When Evangelicals Had Integrity

AS I FLIPPED the pages of Timothy L. Smith’s classic, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War, a question came to mind: Why did 19th-century evangelicals bundle social concerns, such as slavery and suffrage, with issues that seemed more prudish, such as temperance?

According to historian Ken Burns, by the year 1830 American men consumed seven gallons of alcohol per year, three times more than they consume today. In an era when white women had few legal rights, the scourge of alcohol-related domestic violence gave rise to an evangelical-led grassroots movement that called for temperance and prohibition. It wasn’t a “prudish” venture at all, but rather a progressive reform movement aimed at protecting women from violence and abuse.

The same evangelical women and male allies who pushed for temperance also stepped forward on the front lines of the fights for abolition and women’s suffrage. They had witnessed the fruit of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Group’s fight to end the transatlantic slave trade through England’s 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. That monumental victory led the U.S. Congress to pass a similar act the same year. This should have led to abolition, but instead led to the explosion of the U.S. chattel slave economy, a result of the rise of the cotton gin, the establishment of the second Middle Passage from the upper South to the Deep South, and the entrenchment of the barbaric practice of “breeding” free labor. Though the government had outlawed the importation of slaves from Africa, it did not abolish its slave-based economy, but rather expanded it.

Around the same time, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations were struggling to maintain stewardship of southeastern lands where they had lived for 13,000 years. Despite the Cherokee Nation winning a Supreme Court battle to stay on their land, President Andrew Jackson exercised the power of the gun and bayonet over the power of law. He ordered the army to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling and round up tens of thousands of Indigenous souls for removal. Thousands died on the long walks westward. Their deaths paved the way for King Cotton’s chattel rule.

THE PAST YEAR exposed similar assaults on the rules of law, public ethics, and moral decency. Many people of faith were shocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s brazen vow and the Senate GOP’s decision to “plow right through” the justified concerns of women, people of color, and immigrants—as well as religious, sexual, and gender minorities—by pushing through Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. The Senate’s confirmation of a judge with a very questionable background to the highest court through an opaquely corrupt process was breathtaking.

But the Republican senators were simply following the lead of their president’s disregard for the rule of law. The Trump administration filled the Tornillo internment camp with more than 2,000 refugee and asylum-seeking children after the family separations policy ended. The administration continues to ignore the dramatically escalating physical evidence of climate change while dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. The list goes on. But most striking of all is the continued support that this corrupt administration receives from men and women who claim to be evangelical Christians.

The one thing that tied all social concerns together for the 19th-century evangelicals was their radical belief in the coming reign of God. Charles Finney called new converts to renounce slavery in submission to the governance of the kingdom of God. Phoebe Palmer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth called believers to renounce the subjugation of women in submission to the rule of God. And Wilberforce called for allegiance to God’s kingdom above all others.

Anything short of this, the early evangelicals said, is corruption of our faith.