When Theophilus G. Steward became the pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C. in June 1886, he noticed Frederick Douglass sitting among his parishioners, whom he discovered was “a regular and liberal contributor.” Douglass, Steward said in his autobiography, Fifty Years in the Gospel Ministry (AME Book Concern, 1921), gave “his money, his presence, his influence and his public service freely in aid of the church.” Because Steward previously had heard that Douglass “was not a believer in Christianity” and had spoken disparagingly of the clergy, he engaged the venerable leader about these claims in order to determine their veracity. In response to Steward's inquiry, Douglass, in denying these erroneous characterizations about his religious views, generally described the breadth of his beliefs.
Though Douglass eschewed “theological dogma often promulgated from the pulpit,” he “never denied any attribute of the Deity.” He added “to me God is good! God is light! God is truth! God is love! and to glorify God is to lead a life in harmony with these attributes.” Moreover, “as God is true, I would have man true! As God is holy, I would have man holy! As God is pure, I would have man pure!” Additionally, “Christianity” was “the sigh of the soul for a noble life; for herein is the true glory of God.”
Douglass, despite his nonsectarian sensibilities, possessed a capacious religiosity that discredited accusations that he was either irreverent or atheistic. This corrected view is reflected in D. H. Dilbeck's insightful and nuanced volume, Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet. Dilbeck cites John T. Jenifer, Douglass's eulogist and Steward's successor at Metropolitan Church, as saying that the late leader articulated a “spiritual liberty” that challenged the pro-slavery sympathies of countless American churches. Jenifer said of Douglass, “Christ for him was larger than Creed, and his Christianity transcended his Churchianity.” Douglass’s harsh experiences as a slave and the complicity of Christian churches and their slaveholding constituents in defending and maintaining black bondage, Dilbeck declares, led him to separate the religion of Jesus from its morally compromised practitioners.
Dilbeck recounts how Douglass experienced the raw cruelties of slavery through the brute force of family separation, pervasive physical violence, and innumerable acts of dehumanization perpetrated through the design and direction of Christian slaveholders. Douglass witnessed how those who owned slaves, many of them evangelical and Methodist, aligned personal piety with their right to hold human beings in bondage. Through proud paradox, white Christians, Douglass observed, were untroubled by a morally vacuous faith that permitted the subjugation of African American men and the rape of African American women. Dilbeck credits black believers whom Douglass encountered with showing him that Christianity was colorblind and that a full embrace of Jesus Christ did not include the contaminating stain of racism. Moreover, as Dilbeck demonstrates, Douglass, during an interlude in Baltimore, joined an African-American religious community in Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church that connected him to an interstate network of black Christians scattered across the middle Atlantic. After his escape from slavery in 1838 and resettlement in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he affiliated himself with another black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where he honed his preaching and oratorical abilities. When abolitionists in the region, meeting in Nantucket, heard Douglass tell about his personal experiences in slavery, William Lloyd Garrison hired him as a full-time lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Because American churches either supported or equivocated about the evil of slavery, and some black churches seemed too afraid to challenge the “slave power,” Douglass searched for an alternate venue from which to fight against human bondage. According to Dilbeck, “the abolitionist movement,” for Douglass, “epitomized the true gospel of Christ in action” (53).
Dilbeck makes the compelling case that Douglass, while hardly bound by sectarian creeds or church membership, was deeply religious and thoroughly Christian. Though he believed in God, his views on divine activity in human history shifted. Though God was the source of human progress, Douglass also thought that the stubborn human effort of African Americans, especially after the Civil War, rather than divine providence, was needed to sustain black freedom. Additionally, Dilbeck contends that Douglass's prophetic voice against slavery extended to women's suffrage and against any other deprivation that violated his foundational belief that God was no respecter of person. If Christians and their churches refused to stand against slavery and second-class citizenship directed against African Americans and women, then it became the responsibility of prophets like Douglass to call the nation to correct these wrongs.
Dilbeck thoroughly surveys Douglass's writings and speeches, despite the omission of his significant exchange with Theophilus G. Steward. Nonetheless, Dilbeck's examination of Douglass's religious perspectives and how they developed across his long life are skillfully tracked and explained. That Douglass received indispensable religious nurture from black believers, however, requires a reference to such persons as Edward Waters, the third bishop of the AME Church whom Douglass recalled at the denomination's 1884 General Conference as providing him with “quiet teaching.” Moreover, Dilbeck needed to identify William Serrington and Thomas James, successive AME Zion pastors in New Bedford. who mentored Douglass as a church member, local preacher, and encouraged him to narrate his slave experiences. Notwithstanding these oversights, Dilbeck unassailably asserts that Douglass, as an abolitionist and equal rights advocate, poured his religious sensibilities into his understanding of freedom in the United States. Because of his Christianity, however unorthodox, he declared that neither enslavement nor disenfranchisement on account of race, gender, or creed should be tolerated in American society.
