I. Black and White Critiques of Slaveholding Christianity

Many historians have faced African American Christianity and found irresistible Howard Thurman's observation: “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”Footnote ⁸ Historians have occasionally turned theologian, concluding that the experience of black believers trapped in slavery illustrates something primal about the nature of Christianity itself. If nothing else, it is undeniable that many of the enslaved believed they had tapped into such power and found that their suffering gave them a particular understanding of Christianity that voided the claims of those who claimed ownership over them.Footnote ⁹ In so doing, however, they were less identifying genuine Christianity than they were making their case about what Christianity really was and generating a form of it meaningful to them.

Similarly, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, white European and American Christians were formulating the notion of “Christian slavery,” an ideology likewise using Christian ideas and rhetoric to legitimate a specifically racialized slavery. They argued the two terms in the phrase “Christian slavery” were mutually reinforcing: slavery was a Christian practice because it benefitted the enslaved. Baptizing them, in turn, fostered greater harmony between them and their masters.Footnote ¹⁰ This ideology allowed slaveholders to understand the practice as a divinely ordained source of social stability.

It might not, then, be surprising that black Christians were among the first to contest this interpretation of Christianity, arguing it was in fact not Christianity at all but rather something Frederick Douglass called “the slaveholding religion of this land.”Footnote ¹¹ Christian African Americans argued that the attempt to enfold slaveholding into true religion would corrupt Christianity and hence produce a degraded society premised on violence. They made two primary arguments. First, slaveholders relied on force to deny black people genuine religious practice. This outraged evangelical African Americans, who consistently juxtaposed the deeply personal conversion experience they prized with the violent power of slaveholders who attempted to stop them from worshiping as they chose. Moreover, even black people who did not accept evangelical Christianity believed that true Christianity sustained individual liberty; Douglass called “the Christianity of Christ” a religion of the “meek and lowly.”Footnote ¹² Second, African Americans believed that slaveholders’ attempts to control the religion of black people rendered their own pretentions to Christianity false.Footnote ¹³

These arguments resonated deeply with white Northern Christians, who linked them to the health of the United States in total. They were suspicious that “infidelity” would undermine the moral strictures and human dignity that supported the republic.Footnote ¹⁴ Increasingly, they believed that those moral strictures were obvious to any honest mind. Many also worried that the problem of slavery would strangle political liberty. These people found in the accusations of African Americans a language useful for describing the political threat of slavery in religious terms. Some, like Lyman Beecher, were evangelical Protestants. Others, like Theodore Parker, were Unitarians suspicious of evangelicalism. Nearly all, though, found the rejection of slaveholder religion in their attempts to present their form of the faith as the true ground upon which American democracy rested.

II. The Suffocation of Real Religion

One accusation black people leveled at slaveholders was that the violence inherent in slavery inhibited conversion to Christianity and thus would lead (as John Dixon Long put it) to Christianity cutting its own throat. As Frederick Douglass put it in his fiery speech on the Fourth of July, “Welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! In preference to the gospel as preached by these Divines!”Footnote ¹⁵ Slavery's cruelty constricted the spread of the Christian Gospel among those subjected to it.

In his novel Clotel, William Wells Brown, who had escaped slavery and embarked upon a literary career in the North, included an ominous warning in verse:

Brown accused slaveholders of providing such a poor example of Christianity that those who watched them were inspired to reject anything that claimed the term. In his novel, slaveholder and minister John Peck brings to his home a white preacher, Hontz Snyder, who delivers an impassioned sermon to the black people there. “It is the will of God who hath by his providence made you servants,” Snyder declares. “He knew that condition would be best for you in this world, and help you better toward heaven.” But Snyder's sermon fails utterly. “He could not succeed in keeping the negroes at all interested,” the narrator observes. “Four or five were fast asleep,” and “not a few were stealthily cracking and eating hazlenuts.” After Snyder departs, a black man, Simon, asks the others if they liked the sermon. “‘No,’ answered four or five voices.” Indeed, one man observes: “Dees white fokes is de very dibble . . . and all dey whole study is to try and fool the black people.”Footnote ¹⁷

Many other black people agreed that their revulsion for white people's moral failings made them suspicious of the religion they professed. Henry Box Brown recounted the story of a slaveholder named Joseph Colquitt who, fearful that his sickness would lead to death, prevailed upon the enslaved black people he and his neighbors owned to pray for him. But then upon regaining his strength he grew ashamed of sharing his piety and ordered all those who prayed to be beaten. In consequence, Brown observed he and other black people “began strongly to suspect the Christianity of the slaveholding church members and hesitated much about maintaining my connection with them.” Many simply stopped going to church.Footnote ¹⁸

Such experiences could lead not merely to impiety but disbelief. Harriet Jacobs, for instance, remembered how her uncle, Benjamin, recaptured after a near escape and treated harshly, threw his mother's pious entreaties back in her face. “When a man is hunted like a wild beast he forgets there is a God, a heaven,” he told her. She begged him not to talk so and to “put your trust in God. Be humble.” Benjamin lashed out “No! I will never humble myself to him.”Footnote ¹⁹ Benjamin's mother, Jacobs recorded, collapsed into tears.

