Just Curious

Excellent post on religious orthodoxy

An essay from "Chieftain of Seir" on Levi Coffin, the Quaker "President of the Underground Railroad" and John Brown the militant abolitionist, and the religious traditions they stood for.

http://chieftainofseir.blogspot.com/2006/03/dangers-of-historical-symbolism.html

I've never thought very highly of John Brown or Ralph Waldo Emerson or the "Progrssive" Hicksites, though the Chieftain of Seir really hit the mark when he noted how he wasn't aware of one single slave who owed his emancipation personally to John Brown.

On the other hand of course we have these biased religious historians trying to tell us how all orthodox Christians were pro-slavery and how the Christian leaders of the time turned a blind eye to it, while unitarians and transcentalists worked hard in the abolitionist movement. False. The fact that a five-point Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards would like to dodge the bullet of slavery didn't mean anything. John Wesley was staunchly abolitionist, and promised hell-fire to slave owners:

http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm

Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no sympathy, no sense of human woe, no pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the great God deal with you as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands. And at "that day it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for you!"

No wonder he got fired as an Anglican priest in Georgia (that said, he also "sinned" by having a crush on a nice Southern girl in his parish), and was sent back to England.

You go, John, give 'em slave-owners fire and brimstone!

posted by James Chang @ 11:00 PM