Violence and Atheism in the Age of Abolition

Abstract

AbstractThis essay offers an interpretation of certain sections of the American abolitionist movement before the Civil War. It posits that many antebellum opponents of slavery and enslaved people alike subscribed to a theory of Christianity that, following Scottish common-sense theology and the experiential, liberation-oriented Christianity of the enslaved, maintained that morality and immorality were equally comprehensible and perceivable to all humanity. When, therefore, reports of physical violence and oppression wreaked upon enslaved people in the South began circulating in the North, the conclusion that slavers must be atheists who were not truly practicing Christianity united both black Christians and white Unitarians in a common critique of slavery. The accusation that slaveholding was a form of atheism lent weight to common fears that slavery was a form of tyranny undermining the potential of American democracy among Northern Americans.