White abolitionists. In order to square these facts with his broader thesis Stewart suggests that Brown can’t really be counted as a Christian because his religion was so mystical and so tinged by a vengeance ideation. I think that’s cheating.
But here I go again, clinging for dear life to cherished Christian heroes. Matthew Stewart does me and others like me an actual favor by smashing false idols right and left.
As is so often the case, infidel Abraham Lincoln said it best (while yet again echoing Theodore Parker): “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
