Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism

Abstract

Recent histories of abolitionism have paid considerable attention to the religious origins of the movement, while a mountain of monographs have explored the role that Christianity played in defending slavery. In Bonds of Salvation Ben Wright aims to recover an ideological context that shaped not only abolitionists and their opponents but also every American in between. That ideological context was the overwhelming consensus that the nation and the world should be converted to Christianity. Wright aims to reveal “the role of Christian convictions in creating the ideological worlds of the early republic,” especially how this context shaped “conversionist” and “purificationist” responses to slavery (p. 4). Wright argues that conversionism, the belief that saving individual souls was the proper work of the church and also the surest path to societal transformation, provided a unifying ethos for American Christians in the years after the American Revolution as they embarked on the project of building denominational structures that spanned the nation. Conversionism and an enlightenment belief in progress allowed white evangelical Christians with sincere antislavery convictions to prioritize saving souls over freeing the enslaved in the belief that abolition would occur downstream from salvation. Meanwhile, a few purificationists, such as the Congregationalist Samuel Hopkins, argued that God would never lend his favor to a church that did not first reject slavery. Wright is clear that the conversionist compromise was functionally proslavery, and yet his reframing provides a more nuanced understanding of why many white American Christians who deplored slavery nevertheless did not feel morally compelled to adopt abolitionism. Most interestingly, Wright shows how both advocates and opponents of the American Colonization Society framed their arguments primarily in terms of whether colonization was an effective means of spreading the gospel to Africa, and only secondarily in terms of its effects on slavery.