From Anti to Neutral
Like I said last week, there are lots of contributors to the Baptist drama that unfolded in the 19th century surrounding the issue of slavery. The problems between northern and southern Baptists really began in the 1830’s when English Baptists began writing to American Baptists about the importance of abolition. Two important English Baptists, Francis Cox and James Hoby came to America to promote emancipation at the Triennial Convention.
Around this time that the abolitionist movement was growing among northern Baptists, the Baptist denomination in the South was gaining numbers; naturally, over time, these numbers began to include more slave holders. This, paired with the invention of the cotton gin (which, along with slave labor, became essential to the prosperity of the southern economy) contributed to a rise in pro-slavery ideals among church-goers in the south.
The Baptists in the north began to put pressure on the Baptists in the south to fight for abolition. And of course, Baptists in the south resented the fact that the northern churches felt they had the authority to instruct individual church bodies in what they should or should not do - we have always been fiercely independent.
When the northern churches were unable to sway their southern brothers and sisters, abolitionists across the country cut them no slack. In 1847, Frederick Douglas gave a speech in which he called out churches for being responsible for the continuation of slavery. “Say what we may of the politicians and political parties,” Douglas said, “the power that holds the keys of the dungeon in which the bondmen are confined is in the pulpit.”
“Churches began to reject any public statements or declarations regarding slavery by their ministers, choosing to remain silent on the subject all together. ”
While tensions between northern and southern Baptists rose, many on both sides of the slavery debate realized that the very stability of the Baptist denomination was in danger. Here is where we see a major slip into neutrality among Baptists - especially anti-slavery southern Baptists.
One of the founding principles of the Baptist denomination is the insistence that individual churches make their own rules - which, in the South, included decisions about relationships between slaves and slaveholders. However, many in the church decided that the institution of slavery was and should be in the hands of the government alone. Churches began to reject any public statements or declarations regarding slavery by their ministers, choosing to remain silent on the subject all together.
Even the previously outspoken John Leland, who had once called out the evils of slavery became seemingly ambivalent towards the subject, and a previously anti-slavery minister in Virginia wrote in a sermon: “If the ultimate effect of it be the emancipation of the slave – we say – in God’s name, ‘let it come.’ If it be of God we cannot – and we would not if we could – overthrow it, lest haply we be found even to fight against God. If the ultimate effect be the perpetuation of slavery divested of its incidental evils – a slavery in which the master shall be required, by the laws of man as well as that of God, to ‘give unto the slave that which is just and equal,’ and the slave to render to the master a cheerful obedience and a hearty service – we say, let slavery continue.”
So, rightly or wrongly, for the sake of the church, many Baptists and other protestant denominations in the south would remain silent on the issue of slavery, choosing neutrality rather than risk disunity.
