Rethinking the Unreasonable Act

At the close of the prayer at the Congregational house in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1841, Stephen Foster rose, unannounced, and began to lecture against slavery. The Rev. Mr. Cook commanded him to sit down. Foster ignored him. Cook repeated his demand three times. Foster still spoke. Three men seized Foster by his shoulders and legs; he offered no resistance. They violently threw him down the stairs and out of the church. Foster rose, dusted himself off, and walked across the common to the Baptist congregation. Again uninvited, he began to speak against slavery. Quickly several men grabbed him, ripping his clothes. They shoved him into a closet under the stairs and deliberated over what to do with him. Coming to a consensus, they yanked him out of the closet and literally threw him out of the church. Undeterred, Foster interrupted a Quaker meeting that afternoon. This time it was the supposedly nonviolent Friends who rent his clothing and dragged him out the door. Still Foster kept denouncing slavery, finally holding his own meeting that evening.²

Stephen Foster was a zealot. A follower of William Lloyd Garrison’s radical brand of abolitionism, he became infamous for breaking up services in churches that did not oppose slavery. He openly violated segregation laws, insisting that white abolitionists take their seat in the Jim Crow car on trains and in the “Negro pews” in churches. When arrested, he went limp. When in court, he defended himself, using the trial as a platform to condemn slavery and the church’s and state’s complicity with it. Such fanaticism came at a cost. By the end of 1841, Foster had been forcibly ejected from twenty-four churches—twice from the second story.³ He had been jailed four times. Once he was nearly lynched by a mob when he proposed a resolution in a public meeting that denounced the U.S. government as “a wicked and nefarious conspiracy against the liberty of more than two million of our countrymen” and reviled complicit Northerners for being “the basest of slaves, the vilest of hypocrites and the most execrable of man-stealers, inasmuch as they voluntarily consent to be the watch-dogs of the plantation.”⁴ He and other agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society were regularly threatened with pistols and attacked with rocks, bricks, eggs, rotten fruit, smoked herring, and even prayer books. Yet Foster never shrank from his fanatical approach to abolitionism. He believed extremism was crucial in the struggle against slavery and for democracy. As his comrade and future wife Abby Kelley once exulted, “We should pray to be preserved in the freshness of our fanaticism.”⁵

I first learned about Foster and Kelley in 2002, when the wounds on the American psyche caused by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were just starting to scab. Al-Qaeda and the problem of international terrorism was the foremost foreign policy concern. At home, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and the 1996 capture and later conviction of the “Unabomber” were being pushed out of the realm of recent memory by the events of 9/11. Nevertheless, the “eco-terrorist” organization the Earth Liberation Front was the FBI’s number one domestic threat. Further, the contested 2000 election of Bush v. Gore was still raw, with pundits and the public bemoaning the nation’s increasing polarization into “red” and “blue” states. The plague of “extremism” seemed to be everywhere. Since then there have been wars in Afghanistan, and Iraq; terrorist attacks from London to Bali to Mumbai; conspiracies regarding 9/11 and President Obama’s birth; the Tea Party movement and its prophecy that “Obamacare” will usher in socialism; and the shooting of abortion providers and Congresspersons. This is the age of extremism.

Already in this short century extremism has replaced the specter of communism as the principal threat to liberal democracy. Yet while communist theory was easily known to all who cared to read Marx and his students, extremism is little understood today. Terms like “extremist,” “zealot,” and “fanatic” are largely used as political curse words...