Benjamin's experience points to worry that the violence embedded in slavery would stifle the conversion of black people. Thomas Johnson's story illustrates the fear. He had a pious master. Johnson, growing up enslaved in Virginia in the 1830s and 1840s, remembered that when he was a child the man would come back from church in a spiritual fervor and “teach me to say prayers, and the Apostles’ Creed, and read to me about Abraham's servants, and Isaac's servants, and Jacob's servants, and ‘servants obey your masters.’ He would read these nice things over to me so carefully, have prayers, and then, when he felt like it (which he often did), give me a lashing.”Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, Henry Box Brown recounted a deeply symbolic story of a supposedly pious slaveholder named Allen who once happened to be reading the Bible when an enslaved man hurried in, late to an errand. Allen, infuriated, stood and “this professing christian [sic] proceeded to try the effects of the Bible on the slave's body, and actually dealt him a heavy blow to the face with the sacred book.”Footnote ²¹ Johnson, Brown, and others told such stories to illustrate the deep revulsion many black people felt toward the religion whose practice was so often mediated with violence.

And yet, such instruction was common enough in the antebellum South because many masters sought to control the ways enslaved people experienced Christianity. The Episcopalian bishop and president of the Virginia Theological Seminary, William Meade, noted that many masters feared that “it was unsafe to show [a black person] much kindness, lest he be lifted up and rendered dissatisfied with his state.” Fortunately, Meade argued, the Gospel was “admirably calculated to soothe a wounded spirit and reconcile to any hardships of their lot.”Footnote ²² Christianity, Meade hinted, was not a religion of liberation or freedom; rather, it was a religion of docility, and cruelty was the proper way to inculcate its lessons.

But Johnson's experience revealed how hollow Meade's faith seemed to black people. For Johnson, the dehumanizing experience of slavery revealed how false his master's religion was, and his experience of Christianity replaced slavery's violence upon his body with the ecstatic physical experience of conversion. “How to get religion was what perplexed me; yet I felt it was essential to my happiness both here and in the hereafter,” Johnson wrote, remembering that “some of the slaves sang so often of ‘heaven.’”Footnote ²³ Rather than heeding his master's hymns and Bible reading, Johnson formulated an alternative understanding of what Christianity might be. It was less about these outward forms of piety than it was about liberation. “Looking as I did the master wanted to know what was the matter,” he wrote, “and he talked of sending me to Georgia.” Johnson knew what it was to be sent to Georgia. He remembered those unlucky enough to be sold south “often could be seen in companies, handcuffed on their way to the southern markets, doomed, doomed, to perpetual slavery. ‘Oh!’ I would think. ’I must seek religion.’” It was then he began to fast, pleading to God, “Please, don't let master sell me to Georgia.”Footnote ²⁴

For people like Johnson, the twin physicalities of evangelical faith and legal bondage shaped their experience of religion. Condemnation to hell and condemnation to Georgia seemed two aspects of the same damnation; indeed, Johnson recalled that one plantation owner he knew “was so cruel to his slaves that he was known as the devil.”Footnote ²⁵ Another black man, Tom Jones, recalled his master erupting into a rage when he found Jones studying religious tracts and declaring, “I swear that I will whip you to death.” Jones responded, “I could not help myself, if he was determined to kill me, but that I must pray while I lived. He then began to whip me.” Jones fell to the floor. Upon recovering, he went to an evangelical service, where he again dropped to the floor and experienced conversion: “My burden of sorrow, which had so long weighed me down, was removed. I felt the glory of God's love warming my heart.”Footnote ²⁶ The parallels here are striking, and in both narratives set the physicality of Christian conversion as the bright doppelganger to the physical experience of white violence—the two inexorably opposed.

