“The negro can go into the circus, the theater, the cars…but cannot go into an Evangelical Christian meeting,” exclaimed an elderly Frederick Douglass in 1885 to a listening crowd in the nation’s capital. Celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of Washington, DC’s abolition of slavery, his celebratory oration was also the occasion of a critique of the evangelical tradition.
Douglass’ relationship with evangelicalism was a complicated one, and for good reasons.
In his Life and Times, he tells the story of how he became a Christian around 1831 while a teenager listening to the preaching of a white Methodist minister, and was subsequently discipled by an enslaved “spiritual father” whom he called “Uncle Lawson.” Lawson nurtured a love for the Bible in the young Douglass, set an example of ceaseless prayer, and encouraged the thought that God would one day free him for a great work. Through Lawson, he was connected to a fervent, evangelistic enslaved Christian community that met in seclusion.
Describing the nascent days of his conversion in this environment, Douglass recalled, “I saw the world in a new light, and my great concern was to have everybody converted.”
The beauty that he initially experienced became mixed with sorrow when his master, Hugh Auld, discovered Douglass’ hush harbor community and forbade him from attending Lawson’s meetings. While at the time feeling “persecuted by a wicked man,” his feelings of despair soon turned to hope again as Auld himself became converted in an evangelical revival in 1832. Writing in his first autobiographical narrative, Douglass remembered anticipating his master’s conversion turning him into a “more kind and humane” man. However, Auld’s move into evangelicalism didn’t have the effect Douglass desired. In fact, as Douglass saw it, “after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.”
Douglass’ mixed experience with evangelical Christianity was akin to many of the tradition’s enslaved antebellum black participants. Through evangelicalism, many of them came to faith and were able to grasp at the hope of emancipation. Yet and still, it was through evangelical preaching that many proslavery Christians were emboldened to maintain their slaveholding and found sanction as they tore apart families to uphold the lucrative institution. This was the Christian tradition Douglass was pointing to in the infamous jeremiad at the end of his autobiography, saying, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
Free and enslaved black evangelicals alike could see the variant ethical nature that evangelical Christianity produced among whites. It was a faith that looked like theirs from the outside but was inwardly out of sync with their mores. But like Douglass, many neither left evangelicalism nor Christianity. Instead, they formed their own churches within the tradition.
Upon escaping to freedom in 1838, Douglass visited a Methodist Episcopal Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, looking to join. Apart from Lawson’s Christian community, Douglass had become a member of the integrated Methodist community in Baltimore, Maryland while a slave. There, he shared community with other slaves and violent slaveowners who did not perceive a tension between professing love for their enslaved brethren and selling them away from their loved ones or brutally beating them. In New Bedford – a community that had abolished slavery since the late 1700s, he presumed he would find a higher quality of Christianity than that of the South. What he found was another kind of Christianized degradation.
In New Bedford, there was still a line of demarcation between black and white Christians in the church. In an illuminating description of the first Methodist Church he visited in Massachusetts, he detailed in an 1841 reflection how blacks were positioned behind whites in service and were served communion in a second-class status. Without any conviction of wrongdoing about this arrangement, he recounted the white minister’s eucharistic invitation to blacks after all the white members had been served: “he took a long breath, and looking out towards the door, exclaimed, ‘Come up, colored friends, come up! For you know God is no respecter of persons!’”
Douglass never returned to that church and instead joined a local branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. His move towards an independent black church was one that reflected the path of numerous black Christians at the time.
The evangelical revivals that first swept through the American colonies and their stratified societies drew black and white converts into a bibliocentric, evangelistic, enthusiastic expression of Christian faith. In this milieu, the first African American, or as they were called then, “African” churches were formed.
Beginning in the 1770s, independent black congregations in the South were being formed as African Baptist churches. Preachers who began as slaves, such as George Liele and Andrew Bryan, were helping to establish African Baptist churches in Georgia and South Carolina. Spreading throughout the South, predominantly through the Baptists and Methodists, enslaved and free black preachers were becoming pastors of their own congregations.
