One thing that has always struck me as odd is that there is an insistence on tradition in many churches, as well as in politics there is a harkening back to the greatness of America (such as the slogan to make America great again), without also seeing the more sinister aspects of tradition, both the church’s (for example the role of the church in Nazism, which was far more the norm than Bonhoeffer’s witness, upon which we usually focus). Similarly, we focus on the nation’s greatness and the United States Constitution’s glory, without consistently recalling that people were enslaved and the status of enslaved as ⅗ a person is ensconced in the Constitution of the United States.
I remember a family elder telling me that Africans had sold each other into slavery. Awakening to Justice’s chapter on West African resistance to the slave trade is an important corrective. There are additional chapters on worship, piety, and women in the period. There is a section on charitable aid among Christian abolitionists that inspires even today, and there is a significant discussion of the Oberlin College approach to the interracial Christian community that flourished during the period.
In 1839, white abolitionist David Ingraham wrote, “O it seems as if the church were asleep, and Satan has the world following him.” At that time, America was a Christian country—the idea of separation of church and state initially meant no government church. If, after a period of secularization, many are trying to ensure America returns to a Christian identity, what does a Christian calling require of her? What does it say of Christian witness when we remember that Black people were lynched on church grounds less than one hundred years ago? How can we craft a better future for the church in the United States? Leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or current faith leaders like Dr. Jemar Tisby lead the way with their prophetic utterances that identify shortcomings and cast a robust vision for the future.
In the book Awakening to Justice: Faithful Voices from the Abolitionist Past, scholars comprising SPU’s Dialogue on Race and Faith Project examine the mid-nineteenth-century writings of abolitionists David Ingraham, James Bradley, and Nancy Prince to help us answer the question of what a Christian calling requires of us today. The project hopes to unlock conversations on what one counter-cultural Christian community looked like in the middle of the 19th century, to spark dialogue about race and faith today. The authors write, “From Ingraham, Bradley, and Prince, we learn that racial justice is never a popular practice. We can glean lessons in resilience and perseverance from their example. We can also discover how they imperfectly pursued righteous ends” (3).
Awakening to Justice is rooted in mature, evangelical theological and social analysis. The book’s conclusion calls us back to revivalism and spirituality, forbidding a dichotomous split between personal piety and social activism. Estrelda Y. Alexander writes, “They thought the two tied together so tightly that a person could not claim to be sanctified without showing concern for those who were oppressed. […] clear violation of God’s image demanded an active Christian response.” (169).
I commend this book to people in more traditionalist congregations who still desire racial healing even as they try to grapple with how to administer that healing in our turbulent era. One civil rights leader I admire has shared just in the past weeks that she is worried that white people will stay at home for the next four years and be complacent as civil rights protections are framed as the reason why we have crumbling infrastructure. There is a sense that the social wage of living in a community providing protections and benefits is divided by race, and Awakening to Justice illustrates how this is not a new trend.
The Oberlin chapter is prophetic, describing the foundations of an integrated community and how African Americans spearheaded the movement for Black self-determination: “The connection of slavery and racist prejudice with sin and the need for repentance was at the heart of the religious drive of the abolitionist movement” (147). The chapter explains that Oberlin differed from many white abolitionist communities of the time because many abolitionists wanted to end slavery without unraveling white privilege and superiority (149).
This chapter also tells a cautionary tale: “Once the abolitionist fires settled to ashes, so did the call for racial equity. Oberlin followed the national trend toward both de facto and de jure Jim Crow segregation. As Oberlin archivist W.E. Bigglestone wrote in 1971, ‘working and fighting for freedom for a slave was not the same as defending him against widespread discriminatory practices. Perhaps Oberlin had exhausted its interest and enthusiasm for blacks during the anti-slavery struggle. In any event, black students were treated differently from white students at Oberlin College during the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II” (161).
I find this a prescient chapter because it has struck me that, for example, if white people were a persecuted minority–which I don’t think we are, but many whites claim this is the case–there would be legislation not to dismantle civil rights law, but rather to enforce civil rights protections for white people. This is not what is happening at all, and this highlights the reality that structural racism is intact in the United States and that civil rights protections are still necessary, lest we enter another period akin to that of Jim Crow in the decade to come. To name one example, the privatization of public schools is creating similar racial disparities of the era of school segregation of the time period. Where I live in Seattle, the schools are among the most segregated in the country due to the proliferation of private schools. If there were never reparations, how do we expect everyone to be able to afford the private schools that are going to be better funded and equipped?
Given the current shifting landscape, this book, published in 2024, is particularly timely. It is honest about the difficulties of creating and maintaining multiracial fellowship, and was created by a multiracial team of scholars from across the United States. It contains writings by three abolitionists, one white (Ingraham) and two African American (Bradley and Prince), so that we can see what life was like for these people in the contexts in which they lived. A lot of the book is dedicated to examination of slavery in Jamaica, where the three protagonists were serving as missionaries.