III. The Hypocrisy of Slave-Owner Religion

Such troubling stories about slaveholders led black people to decide that such behavior was not merely inhibiting the growth of Christian faith. It also offered a criterion for defining what genuine religiosity was. If the violence slaveholders wielded so easily was not Christian, how were observers to understand what slaveholders were doing when they went to church on Sunday, led their family in hymns, or prayed? Many black people concluded that they must be hypocrites or, at the best, deceived. As the fervent pamphleteer David Walker insisted, “Have not the Americans the Bible in their hands? Do they believe it? Surely they do not. See how they treat us in open violation of the Bible!!”Footnote ²⁷

Walker's accusation of hypocrisy, the declaration that white peoples’ practices rendered invalid their verbal protestations of faith, was common among African Americans. Particularly telling was Walker's vague invocation of the Bible; his assertion that slaveholders violated its teachings while simply alluding to the cruelties of slavery matched many African Americans’ insistence that Christianity was best understood as an expectation of moral behavior rather than the theological scriptural parsing of many Christian defenders of slavery.

Perhaps the most scathing was Frederick Douglass, who called Edward Covey—the “negro-breaker” who had charge of Douglass for a year—“Sunday-pious.” Douglass observed that though the man led his household in elaborate displays of hymn-singing and prayers, “I saw in his very religious devotions, this controlling element of his character.” For Douglass, Covey's impulse to dominate and master those around him seemed baffling and irreconcilable with his professions to faith. Covey required the enslaved in his charge to lead hymns and participate in prayer, and then rose from his knees to beat them in the yard. Douglass remembered, because “everything in the shape of learning or religion which he possessed was made to conform to this semi-lying propensity” of the preservation of Covey's power. His religion was a guise for his hunger toward violence.Footnote ²⁸

Douglass's conviction of Covey reveals his own assumptions about what Christianity should be. “His religion was a thing altogether apart,” Douglass observed of Covey. “He knew nothing of it as a holy principle directing and controlling his daily life.” This diagnosis—of a Christianity made of empty words and ritual rather than of moral practice—was common among black writers. Williams Wells Brown wrote scathingly of Mr. Sloane, a Presbyterian minister brought to his plantation. “When they wanted singing he sung; when they wanted praying he prayed; when they wanted a story told he told a story. Instead of his teaching my master theology my master taught theology to him.”Footnote ²⁹ In Brown's telling, Sloane was quite literally a puppet, reciting the ideologies of slavery he was fed by slaveholders.

Harriet Beecher Stowe sensed the paradoxical power of African American suffering. Uncle Tom's pain endowed the man with what Stowe called a “strange power.” Tom's spiritual authority extended to his driver, Simon Legree, whom Stowe cursed with a horrendous vision. Upon beating Tom out of frustration with Tom's “evident happiness” at his conversion, Legree realized that “the blows fell now only on the outer man and not, as before, on the heart.” Tom stood, hurt but unperturbed, his soul unaffected by the brutality, and Legree was the one shaken, for “there passed through his mind one of those vivid flashes that often send the lightning of conscience across the dark and wicked soul. He understood full well that it was God who was standing between him and his victim, and he blasphemed Him.”Footnote ³⁰ We might see here a bolt of awareness falling upon Legree: when he curses Tom for a Christian, it is clear that the title has been denied the slaveholder himself.

The story is an eerie parallel to that of Bethany Vennay, whose master was similarly stricken with awareness of her righteousness and his own moral failures. She remembered that, after her master beat her for asking to attend prayer meetings, “I felt moved to go down on my knees and ask the Lord to help me, and make Master David willing.” When she asked him again: “He saw my position; and, as if ‘rent by the Spirit,’ he cried out: ‘Well, I'll go to the devil if you ain't my match! Yes: go to meeting, and stay there.’”Footnote ³¹

All these writers implied the white people they wrote of were hypocrites; that they understood at some level that what they were doing was not genuine Christianity but that they chose it for corrupt reasons. That presumption reflected an optimism about human nature increasingly shared by many white American Protestants, and it contributed to the popularity of the accusation of slaveholder atheism among white abolitionists.