The first African churches were formed in partnership with whites who supported blacks meeting on their own. Nevertheless, with suspicion of slave revolts and actual revolts such as that of Denmark Vessey in 1822 and Nat Turner’s in 1831, African churches in the South became less independent and less prevalent. While meeting openly, in a sanctioned way, became less common without white supervision, enslaved southern blacks moved their independent churches into clandestine gatherings near swamps and hush harbors.
In the North, the African church movement continued to grow openly as black Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians touched by the revivals founded denominations completely separate from white control or separate congregations within white controlled denominations.
Among the most prominent were Richard Allen’s denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church founded in 1816; Absalom Jones’ Saint Thomas African Episcopal Church established in 1792; and John Gloucester’s African Presbyterian Church in 1807.
African churches in the North came about in a variety of ways. Some, like Allen’s and Jones’ derived out of the refusal to accept second-class status within a racially mixed church. Others like Gloucester’s, were formed from the initiative of free black preachers who attracted large black crowds and formed them into a congregation. Some were like Thomas Paul’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, which was organized in 1808 at the request of black congregants who were a part of a mixed congregation. According to Carter G. Woodson, seeing independent black churches forming around them, they initiated to process to separate.
Whether an autonomous denomination or a separate congregation, black evangelicals now had the ability to live out their faith according to their own convictions. Many of these churches became hubs for black abolitionists, aids to those sojourning through the Underground Railroad, and purveyors of black evangelical theology.
By the time Douglass became a member of New Bedford’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1838, he had become a part of a well-established African evangelicalism, through which he received his license to preach in 1839.
Through Douglass’ preaching, some of the distinctives of early black evangelical theology can be heard. These distinctives went beyond castigating the second-class nature that proslavery and abolitionist evangelicals placed upon blacks in the church, in his experience. They went beyond denouncing the protective layer that slaveholding Christianity wrapped around the conscience of many white southern evangelicals. What can be heard in Douglass is that the separation between black and white evangelicals was deeper than these matters. It was over their view of Jesus.
In his 1885 speech at the nation’s capital, Douglass remarked, “Of all the forms of negro hate in the world save me from that one which clothes itself with the name of the loving Jesus, who, when on earth, especially identified himself with the lowest classes of suffering men, and the proof given of his Messiahship was that the poor had the Gospel preached unto them.” The association of Jesus with the poor and lowly was deeply formative for him and early black evangelicalism.
Douglass’ words that day were aimed towards evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who had recently visited DC. Moody was the most prominent evangelical evangelist of the time, attracting hundreds and thousands to his preaching tours. But when he came to DC, Moody barred blacks from the revival meetings that took place at the First Congregational Church and visited black churches separately.
As evangelical Christians, Douglass and Moody would have both related to and relayed the classic articulations of evangelical preaching, which stressed the need for all to repent and receive forgiveness from God. Moreover, a stress on the cross of Christ in the path toward reconciliation with God, or what historian David Bebbington called crucicentrism, Moody and Douglass would have also held in common. However, while they held crucicentrism in common, cruciformity or what theologian Scot McKnight calls “Christoformity,” would have splintered them.
For Douglass and many black evangelicals, the zenith of Christ’s coming meant more than our sin debt being paid and the gracious offering of God’s forgiveness, but it was a call to be formed by the life of Christ – who himself was lowly, poor, and despised. White evangelicalism’s degradation of blacks, who like Christ, occupied the place of disrepute in society, was evidence of a malformed Christianity – a Christianity that had the outward doctrinal marks but was missing the inward sign of a transformed soul and renewed view of creation that only came from authentic communion with Jesus.
While Douglass did find commonality among some white evangelicals, he was calling for more.
In 1885, Douglass was speaking to a discouraged black community that was living through the rise of a new president who derived from the South’s slaveholding party. He was the first of his kind since the Civil War. Douglass was speaking to a black community that was suffering from increasing racialized violence and marginalization, strengthened by the Supreme Court’s recent Plessy vs Ferguson verdict. The same spirit that had animated the heartless cruelty of proslavery Christianity, which lacked mercy and Christlikeness, was now being reinvigorated. His criticism of evangelicalism that day was not to demean the tradition altogether, but was an invitation not to repeat the sins of the past.
It was a moment he was hoping for black and white evangelicals to come together as bearers of God’s light in a dark time.
Jessica N. Janvier, PhD 
Leave a comment