Toward an American Theology of Freedom
In 1962, when the civil rights fervor in our country was approaching a tipping point, the great theologian Karl Barth made his one and only trip to the United States. (Of course, I have to get Barth in here given the extensive study I’m doing of him in relation to my current book project.) On that trip he implored his American hosts of the need to demythologize the Statue of Liberty. What did Barth mean by this? He was pointing to the need for an ideologically-unhinged approach to liberty. In short, he was calling for a true and specifically American theology of freedom.
But little did Barth know, to say nothing of his many American interpreters even now, that his call to demythologize liberty put him in an interesting company of thinkers and activists. This was a tradition of black intellectuals spanning the trans-Atlantic. A central figure in this tradition was Frederick Douglass. (His image heads this post.)
In 1852 (on the 4th of July of that year, to be exact), just over a century before Barth showed up in America, Douglass called for a similar demythologizing of and deeper reflection on freedom and liberty in American life. Indeed, he carried out the unmasking and in the process discerned that at the center of the mythos of American liberty and its political shortcomings on the key question of the day, which was slavery, was a deep and profound failure of Christian social imagination. It was in that magnificent piece of political oratory, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” that Douglass took up his analysis of liberty and freedom. (You can find the entire speech here.)
With the war in Iraq still fresh in our political memory banks and with the recent doubling-down on the war in Afghanistan—wars waged in the wake of the September 11th attacks to defend “freedom,” because as the saying goes, “freedom isn’t free”—it is well worth returning to Barth’s admonition as the dust now settles the July 4th weekend festivities. But I want to do so by way of Frederick Douglass, the one-time American slave.
In this post, I’m going to give or at least try to give something of the flavor of Douglass’s profound address, how in it he is really intervening into America’s religious and political discourse. I’ll finish up by suggesting a connection (and it can only be a suggestion for now: I will develop it in another posting) between what Douglass is talking about and current debates about immigration in our national life.
Who was Frederick Douglass?
Born into slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) was a well-known, if not the best known, black American of the 19th century. His acclaim came with the publication of his first of his three memoirs, the full title of which is A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave (1845). I reflect extensively on this narrative and its significance for Christian theology in my book, Race: A Theological Account.
In 1852 Douglass addressed the topic of the nation’s founding and the meaning of American freedom and liberty in light of its founding. However, the address was a stinging indictment of how the nation was not living up to its ideals on these matters. It was a contradiction. How could it be otherwise while held in others in chains as chattel? Delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass’s address called attention to the contradiction at the heart of America’s project of liberty and its empire or civilization of freedom. And yet he did so in such a way as to suggest how America’s ideals of liberty might be realized, its dream recuperated and not deferred.
But what in my opinion is worth pausing over, especially given our cultural and political moment of retrenchment in which we seem to be trying to get the well-ordered “good ole days back”—witness the immigration debate and the political Tea Party movement and what it culturally represents—is Douglass’s yet relevant indictment of the Church and of Christianity’s failure of social imagination and nerve in America. As he saw it, slavery was still in force in his day because American Christians ultimately provided religious aid and comfort to the nation’s insistence on maintaining the “invisible institution.” Slavery was profitable for the nation. It was part of the capitalist machinery. It worked hand-in-glove at the time with the stage of capitalist social development that was in place at the time. And Christianity in America—and this is Douglass’s indictment—was going with the grain of this order of things.
Some Choice Excerpts from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Here are some excerpts from Douglass’s charge against the nation via an indictment of the American churches:
But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.
For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man.
All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation – a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”
The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”
Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.
What Douglass is pointing to in his Independence Day address is how the thinking and practice of American Christians or the church in America has worked within a master-slave framework, though this framework has been cloaked and so hidden inside of Christian words, Christian preaching, Christian liturgies, and Christian missionary practices. Christianity’s social imagination in America has been captured within a framework that divides the human between those who obey and those who receive obedience. What Douglass wants to get across is the claim is that this structure of human relationships—remember he is demythologizing the American discourse and practice of “liberty”—gains its currency, its legitimacy, its righteousness and holiness precisely by being a Christian performance, a work of holiness for the nation. That is, “liberty” has been carried out as a performance of “salvation,” where salvation here means the upholding and advancement of the nation as the horizon of God’s cause and the horizon of our good. Douglass saw into this ruse and started to diagnose its religious mechanisms.