IV. The Moral Sense

One night the Presbyterian minister Ezra Styles Ely attended a formal dinner. He was seated with two former Northerners who had moved south and had enslaved several hundred people between them. The two spent the dinner mocking the Sabbath and rejecting the inspiration of the scriptures. Upon discovering Ely's occupation, one turned to him and said, “Christianity has made more damned rascals, than all other religions under heaven.” Ely by this point was quivering with rage, and he declared, “It is false, sir!” Tensions ratcheted upward, and there was talk of dueling before Ely pointed out he was not accusing the man of lying. “I have not said that you spoke contrary to your beliefs: for I know not your thoughts; but you have uttered what is untrue.” Mollified, the man begged Ely's own pardon, and the dinner broke up. But Ely's position was carefully worded, perhaps more carefully than his interlocuter realized. He said that the man did not understand the truth and conceded only that there were many “rascals . . . created by infidelity, and are not improved by the religion of Jesus, for they have not felt it.” His observation about the two slaveholders was telling: “To quiet their consciences, they have concluded, very philosophically, to believe nothing.”Footnote ³²

Ely, who spent much of his time trying to advocate for a particular brand of Calvinism in a country rapidly losing affinity for doctrines of predestination and total depravity, believed that the men spoke falsehood about Christianity because they resisted it and therefore failed to fully understand it. His pointed comments about “rascals,” those who were created by their chosen infidelity, seem a veiled allusion to his interlocutors, who felt the pricks of conscience but who avoided Christian experience—the preached Word, the worship service, and the sacraments of the church. Ely's form of Christianity shared many characteristics with that of other antebellum white Christians, particularly his firm insistence that infidelity was, as he put it later, “madness.” Human nature, Ely believed, was naturally oriented toward Christianity, and though damaged by depravity—as the two rascals illustrated—Christianity could slip onto the human mind and sentiment like a well-fitting glove because it belonged there.Footnote ³³ Ely's deist slaveholders, then, felt the pain of conscience but did not recognize what they were feeling. Out of ignorance, they denied the natural moral order of the universe.

Many white Protestants in the American North shared Ely's conviction that the human faculties naturally perceived this order and that it condemned the barbarism of slavery. The disintegration of the Calvinist beliefs about human depravity that Ely held made its spread easier. White Protestants as distinct as the revivalist Charles Grandison Finney and the Unitarian Theodore Parker opposed slavery, and both believed that human instinct perceived slavery's evil without prompting. The abolitionist Theodore Weld cried out in the introduction of a book of lurid slave narratives that “human nature is true to herself. . . . We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart.”Footnote ³⁴ For these activists, slavery was not simply a moral wrong but obviously a moral wrong. Thus, the efforts by black abolitionists like William Wells Brown and Henry Box Brown to write and publicize slave narratives; they believed that anyone, if presented with the realities of slavery, would by human nature come to revile it. It became a rallying cry that linked abolitionism to American democracy. As one abolitionist put it, “The people of this country who prize liberty will become abolitionists as soon as the necessary information is extended to them.”Footnote ³⁵ For Christians who opposed slavery, these ideas increasingly pointed to slaveholder hypocrisy, a worrisome trait in a society that believed its politics depended upon the strong moral fiber of its citizens.

Such confidence derived from shifting patterns of ethical reasoning in the early American republic. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson, a leader in the Scottish Enlightenment, never lived in the United States, but his works and those of his followers, like Thomas Reid, became staples of American universities like Harvard and Princeton. Hutcheson and other common-sense philosophers argued that each individual possessed an innate “moral sense,” a spark of divinity within them, which linked human intuition to the moral structure of the universe. Right and wrong were actualities, as real as gravity, and human beings could perceive them through sentiment and intellect, reason and affections. While Hutcheson's theories were spreading among ministers educated at American universities in the early nineteenth century, Christians like Horace Bushnell were using the ideas to deemphasize the sort of doctrinal theorizing of an Ely, arguing that the moral sentiments Hutcheson described were best experienced through inclination and instinct. They were simply natural.Footnote ³⁶ These ideas were embraced across the Christian spectrum in the United States, though expressed somewhat differently by different Christian denominations.

Charles Grandison Finney, America's leading antebellum evangelist, was among them. Finney explained, “Sinners, when the Spirit of God brings the truth before them, must feel. They feel wrong as long as they remain impenitent.” For Finney, right action must follow the obviousness of moral choices, and that obviousness was perceivable through sentiment: a sinner would intuit as well as cogitate their sin. Finney believed that abolition was among these moral choices, and the fact that slavery continued to exist in the United States despite its sinfulness was due in part to the churches who “to a great extent throughout the land have held their peace, and borne no testimony against this abominable abomination.” But now, Finney declared, “Facts are exhibited and principles established and light thrown upon the minds of men, and this monster is dragged from his horrid den and exhibited before the church, and it is demanded of them ‘is this sin?’” The answer, of course, was obvious. Like Theodore Weld, Finney believed that right knowledge of the facts would lead inexorably to correct conclusions about morality.Footnote ³⁷

