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Bonds
of Salvation How
Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism
Ben Wright
Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2020 Hardcover. 253 p. ISBN 978-0807173893. $45/£37
Reviewed by Nathalie Caron Sorbonne Université, Paris Ben Wright’s Bonds of Salvation is one in a series of books which have, for
more than two decades, revisited the history of American abolitionism. The new
historiography has emphasized the agency of African American men and women and
their prominent role in the process of emancipation (Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the
Antebellum North, 2002; David Williams,
I Freed Myself: African American
Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era, 2014); the length of the struggle
against slavery and its continuity (Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States,
2015); its interracial and transnational dimensions (John Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists
and the Transformation of Race, 2002 ; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,
2016); as well as the contribution of its participants to the reflection on the
meaning of democracy and its connection with feminism and the civil rights
movement (Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s
Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2011 ;
Kate Masur, Until Justice be Done:
America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction,
2021). Another important consequence of the new historiography has been a
secularization of abolitionism, which for a long time was exclusively referred
to as a “reform” movement grown out of evangelical Protestantism. Today
scholars tend to describe abolitionism as a social movement—even as the first
social movement as we understand the term. In 2002, in The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the
Early Republic, Richard S. Newman argued that abolitionism was “the first
social movement to so completely transform itself” while moving away from the
tendency to underscore the abolitionists’ religiousness. In the introduction,
Newman noted that “[h]istorians ha[d] long known that religion was the primary
motivator for generations of abolitionists. However, this focus on motivation
has often pulled scholars’ attention away from what abolitionists did and how
their activities shifted over time.” In his own introduction, Wright refers
to Newman observing that after him historians have primarily been concerned
with “charting the political action of the early movement” and proposes to
“foreground”—one of his favorite verbs—“the pivotal role of religion in
structuring the ideological possibilities of the movement” [5]. In Bonds of Salvation, Wright confronts a
paradox, namely the fact that, in the early American republic, although most
Americans were Christians attached to the notion of salvation and although a
great deal of them were opposed to slavery, few “took organized action against
slavery” and many “watched on the sidelines as the evil institution grew” [1].
Wright proposes to answer the following question: “How did American
Christianity encourage this inaction, and what changed to inspire the later,
larger and more active Christian abolitionist movement ?” by addressing
different visions of salvation [1]. For Wright, racism was not “the only
challenge to abolitionism” [2]. Indeed, for most Americans, in this period of
millennial hope, the salvation of all was more crucial than the emancipation of
enslaved black men and women. Whereas white and black abolitionists sought to
purify the nation from its original sin—and consequently save it—by organizing
action against slavery, other Christians, most of them white, “prioritized
conversion and expanding salvation and accordingly remained outside of the
organized antislavery movement” [3]. One of Wright’s aims is “to understand
how Christianity shaped the development of American abolitionism,” namely how
Christianity “both inspired and limited the movement” [3]. To do so, he focuses
on the ideological context, which he contends has been understudied, but may
explain antislavery action as well as antislavery inaction. Wright
distinguishes between purification and conversion, two ideological trends at
work from the beginnings of the nation and both creating “bonds of salvation,”
which often were at odds: A minority privileged purity, believing
that God’s kingdom would become manifest only when the church and the nation
had proven themselves worthy. The majority of Americans sought to fulfill this
holy work by extending Christian conversion, confident that God would save both
their souls and the world” [201]. Wright, however, does more than equate
purification with abolitionist action and conversion with white inaction or
anti-abolitionism. Rather he examines the shifts in the uses of both words and
the ways both ideals combined or conflicted. Because he wants to understand why
white Christians chose to ignore the activism of their black coreligionists—and
hence “the blind spots of the evangelical Christian community in which [he] was
raised” [ix]—Wright is mostly interested in the history of conversionism, whose
study, he argues, is necessary to understand early American religion [8]. The analysis covers the period from the Revolution to 1845, after the three major national Protestant denominations had splintered over questions of conversion and slavery, or as the author puts it, “over the question of how to expand salvation in a slaving nation” [19]. The first chapter examines the distinction between conversionist and purificationist antislavery between 1776 and 1800, and is organized around three case studies: the Quaker abolitionist purification campaign, the purificationist abolitionism of the Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins, and the move from institutional purificationism to ineffectual conversionist antislavery—and antiabolitionism—by Baptist and Methodist ministers John Leland and Francis Asbury. The second chapter details the creation of national Christian denominations in the 1780s-1810s, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian General Assembly, and the Baptist General Convention, and their role in both binding the nation together and dividing it. The period also saw the foundation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by Richard Allen, among other