Towards a New Practice of Freedom: Love and Hope
Fortunately, Douglass does not leave us with only a grim assessment. He concludes by asking, in effect, what the way forward is for the nation to truly live into independence, liberty, and freedom.
His response is twofold and remains relevant for us today as we come off of the heels of the Independence Day weekend.
First, and as far as Christianity in America is concerned, Douglass saw the need to restore Christianity’s social witness and imagination on the question of liberty and freedom. What’s needed for Christianity is an expanding, not a contracting understanding of freedom and liberty. Only in this way can Christianity be, alluding to language from the epistle of James, “pure and undefiled religion.” Here freedom now means the freedom to receive the neighbor, the poor, and the social outcast, as my kin, family, and sustaining circle for growth. What’s needed is a freedom in which barriers are dissolved.
If nationalism turns on a logic of insiders and outsiders, on a logic of authentic and inauthentic nationals, on a logic of natives and aliens (who must stay in the shadows as the slaves once did), and on a logic that creates divisions within the human, then Christianity—the “pure and impartial Christianity of Christ,” which Douglass spoke of in the 1845 Narrative—is opposed to this logic. Like a line of black intellectuals contemporary with him and that would come after him (from Harriet Jacobs to Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, and beyond), Douglass called for the restoration of an ethics of love. More specifically, he called for the restoration of the beauty of the love of God—a love that embraces the world and that doesn’t seek to recreate it in the image of any particular group—for the love of God and its beauty so understood is freedom and liberty.
This was Douglass’s word to an American Christianity that in his own day was impoverished, if not close to bankrupt. But lest his auditors question his “patriotism” because of his strong words (turns out this is a time honored strategy: impugn the messenger), Douglass ended his address with an important meditation on the U.S. Constitution. His purpose was to show that what he was about and what he was saying was in keeping with the nation’s deepest aspirations. How he threaded the needle here is important, for it is the model that people that Martin Luther King Jr. would live into as he worked for the civil rights of all Americans almost a century after Douglass.
Notwithstanding that the nation’s founding document, its Constitution, has the problem of slavery embedded in it, Douglass nevertheless finds encouragement in the document. Though there are echoes of the institution of slavery within the Constitution (for example, the compromise in which for the purposes of the distribution of taxes, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of person), he yet “defies the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it,” if you “take the constitution according to its plain reading.” As a whole, “the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” So glorious is the liberty and freedom that the Constitution seeks legally to secure that the document internally checks and corrects itself. Its own principles allows for the disbanding, to stay with my example, of the three-fifths compromise. And this is precisely what happened with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which rendered the three-fifths clause moot.
Here’s the important point. Douglass brings together a new vision of religion in America (moving in the direction I summarized above) with the political and constitutional principles of the nations and vice versa—all the while critically expanding the practice of both in the direction of love or towards realizing, in the words of the current President of the United States, “A More Perfect Union.”
This is why Douglass could close his address, “What to Slave is the Fourth of July?” with these words:
Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
An Un-Scientific Postscript: “What to the Immigrant Is the Fourth of July?”
I find in Douglass’s 150-year old address words of deep, abiding, and moving relevance for both Christian existence today and for the nation’s political and cultural life together. It points in the direction of the theology of freedom that Barth founding lacking in the turbulent America, an America yearning for “freedom now!”, and that he stepped into on visit to the country. It was this cultural and political cry that encountered face-to-face as he shook the hand of Martin Luther King Jr outside of a church in New York city in 1962.
This said, it’s not enough to leave the question of liberty and freedom in either Douglass’s 1852 moment or in 1962. To take a line from Beyoncé, we’ve gotta upgrade it. One question we must turn it toward is that of immigration, for as it turns out the immigrant experience is not unrelated to either Douglass’s moment or to that of the 1960s. Arguably, and here the work of historian Matthew Frye Jacobson is critically, especially his books Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1999) and Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1867–1917 (2001), the immigrant question has been the question of the Americas, and certainly of North America.