On questions of the nature of the Trinity or the divinity of Christ, Finney and the Unitarian Theodore Parker stood far apart. And yet, both shared the belief that human nature would naturally rebel against slavery. While Finney emphasized feeling, Unitarians stressed the intellectual comprehensibility of the moral universe. As the great Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing declared of God, “He rests his authority on the perfect coincidence of his will and government with those great and fundamental principles of morality written on our souls. He desires no worship but that which springs from the exercise of our moral faculties upon his character.”Footnote ³⁸ For Unitarians like Parker, then, slavery was immediately, and rationally, perceivable as a grievous sin against conscience and reason alike. Belief in freedom, Parker declared, was as natural as breathing; it “is derived from human nature; it rests on the immutable laws of God; it is part of the natural religion of mankind. It demands a government after natural justice which is the point common between the conscience of God and the conscience of mankind.” Therefore, slavery could only be supported by three primary groups, which Parker described in terms of cogitation. The first was simply “ignorant.” The second included people “idiotic in their conscience and heart and soul.” Indeed, Parker was so morally disgusted with these that he would call them “somewhat inhuman by birth.” The last and largest group was the worst: “men of large acquisitiveness, or else a great love of approbation, little conscience, little affection, and only just enough religion to swear by. These men you can buy.” They were hypocrites, those who were simply flat-out “denying the higher law of God.” Not ignorant, not deceived; denying.Footnote ³⁹

V. Theorizing Atheism

Once it became certain that the moral sense by its nature would rebel against slavery, Northern opponents of slavery had to puzzle out how to explain those slaveholders who continued to profess and preach Christianity. The narratives of African Americans aided them in the rationalization, offering a consistent depiction of slaveholders who were neither of Parker's first two groups—credulous dupes or outright idiots. Rather, in the narratives of black people, slaveholders consistently seemed to be of Parker's third group: hypocrites.

White Protestants in the Anglo-Atlantic world had a name for this sort: they were formalists. The concept appealed equally to evangelicals like Finney and Unitarians like Parker, though it had roots in debates over the nature of religious establishment in Britain, where Puritans and those sympathetic to Low Church sensibilities used it to attack High Church advocates and other latitudinarians. The Scottish evangelical Thomas Pearson defined it succinctly: “It is the very essence of formalism to set the outward institutions above inward truths, to be punctilious in going the round of ceremonial observances while neglectful of those spiritual sacrifices with which God is well pleased; to substitute means in the room for ends.” Like Brown and Douglass, writers who accused their enemies of formalism were policing the boundaries of Christianity. They sought to demonstrate the presumable moral heresies of slaveholders logically led to counterfeit religious practices that lacked the spiritual power evangelicals prized or even the fervent earnestness of Unitarians.Footnote ⁴⁰

For white American Protestants, formalism was an indication of atheism: ceremonial religion linked to a denial of the moral sense, which was in turn linked to rejection of real belief in God. Of course, the roots of the language of formalism in conflicts over English establishment revealed Protestants were to their bones convinced, and had been since the Reformation, that ritual smacked of loss of moral freedom, loss of individual liberty, and lack of personal connection to the divine. At a deeper level, though, the language of formalism signaled atheism to American Protestants because they, convinced of the truth of the moral sense, also believed that right behavior was a reliable corollary of right belief. If one's behavior did not indicate the sort of behaviors that smacked of real religion to American Protestants, and ritual hardly did, it followed that one's beliefs were flawed.Footnote ⁴¹

Such convictions lay at the root of a distinction that many Protestants in Britain and the United States made in the early nineteenth century between speculative and practical atheism. During the religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s, many American Christians began signaling that the difference mattered for the health of American government. The minister Lyman Beecher, for instance, a leading figure in the nation's evangelical reform movement, warned in 1829, “If mind is voluntary and accountable in its action . . . then is the power of the divine government proportioned to the strength of desire for good and aversion to evil.” For Beecher, the moral sense meant that human government must be shaped by humanity's better rather than worse impulses, and therefore: “Atheism then lets out a race of famished infuriated animals goaded by instinct and unrestrained by prospective hopes and fears.”Footnote ⁴²

Speculative atheism, Beecher allowed, was perhaps less damaging than its other forms. It was about belief only, “giving up the understanding to strong delusion, to believe a lie,” the willingness to ignore one's own impulses to embrace what Beecher believed was untrue of the universe.Footnote ⁴³ Other believers across the spectrum of orthodoxy shared the definition. Theodore Parker, for instance, defined it as “speculative, denying there is any God,” or even “denial of the actuality of any possible idea of God.” For Parker, true to his faith in the moral sense, “speculative atheism is a thing human nature revolts at.” He believed that, because of this, there were only a few such people, and most of them were philosophers who worked hard at it.Footnote ⁴⁴

For many less orthodox Christians in the North, like the radical Unitarian Parker himself, the categorizing and close parsing of the concept of atheism in this way was useful. It allowed Parker to deny the charge of atheism by linking his transcendental ideas about God to the more ubiquitous notion of the moral sense and thereby place himself in alliance with Beecher against speculative atheists. To Beecher and other evangelicals, those people seemed even worse than Unitarians.

