Christianity: Justification for Slavery, License to Freedom
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document in english
history 1789 to present
school essay
date published 22/08/2007
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SummaryWhen the first Africans were taken from their homeland to be sold into bondage in the Americas, their religion was left behind with their freedom back in Africa. Their native religions, as well as their languages and various other aspects of culture, were banned from practice in the New World, with Christianity and English imposed upon them as substitutes. As portrayed by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in their respective slave narratives, Christianity served as a weapon of suppression for slave owners in the antebellum South. However, instead of accepting Christianity as justification for slavery in America, slaves made the religion their own, interpreting Christianity as support for the freedom and equality of all people.
Table of Contents
- Once slavery was instituted in America, Christianity was used for religious arguments for its existence
- Women in slavery like the one Douglass describes suffered even greater wrongdoings at the hands of their masters than male slaves
- Douglass' narrative features another slave woman that suffers greatly for the sake of her master's reward
- The Christianity that Douglass and other slaves adopted emphasized what they believed were the meanings of the teachings of Jesus that they had learned
- When slaves needed a unifying ideology that justified their freedom from exploitation, they had to look no further than the religion imposed on them
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