Given this and given the present-day debates over illegal aliens and immigrants (especially those from Mexico or that have other Latin American origins) living in the shadows, with so-called Christians voices being most vociferous about their presence (see the recent NY Times article for a different kind of Christian witness in Houston, TX), perhaps today might it not be fitting to amend the title of Douglass’s freedom-address to “What to the Immigrant, living in the shadows, is the Fourth of July?”
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Dr. Carter,
I just wanted to say thank you for writing, Race: A Theological Account. As a Christian interested in racial reconciliation, patristic theology, and postcolonial theory, I consider the work to be one of many springboards in my academic endeavors.
I was however wondering if you could clarify your analysis of Frederick Douglass. After reading your chapter on his life, it forced me to go back and re-read his Narrative. I had not read it since high school, and the teachers taught his work from a Euro-centric perspective. I understood the idea that black male subjectivity has been understood apart from black female subjectivity (the Enlightenment self) but I was confused of how Frederick Douglass’s witnessing (as a enslaved African by-stander) of Henny’s death had to do with sexism. I did see that Frederick Douglass in the end, just randomly mentions his wife, (which I see is agreeing with your conclusion about the gender exclusive nature of the Enlightenment self), but could you clarify the part about Henny’s death and modern notions of the self? I would greatly appreciate it.
Truth and peace,
Rod
Hi Rod:
Thanks for your comment.
In the Douglass chapter of my book, the point I’m trying to make there about the significance of Aunt Hester’s/Esther’s death for the young Douglass is that Douglass’s sense of identity or subjectivity is formed through and in relation to his witnessing the death of his Aunt. The scene in the Narrative that portrays this is a vital moment of racial formation or the formation of racialized subjectivity. To use the language of one theorist (who in fact was talking about Richard Wright, but it is spot on in this context too), Douglass was being constituted as a death-bound-subject. His sense of identity was being forged in relationship to death. What I am carrying in the Douglass chapter of my book is a reading of his Narrative as an archaeology of the formation as a subject who is bounded by (social, which is to say, deferred physical) death. (Which also means that the chapter is looking into racial subject formation in the modern world, generally, and the American situation, in particular, as a problematic social performance of the theology of the atonement. It’s problematic in that it’s a performance of subjectivity that rather than frees the subject into life, binds to death. In my own theological work, some of which is being worked out in the book and in subject work that I’ve taken up, I working towards a materialist and political reading of Christology and atonement theology that delivers us from this problem.)
Further still, I’m out to show that Douglass’s death bound subjectivity, marked as it was by death, is gendered too. This is critically important. I was first introduction to this notion by one of my teacher at the University of Virginia, the literary theorist and brilliant scholar Debra McDowell. That is to say, what for the young Douglass came to be aligned with slavery and death and bondage and ultimately weakness, as Douglass saw it, was a certain vision of woman or the black feminine to be more exact. And what the vision of freedom and strength or of what it meant not to be a slave took on the archetypal shape of being male, or the white masculine to be exact. This is what signifies true “manhood” and thus freedom. To be free and thus escape the social death of racial subjection is to overcome the black feminine and so be a (or “like” a white) man. Now at this point, we’re confronted with the issue of racial assimilation and the like as they are tied up with citizenship. A big topic, partly broached in my chapter, but more work needs to be done on this issue. (Also interestingly enough, there are important points of contact here with the work of Richard Wright as well.) Hence, the significance of the Douglass-Covey fight in chapter 10 of the Narrative, which is a fight for masculinity or freedom through religious power, where Christianity is made to signify masculinity.
What I do is trace this master/slave, freedom/bondage, male/female, weakness/strength dialectic in the 1845 Narrative, looking at how Douglass’s wrestling against slavery was, within everything I just outline around gender and racial formation etc, a wrestling with religion or more specifically (and specificity is critical here) with how Christianity has been made to function as the sustaining myth, the ideological superstructure of American nationalism.
Hope this helps.
jkc
Thank you, Dr. Carter. Your explanation clarified the chapter for me.