Parker, Beecher, and many other religious thinkers, though, found speculative atheists less terrifying than the other group: “practical atheists.” Practical atheism was, as Parker put it, “the carrying out of real speculative atheism into life, living as though there were no natural obligation on man to think true, to do right, to feel kind, and to be holy.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Though the one did not inevitably generate the other, practical atheism was often the application of speculative atheism. It was also why atheism had destructive political and social effects. Charles Finney warned that practical atheism did not require one to theoretically deny God. “The wickedest man on earth may have strong desires after holiness,” he pointed out; indeed, all people naturally did, according to moral sense theory. But “whatever desires a person may have, if they are not carried out into actual choice and action, they are not virtuous.” Finney concluded, “This is practical atheism.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Practical atheism, therefore, did not necessarily mean a cognitive rejection of belief in God, but behaving in defiance of moral sense theology amounted to the same thing. If human faculties pointed clearly to the reality of God, to act contrary to that reality was to act contrary to one's own senses. There was a reason Beecher and Ely called atheism delusion and madness.

VI. Slaveholder Atheism a Threat to the Republic

Ironically, the diagnosis these nervous Protestants placed upon slaveholders was that their atheism must result from their anxiety. Among the earliest theorists of slaveholder atheism was the abolitionist James Duncan, a Presbyterian minister who was one of the first Northerners to call for immediate emancipation. He applied the commonly assumed relationship between speculative and practical atheism to slaveholders and echoed many black writers’ arguments about slavery. As he described it, fear of violence and revolt led slaveholders to restrict the “rights of conscience” of those they enslaved. Such behavior, driven of fear, led slaveholders into anxiety. That they felt empowered “with impunity to contravene all moral obligations relative to his fellow man,” Duncan argued, was essentially practical atheism, behaving in defiance of God's law. This in turn led them “to conclude that either the God of the universe delights in acts of injustice or robbery among men, or else there is no God at all. The first he cannot admit, as it would make him a devil.” Therefore, “the last result of this process of reasoning is liable to be speculative atheism.”Footnote ⁴⁷

William Patton, a Northern minister, was sympathetic to these accusations of hypocrisy and also explored the consequences of slaveholder cognitive dissonance in the light of the moral sense. He compared slaveholders’ situation to that of a pirate who “will rob and murder . . . but he will hardly consent to employ a chaplain on board his vessel to pray over the plunder.” Patton observed that slaveholders “have sufficient moral sense to loathe whatever savors of formalism, cant, or hypocrisy,” and thus inevitably came to “inwardly loathe corrupt religion which sanctions their deeds.” They simply could not admit it. With approval, Patton retold the story of one slaveholder who gave up the task of self-justification and one day at church “denounced them all as hypocrites and utterly abandoned public worship.” This man was honest enough, at least, to recognize duplicity. The rest were lost to self-loathing and an empty formalist Christianity, and Patton worried that they would turn to increased brutality to cover their shame, drowning their sin in “lust after gain and power.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Speaking of Southern Christianity, the Irish writer J. E. Cairnes observed, “It seems impossible that a whole people should live permanently in contemplation of a system which does violence to its moral instincts. One of two results will happen. Either its moral instincts will lead it to reform the institution which offends them, or those instincts will be perverted and become authorities for what in their unsophisticated condition they condemned. The latter alternative is that which has happened in the Southern States.” The South, Cairnes said, “has generated a code of ethics and a type of Christianity adapted to its peculiar requirements.”Footnote ⁴⁹

