Lightly edited copy of a blast email Debi and I sent out today to participants in Sundays@6, our online adult faith formation group at Peace Lutheran Church, Springfield. Sunday will be the third session in a book study on “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” by Jemar Tisby. This week we’re also linking to an article “Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” by Richard M. Chapman and other material on the subject.
THIS WEEK WE’RE reading Chapter 3 of “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” by Jemar Tisby. In this chapter, he outlines the ways people of color were systematically excluded from the benefits and blessings of liberty during the American Revolution. How many of us learned the Founders specifically deleted language from a draft of the Declaration of Independence that would have accused the British of “violating [the] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people … captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere?” (Ellipses in the original.) I certainly didn’t. But Tisby fills in the blanks!
Tisby also discusses the beginnings of the Black church and the discrimination faced by Black Christians at the hands of white Christians. He goes so far as to say, “There would be no black church without racism in the white church.” Influential evangelists like Methodist George Whitefield and Congregationalist theologian Jonathan Edwards focused on individual salvation, thus allowing systemic evils like slavery to flourish.
We have also linked to a video on the Black church, part of the Black History in Two Minutes or So series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. The YouTube blurb outlines the its history from the foundation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by the Rev. Richard Allen to the present:
Religion as we know it infiltrated the black community during slavery. While the objective leaned on pacifying slaves, black people rose against the negative narrative and invested in a community that would be known as the black church.
Records indicate that as early as 1794, Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved black man, founded his own denomination and church. Reverend Allen, a man who purchased his own freedom, sought to abolish slavery and help other people escape, as well. As the nation continued to work through the Civil War, Jim Crow, racism, and economic disparity, the black church and its leaders mobilized its followers to speak out and stand up for injustices.In this series of Black History in Two Minutes or So […] we look at a fundamentally important piece of American history that has been a haven for blacks who have often times been isolated by the nation and the rules of the land.
Two other documents linked below detail how Lutherans in various parts of the country responded (or failed to respond) to slavery and injustices perpetrated against Black people from the time the first Lutherans arrived in the U.S. to the Reconstruction era. While it’s hard to generalize about Lutherans who came to America from a variety of nations and cultural backgrounds from the 1600s through the 1900s, it’s fair to say that most of them – like other white immigrants – failed to respond.
Here are the links:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwWqkk4Ha70 — “The Black Church,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., with additional commentary from Brittney Cooper of Rutgers University and Peniel Joseph of the University of Texas, part of the “Black History in Two Minutes or So” series.
- http://thecresset.org/2008/Trinity2008/Chapman_T2008.html — “Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” by Richard M. Chapman, associate professor of history at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.
- https://www.augustana.edu/about-us/president/presidents/Esbjorn/slavery — “Augustana President Lars Paul Esbjörn on slavery, 1850,” an excerpt from a letter from the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn to Peter Wieselgren, May 23,1850, after Esbjörn had immigrated from Sweden to Andover, Ill.
Hang onto Chapman’s article, which appeared in the Trinity 2008 issue of The Cresset, a magazine of the arts and public affairs at Valparaiso University. It comes to four single-spaced pages printed out, and it takes the story up to the present. We’ll be coming back to it! Chapman summarizes the antebellum period (before the Civil War) like this:
On the whole, Lutherans did not become strong anti-slavery advocates, nor did they champion the cause of free blacks in the North or the South. Historian Abdel Wentz notes the partial exception of Norwegian and Swedish newcomers who easily preferred the Midwest over the South and viewed slavery as unrighteous even as their clergy extemporized (Wentz, 164–166). Many probably harbored private qualms that slavery was immoral while outwardly, most tolerated or passively accepted the practice when they did not support it outright. Since racial slavery was the law of the land, tethered to the Constitution itself, Lutherans apparently followed a familiar pattern of firm, if not absolute, allegiance to the temporal governing authorities, as Martin Luther himself urged his followers at the time of the Knights’ Rebellion and the Peasants’ War of the 1520s. That such was the central tendency and not an inevitable outcome can be discerned in the appearance of individuals, congregations, and synods of the Lutheran heritage determined to abolish slavery. In 1850 the Norwegian Eielsen Synod denounced the “fearful sin of giving our consent to the slave traffic,” and advocated “all possible diligence in bringing about… the freeing of the negroes” (Fortenbaugh, 90). [Ellipsis in the original.]
Which brings us to the second document, a translation of Esbjörn’s letter to Wieselgren, an evangelical pastor and temperance advocate in Sweden who was a mentor of Esbjörn’s. Augustana College’s first president (and at times its only classroom teacher), Esbjörn’s papers are archived at Augie. We’re focusing on the Swedes in Sundays@6 for two reasons: (1) Their experience is typical of other Lutheran immigrants; and (2) pure convenience! Pete has presented papers at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum on the old Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and he has letters, papers and articles close at hand; he promises not to get carried away with it, though! In 1850 Esbjörn wrote:
Here there is much noise about slavery, which the southern states are very hot about preserving and expanding, and the Northern eager to oppose.
The worst is, especially, that Christian churches trade in this and permit slave owners and slave traders to be members of their congregations, especially the Episcopal Methodists [forerunners of today’s United Methodist Church] and Old School Presbyterians. Thus many large numbers, congregations and Synods separated from them and organized their own synods, since they do not wish to be in Christian brotherhood with people who sanction the holding of slaves as being permitted for a Christian.
The sin of slavery here is, as drunkenness has been, a national sin, which has taken frightful root, and it requires great powers of Christian self-denial to uproot them. Many Christians express a hearty desire to enlighten their neighbors, but it goes slowly.
I wish that Sweden would add a little fuel to this fire of love […] Thus, I ask you, as a historian, to send me some historic proof that Slavery in Sweden disappeared immediately with Christianity so that as it arrived, slavery left.
Esbjörn’s attitude was typical of many evangelical Protestants in the northern states, whose concept of social justice by the 1850s prominently included abolition as well as temperance. He wasn’t exactly correct about the history of slavery in Sweden – it flourished in Swedish colonies and wasn’t legally abolished until 1847 – but he was in line with the northern Presbyterians and Congregationalists with whom he cooperated. That said, today’s Swedish- and Norwegian-Americans shouldn’t feel smug about their ancestors; histories of the old Augustana synod note that Swedish immigrants in Texas happily defended slavery up till the Civil War and emancipation. In 1855 a Swedish immigrant in Austin, Texas, wrote to Hemlandet [the homeland], a Swedish newspaper in Chicago:
We live in a slave state, are in daily contact with both masters and slaves, and find that the slaves are provided with better food, accorded better treatment, and are better cared for than the working classes of Sweden. A few of us own slaves and all of us aspire to own slaves when we are in position to purchase them. In a slave state a white man has many advantages… — Svante Palm in Hemlandet, July 7, 1855, in “Swedes in the Civil War” [https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/swensonexhibits_civilwar/], exhibit on view at Birger Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, November 2015–March 2016, Augustana College, Rock Island,
Next week we’ll take up Chapter 4, “Institutionalizing Race in the Antebellum Era.”
[Uplinked Feb. 15, 2024]
Ordinary Time 