independent Black churches. Those denominations built the benevolent empire—a catch-all phrase used to refer to the large number of missionary and reform societies which were founded in the early-nineteenth century—and fostered “dreams of salvation,” which, in the case of white churches, excluded any collaboration with troublemaking abolitionists as illustrated by the eviction of two abolitionist ministers, the Baptist David Barrow and the Presbyterian George Bourne. Wright insists on “the denominational origins of many of the most influential reform organizations of the early nineteenth century” [80], including the American Colonization Society. For Wright, the ACS, whose roots were Presbyterian and its spiritual father Robert Finley, was “the national organization designed to confront slavery while protecting white supremacy” [83]. In the third chapter, dedicated to the ACS, Wright insists on the centrality of conversion in the motivation of its members and the temporary success of its “powerful biracial discourse.” Colonizationism implied the colonization of Africa by free Blacks but also the transformation of black Americans into Christian missionaries. Despite immediate opposition on the part of free Blacks, it attracted both black and white Christians—including the African American poet Phillis Wheatley—because “conversionism led colonizationists to frame their movement as fulfilling the millennial promise of Psalm 68, ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands to God’” [87]. Through conversion, colonizationism would both accomplish the salvation of the African continent and the redemption of the United States. Chapters 4 and 5 begin with the success and influence of the colonization movement and
denominational support for the ACS well into the 1820s, and continues with the
failure of colonizationism by looking at anti-colonization movements, in the
North and in the South, and the destruction of the conversionist consensus in
the 1820s and 1830s. In the South, more slave-owners feared that support for
colonization would lead to support for abolition, and opposition grew when
attempts were made to secure federal funds for colonization. In the North,
black abolitionists managed to “uncouple dreams of salvation from colonization”
[136]. In particular, in 1827, Richard Allen, who originally supported the
movement, had a letter published in Freedom’s
Journal, the first African American publication, in which he argued that
colonization was proslavery and articulated an anticolonizationist message
which was further expanded by David Walker in his 1829 Appeal—Wright fails to mention that Walker actually quotes an
extract from Allen’s letter. In chapter 6, Wright recounts the splintering of
the national churches in the late 1830s and mid-1840s, and follows in the wake
of other historians who have shown that “churches North and South … pushed the
nation on the path of violence” [172]. In particular, Wright mentions C.C.
Goen, whose Broken Churches, Broken
Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (1985)
deals with the failure of “the Evangelical bond” to maintain national unity and
may have inspired the title of his book. Wright underlines that churches first
split over issues of salvation. As Southern enslavers “came to see slavery as
an essential ally to salvation,” [181], “more and more Christians came to
believe that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation” [184]. By the
1840s, “the old tactics of preserving unity by foregrounding salvation had
pretty much failed” [197]. The Presbyterians split in 1837, the Methodists and
Baptists in 1845. Wright concludes on the “collision of
salvation and slavery,” which among other factors led to the Civil War. He does
not argue that religious discord or denominational fracture caused the war, but
he insists on the interrelation of the split in national denominations, the
emergence of “purificationist currents,” and the fall of American democracy.
Whereas Christian abolitionists sought to purify the nation from the sin of
slavery, Christian enslavers wanted to purify the nation from abolitionists:
“Both camps were convinced that the other represented and existential threat to
American salvation” [202]. Southern ministers played a major role in convincing
a majority of Southerners to support the idea that through conversionism and the
cultivation of the faith of the enslaved, slavery was an agent of salvation
while abolitionism was “a demonic challenge to both social stability and gospel
truth” [203]. Wright’s book may signal a resurgence
of interest in the role played by religion, and more particularly Christianity
as an institution, in the dynamics of antislavery and abolitionism. One of his
strengths is the examination of the reasons for the passivity—a word he does
not use—of most Americans in the face of slavery. For Wright, however,
Christianity means denominational Protestantism. Nothing is said about American
Catholics’ support for slavery and the role the Catholic Church played in the
limitation of American abolitionism as demonstrated by scholars of Catholicism
such as John T. McGreevy and Maura Jane Farrelly. Because the book focuses on
institutional Christianity, it tends to downplay the role of women—without
ignoring it—as well as that of non-denominational Christians. Oddly, the
African American Christian abolitionist Sojourner Truth is not mentioned.
Besides, key notions such as conversion and purity, whose meanings depended on
who used them and when, are sometimes a bit fuzzy, especially when associated
with a movement—conversionism and purificationism—and could have been defined
in the introduction with more clarity. A few inaccuracies can be noted, as on
page 112, when Wright refers to “colonizationist movements” in the plural
before mentioning “the movement” in the singular in the next sentence. These criticisms
aside, Wright makes a strong case in arguing that the paradigm of conversion
helps explain what he prefers to call inaction. His book is particularly useful
in the ways it distinguishes antislavery and abolition, draws attention to
antislavery Americans who have remained outside of antislavery studies—for
example the Methodist itinerant missionary Joshua Marsden with whom the book
begins—and addresses the support of a number of black Christians for the
American Colonization Society.
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