To this point, the arguments these Protestants laid out sought to explain the roots of slaveholder hypocrisy, that is, how practical atheism could give birth to speculative atheism. Quickly, though, they took the next step, showing how these twin atheisms would undermine American democracy. If slavery led to atheism, atheism would lead to the withering of liberty and the rise of tyranny. The strident abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison linked these ideas clearly, saying, “The struggle is between Right and Wrong—Liberty and Slavery—Christianity and Atheism.” He equated three questions: the first “whether 2,000,000 slaves in our land shall be immediately or gradually emancipated,” the second, “whether freedom is with us—the people of the United States—a reality or a mockery,” and the third, “[whether] to obey Jehovah or worship Mammon.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The abolitionist lawyer John Joliffe linked these ideas in causal means in his novel Chattanooga, having the opponent of slavery Rasleigh tell the confused Southerner Thomas Card, “Slaveholding then is but a system of Atheism—not that open Atheism which denies the existence of God—but the more covert and subtle Atheism, which while it admits his existence denies his authority as legislator over his creatures.” For Rasleigh, this denial of God's authority forced democratic government into doing things which no government should do. “God himself will not interfere with man's free agency,” Rasleigh said. “Still less has he conferred upon one set of men the power to do so.” Rasleigh concluded his conversation with Card by expressing worry that the “strangely inconsistent” state of affairs in the nation might give way to violence or tyranny.Footnote ⁵¹

Rasleigh's disquiet about the seeming success of an atheistic regime in a nation full of people endowed with the moral sense to know right from wrong opens up dimensions in the sometimes-agonized relationship with democracy many opponents of slavery held. As the Civil War approached, many abolitionists—especially those who assailed slavery the most vocally and who often called for its immediate end—began to speak of a controlling “slave power,” a political conspiracy determined to remake the United States over in the image of Southern slaveholders. For many abolitionists, the seeming success of this slave power—which included the 1836 “gag rule” restricting debate on slavery in the House of Representatives, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act permitting slaveholders to hunt their escaped captives through the North, and the 1857 Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott decision that those of African descent could not be citizens—revealed that Parker's “atheistic state” was triumphing. This shook Protestant abolitionists’ confidence in democracy. Conspiratorial thinking proved a means to reconcile their faith in the moral sense with the political triumphs of the South.Footnote ⁵²

After the Fugitive Slave Act became law in 1850, Theodore Parker—Unitarian, abolitionist—raged in Boston. Repeatedly, from 1851 through 1855, slave catchers appeared in Boston, and repeatedly Parker took to the podium at Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston to denounce the law and rouse Boston's citizens to resist the slave catchers. In 1855, Parker was brought to trial on charges of inciting a riot, and in his defense he declared, “Massachusetts hated the bill and was in no haste to conquer her prejudices in favor of Justice, Humanity, and the Christian Religion; she did not like the disagreeable duty of making a public profession of practical Atheism.”Footnote ⁵³ Congress, Parker warned, was in fact legislating atheism in the United States, which boded poorly for the prospects of American democracy. “Slavery is a Principle,” Parker observed, now “a part of our national religion, for our actions are our worship of God, if pious, of the devil, if impious.” The Fugitive Slave Act was markedly satanic, and such a state of affairs, Parker worried, meant that “tyranny” was gaining ground. “In an atheistic state the atheistic church will be supple to the master and hate the slave,” Parker observed.Footnote ⁵⁴

This argument—that practical atheism in the form of slavery was being forced upon a people whose natural moral senses reviled it, and that this would lead to democracy's end—proved a means to reconcile the failure of Americans in total to repudiate slavery; indeed, frequently abolitionists spoke of the slave power subverting democracy and Christianity alike. They spoke of defenders of slavery and the slave power as pathological or deluded, and, bemoaning the influence of such people in government, they began speaking of a version of practical atheism called “political atheism.” Beecher and other earlier antebellum Christians had used the phrase to denounce the excesses of the French Revolution and the fear that the separation of religion and politics would result in the separation of morality and government. In such a state of affairs, Beecher warned, “the madness of licentious liberty predominates, and the fear of God and the protection of law fail in the presence of an atheistic mob.” This is what had happened in France; as God was removed from public life, democratic government began to eat itself. Beecher was sure the French Revolution was the product of an “anti-Christian conspiracy [that] produced first Deism, and at length Atheism, and the French Revolution.” That same conspiracy was at work now in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁵

