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........

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