Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Chapter Two: “‘Because I Was a Master’”: Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom

54 Charles Colcock Jones, a Presbyterian planter and minister in the low country of Georgia, scorned slavery when younger but eventually emerged as the most effective advocate for the mission to the slaves in the 1830s. His complex relations with his large family and his slaves emerge in memorable detail and sensitive prose in Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place, a beautiful work of southern history that shows how the insidious evil of slavery undermined the determined efforts of even the best-hearted people to redeem it. Jones saw his task as one of bringing light to those who came from pagan lands but could receive spiritual teachings about Jesus. Such instruction would have useful benefits for planters as well. Authority and obedience to masters would not be “felt and performed,” Jones added, “unless we can bottom it on religious principle.” Knowledge of Jesus would redeem the evils that naturally arose from the condition of slavery. Jones articulated his life’s mission in his 1842 work The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States.1 Preaching before a slave congregation in 1833, Jones delivered a message about order and obedience from the book of Philemon. “When I insisted upon fidelity and obedience as Christian virtues in servants and upon the authority of Paul,” he later wrote, and “condemned the practice of running away, one half of my audience deliberately rose up and walked off with themselves, and those that remained looked anything but satisfied, either with the preacher or A chapter two B “Because I Was a Master” Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom Religion, Race, and Southern Freedom 55 his doctrine. After dismission, there was no small stir among them; some solemnly declared ‘that there was no such . . . Epistle in the Bible’; others, ‘that they did not care if they ever heard me preach again!’” Some objected to his preaching “because I was a master.”2 Charles Colcock Jones’s experience suggests one of the deep paradoxes of American religious history: the explosion of democratic evangelicalism in the nineteenth century together with the rise of a racially repressive regime that grew from and depended on order, obedience, and hierarchy. The paradox played out in particularly powerful ways in the South. Thus, in writing a social history of religious ideas of freedom, there is no better place to start than the South. Such an exploration shows the ways in which freedom depended on un-freedom and how religious democracy, racial slavery, and social repression were intertwined. The founding fathers personally held widely varying religious beliefs, from bare-bones assumptions about a generic “Providence” to more pious Christianity, but they largely agreed on abolishing established churches or religious tests for federal office. They were nearly alone in the western world in imagining a political order so disconnected from established religious institutions. Founders such as Thomas Jefferson believed that this would lead to a society based on rationalism rather than (as Jefferson saw them) biblical myths and religious superstitions. Contrary to those dreams, pietist religion deeply shaped American society in the nineteenth century; its influence was deeply pervasive and cultural, rather than strictly political . With the rise of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, evangelicalism grew into a dominant form of religious expression. Toleration and religious freedom were the prerequisites for that growth. Yet the dominance of a particular form of Protestantism made religious freedom something of a myth. Nineteenth-century Protestants constructed a “moral establishment ” that enforced, sometimes in law and other times in practice, a particular vision of order.3 Virginians such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in league with evangelicals (especially Baptists) in the region, enshrined remarkably advanced ideas of religious liberty first in the 56 Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster founding documents of individual states and then in the United States Constitution. In this sense, the revolutionary-era South could claim to be at the forefront of individual religious liberty. In the nineteenth century, the spread of evangelicalism through the South suggested that religious liberties for individuals enhanced the religious growth of Christian denominations. At the same time, Anglo-Americans throughout the country, but even more so in the South, created a racially exclusivist and religiously restrictive culture that limited the freedom, both civil and religious , of those defined outside the ranks of the free and the citizen. Southern evangelicals pressed for religious freedom. Yet...