Other opponents of slavery equated this atheist conspiracy with the slave power. The Transcendentalist-turned-Catholic author Orestes Brownson invoked the notion to denounce the Catholic Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court and author of the Dred Scott decision. Brownson and other Catholics charged Taney with forgetfulness of his faith, of “what his religion teaches him, and what as a Catholic he holds and must hold, namely, that negroes are men.” Like his Protestant counterparts, Brownson ascribed Taney's willful ignorance of this principle, so otherwise inexplicable, to pathology, a “tendency, insanely encouraged” for the judiciary to assert unrighteous authority. Brownson and others worried about the efforts of “demagogues to render the political power absolute,” subverting democracy by removing God from public life and thereby smothering human conscience.Footnote ⁵⁶ The abolitionist Cyrus Burleigh, speaking to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in 1850, said likewise of the Fugitive Slave Act, arguing that the slave power was attempting to stifle the natural human conscience. “Our effort for the freedom of others has become a struggle for our own liberties, for the very existence of pure religion,” he declared. “The slave power [is] alarmed at the spread of free principles and the growth of a free spirit.” Burleigh quoted a pro-slavery journal as claiming that “where the law requires a certain act, conscience or reason has no business to interfere.” This, Burleigh declared, was an “atheistic doctrine.” He meant that if the law required a person to act in defiance of their own conscience, then it denied the moral principles God had embedded into the universe.Footnote ⁵⁷

The intense frustration these abolitionists were feeling as the Civil War approached was perhaps best embodied by George Cheever's response to John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which Brown had hoped would result in a widespread slave uprising but which was quickly put down by the U.S. military. The debate over whether Brown was a Christian, and whether his act was Christian, was immediate and fierce. George Fitzhugh, one of the leading defenders of slavery in 1850s America, called abolitionists like Brown and Parker who resisted laws in defense of slavery “infidels who dispute the authority of God” because they “will not respect or obey the government of men.” And yet, for Brown and for his defenders, it was government itself that had become infidel. Brown declared of the South, invoking his own moral sense, “There are no ministers of Christ here. These ministers who profess to be Christian and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them.” Many more zealous abolitionists compared Brown to Oliver Cromwell, a rigorous and ascetic moralist whose Christianity was evident in his personal behavior—a stark contrast with practical atheism—and a man whose Christianity hounded him into violence.Footnote ⁵⁸

The question of Brown's violence was among the most difficult for many of his fellow abolitionists to grapple with. But for some, the specter of political atheism made the reconciliation easier. Cheever, a stern Congregationalist and staunch abolitionist minister, made the connection clear. For Cheever, Brown was the logical result of the atheist slave power's triumph. Preacher after preacher, prophet after prophet, from Beecher on down, had warned that Parker's “state atheism” would result in social disintegration and political chaos. For Cheever, if the Christian church in the United States was not righteous, then “men out of the Church, driven into infidelity by the Church sanctioning sin,” would seize power in the nation. This had happened, and “it is thus that such a man as John Brown, of Osawatomie, was thrown from his balance and driven to a course of desperation.” For Cheever, Brown was driven by his faith, but that faith was itself spurred by the moral decay practical atheism was wreaking upon the life of American democracy.Footnote ⁵⁹

Cheever thus viewed John Brown's violence as the product of atheism as much as of Brown's Christianity and placed ultimate responsibility upon those Christians in the United States who had betrayed the faith. Invoking Biblical precedents white Southerners often invoked to defend slavery, Cheever scoffed, “Ten thousand southern pulpits have been proving that because Abraham held Slaves, and Paul sent back Onesimus, therefore it is no violation of the golden rule to work negroes to death.” But Cheever was certain that “in their hearts and souls, the reverend and learned arguers feel they are sophists, with no truth in them.” Similarly, Cheever denounced northern churches, which had “taught from a thousand pulpits that man's lower law must be obeyed and not the law of conscience.” But just as the southern churches were teaching a false formalism, Northern Christians likewise had abandoned their moral sensibilities for political gain. John Brown was thus not merely an avenging angel upon both their houses but was the logical and moral consequence of the creeping spread of political atheism. He “could not endure such appalling wickedness, especially when the iron entered into his own heart.” For Cheever, Brown, lonely among American Christians, stayed true to the reality of the universe's moral witness.Footnote ⁶⁰

“The inactivity and the treachery of the church, amidst the presence of such enormities, drive some men into infidelity, but not . . . a true Christian, such as John Brown is said to be.”Footnote ⁶¹ Cheever's final tribute to the seemingly martyred Brown encapsulated the frustrations, fears, and conviction that underlay Northern Protestants’ accusations of southern atheism. As Mark Noll has observed of biblically based debates over slavery, Northerners’ arguments were ultimately unresolvable through appeals to the word “Christian” because they assumed that label carried a meaning that was not universally shared. But as the political contest over slavery in the early republic grew increasingly heated and increasingly virulent, the theological dispute became painfully political, for atheism was about democracy as much as it was about belief in God, and if faith and reason were not sufficient to resolve the question, to men like Cheever and John Brown, violence became a logical necessity.