A quick look at one of the textbooks I regularly receive makes it clear who the heroes were in the movement against slavery in the antebellum United States. William Lloyd Garrison looms large in our historical imagination: Garrison believed in the immediate abolition of slavery, but also embraced other radical (for the time) positions on racial and gender equality. Garrison is a distant mirror; a person from the past whose positions and actions are familiar and even comfortable in the early twenty-first century. Garrison's name, and that of his close associate, Theodore Dwight Weld, are familiar entries in our textbooks. Other names are not so prominent: George Cheever, Amos Phelps, William Ellery Channing, Leonard Bacon, and Francis Wayland. These men take precedence in Molly Oshatz's Slavery and Sin. They were the antislavery moderates who struggled to find a way out of the theological morass precipitated by Southern slavery. Oshatz argues that historians overlook them or belittle their efforts because their positions on the ways and means of ending slavery were ultimately not the arguments that won the day.

Oshatz's antislavery Northern Protestants were brave denizens of an intellectual middle ground that allowed them to make the theological adjustments necessary to be committed to antislavery while retaining their belief in biblical inerrancy. As Oshatz points out, most Americans agreed that the Bible sanctioned slavery in some form. To imagine a biblical argument against slavery required theological dexterity and a willingness to reject received wisdom. Oshatz's moderates gradually formulated arguments in the context of the slavery debate that Oshatz argues gave liberal Protestantism an intellectual genealogy. These men had the heroism of historicizing their faith. What they lacked in Garrisonian flashiness they made up for with moral courage. Oshatz therefore locates the origins of liberal Protestantism before the Civil War, squarely within the slavery debate, and decenters the Civil War itself as the breaking point in the history of American theology. Instead, Oshatz argues, the theological crisis slavery caused lasted until the end of the nineteenth century (11), and the theological struggle had implications for both liberal and fundamentalist Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century (119).

Oshatz's moderates became ever more inventive as they tried to delegitimize slavery while protecting Christian slaveholders. In one of the book's more intriguing conclusions, Oshatz argues that they developed the notion of “social sin.” Slavery was a unique human problem for these theologians, who came to see slavery as “a sin for which society, rather than the individual, might be responsible” (82). This delicate position allowed antislavery moderates to explain why believing Christians were nonetheless slaveholders, and helped them excuse slaveholders who failed to see owning people as a grave moral wrong. The notion of slavery as a social sin also had implications for the development of liberal Protestantism: without meaning to take such a radical position, antislavery moderates suggested that “rather than being objective and unchanging, morality—at least in the singular case of slavery—was socially and historically contingent” (83).

Oshatz's arguments agree with the general parameters outlined by Mark A. Noll in his seminal study America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Noll also posited the inherent strength of proslavery biblical arguments and recognized the difficulties moderate antislavery theologians face in attempting to articulate an orthodox, biblically based opposition to slavery. Oshatz, however, challenges the sense of failure with which Noll imbued antislavery moderates with a counterfactual. “No religious argument,” she writes, “no matter how righteous or persuasive, could have brought a timely and peaceful end to slavery” (59). Historians, she contends, have expected the impossible of the moderates.

Noll rightly notes the power of racism in antislavery debates: “intuitive convictions about racial difference were embraced with every bit of commonsense certainty as prevailed for the use of Scripture” (Noll, America's God, 396). Antislavery moderates had plenty of potential role models: African American opponents to slavery, for example, or even British evangelicals who had forced an end first to the slave trade and then to slavery in the Caribbean (on the complicated history of British evangelicals and abolition, see for example Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006]). African American critiques of slavery are almost completely absent from this book. Oshatz dismisses African American (and Noll's Roman Catholic) intellectuals by claiming they “were not actually participants in the antebellum antislavery debate” (59). Indeed, they were not; they were excluded by moderate theologians who could not perceive their importance to defeating slavery, even as they were embraced by radical abolitionists.

Thus race remains the elephant in the room for Oshatz's argument. Ultimately she dismisses the importance of white supremacy as a theological problem, though it was deeply implicated in the antislavery moderates' approach to the issues. Oshatz claims that the moderates preferred a narrower debate about biblical support for slavery in the abstract (75), and that “antebellum whites looked to the Bible for moral instruction, and the Bible clearly denounced racism” (74). Yet Southern proslavery theologians routinely used the Bible to justify race and racism, citing, among other items, the Curse of Ham as relayed in Genesis as a reason to retain slavery. Race as a category seeps through much of Oshatz's analysis but she does not confront its centrality to theological positions staked out by antislavery moderates.

Perhaps that weakness is an artifact of studying a group of elite white men who could not see the perniciousness of racism in their own arguments. Yet these antislavery moderates seem less like heroes, and more like men limited by the circumstances of their time. Accidental midwives to liberal Protestantism they might have been, but theirs is not a tale of moral courage, but rather one of missed opportunities.