Reformed Theology and the Problem of Slaveholding Power
White Theology and White Power VII
Reformed theology did not invent racial slavery, and Calvinism cannot be treated as a synonym for white supremacy. Reformed Christians included slaveholders, abolitionists, gradualists, colonizationists, segregationists, civil-rights supporters, and later theologians who explicitly confronted racism. The tradition’s global history also extends well beyond white America. Any serious inquiry must therefore reject guilt by denominational association. The more difficult question is whether particular theological strengths could become weaknesses when they were interpreted from within a slaveholding social order.[1]
Jonathan Edwards is a useful test because the contradiction cannot be dismissed as intellectual shallowness. Edwards developed a profound account of divine beauty, human dependence, religious affections, and the corruption of sin. He was also a slaveholder. Modern Edwards scholarship does not require readers to choose between calling him a major theologian and acknowledging his participation in slavery. Both facts belong to the theological assessment because a doctrine of sin should raise questions about the moral world a theologian can and cannot see.[2]
Edwards’s position was not identical to the later proslavery ideology of the antebellum South. He criticized aspects of the slave trade and lived before the sectional theological crisis reached its nineteenth-century form. That chronology matters. Yet his slaveholding demonstrates that sophisticated accounts of human depravity and grace did not automatically generate a structural critique of racial bondage. A theologian can understand sin deeply at the level of the soul while accepting an institution whose injustices have become socially ordinary.
The antebellum crisis made the problem more explicit. Southern Presbyterian theologians such as James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney defended slaveholding within a larger account of biblical authority, social order, providence, and ecclesiastical responsibility. They were not simply searching Scripture for racist slogans. Their arguments often emerged from recognizably theological commitments: Scripture must govern moral judgment; the church should not declare sinful what Scripture does not explicitly condemn; social institutions are shaped by providence; and spiritual equality does not erase civil distinctions.[3]
Those premises did not force the proslavery conclusion. That point is essential. Other Protestants, including Reformed Christians, reached antislavery conclusions from Scripture, natural rights, the Golden Rule, the unity of humanity, and the moral trajectory of the gospel. Reformed traditions themselves contained dissent. The historical problem is therefore not an unavoidable Calvinist doctrine but a hermeneutical pattern in which existing hierarchy became the background assumption against which biblical texts were interpreted.
Providence was especially vulnerable to misuse. Christian theology properly asks how God’s sovereignty relates to history. In a slaveholding society, however, the existence and durability of an institution could be mistaken for evidence of its providential legitimacy. The same error appears whenever long-standing power is treated as self-authenticating. A doctrine intended to affirm God’s sovereignty can become morally passive if it no longer distinguishes between what God permits in history and what Christians are obligated to resist.
A second vulnerability involved ecclesiology. Southern churches frequently argued that the institutional church should remain focused on spiritual matters rather than becoming a political organization. There are legitimate reasons to guard the church from partisan capture. Yet a narrow definition of the spiritual can become politically consequential when it declares the existing distribution of property and power outside the church’s moral jurisdiction. Refusing to challenge slavery was not a neutral withdrawal from politics when slaveholding itself was secured by law, violence, and public authority.
The same issue appears in doctrines of individual sin. Reformed theology possesses unusually strong resources for confronting self-deception, disordered desire, and the depth of human corruption. But if sin is examined almost entirely as personal transgression, a society can become adept at confessing pride, lust, anger, and unbelief while leaving racialized institutions largely uninterrogated. The doctrine is not too strong; its social application is too thin.
The abolitionist countertradition shows that another Reformed response was possible. Christians who treated slaveholding as incompatible with neighbor-love, human dignity, and the moral unity of Scripture demonstrated that biblical authority could judge inherited social arrangements rather than merely ratify them. The existence of this countertradition prevents the argument from becoming deterministic. Social location creates pressures and blind spots, but it does not eliminate moral agency.
That is why the term white theology must remain analytical rather than racialized in a simplistic way. Edwards is not significant because a white theologian owned slaves and therefore his theology can be dismissed. He is significant because a theological system capable of extraordinary introspection coexisted with a social structure that the theologian did not judge with equal severity. The question is about the reach of doctrine: where did its categories stop working?
This inquiry also helps explain why later defenses of segregation could sound less explicitly proslavery while preserving similar theological habits. By the twentieth century, many white Christians no longer defended human bondage. They could nevertheless invoke biblical authority, local church autonomy, family responsibility, social order, individual conversion, and opposition to governmental coercion against civil-rights reforms. The content changed; some mechanisms of theological insulation remained. The next essay follows that transition from slaveholding to segregation.
Notes
[1] Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), which treats Edwards’s slaveholding as part of the historical context of his theology rather than as a reason to erase his theological significance.
[2] Harry S. Stout and Kenneth P. Minkema, eds., scholarship associated with the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center; see also the Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards for discussion of Edwards, slavery, missions, and the slave trade.
[3] James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney are representative antebellum Presbyterian defenders of slaveholding. For the broader theological conflict, see Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.
[4] Mark A. Noll, America’s God and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Noll is especially useful for showing that the conflict involved a crisis of interpretation among Christians who shared strong commitments to Scripture.