Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright April Holm (bio) Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. By Ben Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 253. Cloth, $45.00.) Historians have long connected the rise of the antebellum abolitionist movement with the growth of evangelical Christianity in the early decades of the nineteenth century. However, we more frequently approach the relationship between religion and abolition from the perspective of abolitionists than from within evangelical denominations. In Bonds of Salvation, Ben Wright examines the relationship between evangelical Christianity and abolitionism from the vantage point of the major evangelical denominations. He argues that the ideological approach that made Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists so successful ultimately dictated the contours of American abolitionism and the limits of antislavery action within the churches. Wright takes seriously the priorities of American evangelicals, even as he reveals how those priorities paved the way for denominational schism over the sinfulness of slavery. He begins his book with a question: How could so many white antebellum evangelicals privately condemn slavery and at the same time oppose abolitionism? Wright finds his answer in the millennial dreams of universal salvation through conversion that dominated American evangelicalism in the nineteenth century. While many evangelicals disapproved of slavery, Wright argues, they viewed it as one of a range of social ills that would be remedied by the salvation of the world. [End Page 272] By this logic, the best way to end slavery—and all earthly suffering—was through the conversion of souls to Christianity. Wright calls this ideology “conversionism.” Conversionists, he explains, viewed the United States itself as a divine agent of salvation. They dominated American evangelicalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Wright is particularly adept at explaining how conversionism intersected with denominational growth and the development of American nationalism. He argues that the focus on salvation within American Christianity accommodated a wide range of antislavery views and helped fuel both the colonization movement, promoted as a way to spread Christianity in Africa, and westward denominational expansion, a mechanism for “continental conversion” (110). Wright makes a compelling point about the role of conversionism in developing American nationalism during the early nineteenth century. Denominational growth, especially in the West, was key to the goal of converting the nation. Conversionism also conveniently allowed white evangelicals to avoid debates over slavery that could threaten the success of these Christian nationalist projects. Wright explains that conversionism as a solution to slavery never went unchallenged. Even as conversionists promoted colonization, westward expansion, and denominational growth, Black Christians and some white allies maintained that the church must be purified of the sin of slavery. Through their unceasing activism, Wright argues, these “purification-ists” helped to spawn the abolitionist movement that created fault lines in American churches and American politics. To counter purificationist demands that the church rid itself of slavery, white southern Christians made the conversionist argument that slavery provided access to the souls of enslaved people. Fearful of dividing the churches, antislavery conversionists retreated into a conservative alliance with proslavery evangelicals. In the 1830s and 1840s, the debate over the sinfulness of slavery divided the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominations into separate sectional bodies, both foreboding and hastening the coming of secession and war. Bonds of Salvation offers valuable insight into the limits of conversionism. It is one thing to oppose something on principle and quite another to oppose it with action. Believing that slavery was wrong carried very few consequences for white antebellum evangelicals. Acting on those beliefs, as Wright demonstrates in later chapters, most certainly did. Conversionists opposed slavery but prioritized conversion as “more urgent and its result as more radically transformative” than abolitionism (3). It would save the souls of both the free and the enslaved and potentially bring forth the millennium, which would, among other things, occasion the end of slavery. [End Page 273] Wright shows how, as the century progressed and abolitionists made more demands on their denominations, this passive opposition to slavery faded into a conservative stance aligned with proslavery members of the denomination against abolitionism. Wright’s work engages with a...