Conversion has consequences

One hundred and thirty years ago this month, the former slave turned abolitionist leader and orator Frederick Douglass passed away. Although the exact date of his birth is unknown, he was born in February of 1818 and died on Feb. 20, 1895. During his lifetime he endured the abuses of slavery, the hardships of discrimination, and the victory of the abolitionist cause he championed so eloquently and faithfully for more than a half century.

Douglass escaped from his slave master, Thomas Auld, in 1838. During his 20 years in slavery, Douglass had learned to read, drawing deeply from the Bible, newspapers, and literary and rhetorical texts, sharing his knowledge with other slaves. He had also experienced first hand the abuses and injustice of the Southern system of chattel slavery. As he wrote in his 1855 work, My Bondage and My Freedom, he served in the dockyards of Baltimore, eventually learning the trade of caulking. But this placed him in competition with the white laborers, leading to abuse and physical assaults. As he describes one of these incidents in 1836,

I was beset by four of them at once…. Two of them were as large as myself, and they came near killing me, in broad day light. The attack was made suddenly, and simultaneously. One came in front, armed with a brick; there was one at each side, and one behind, and they closed up around me. I was struck on all sides; and, while I was attending to those in front, I received a blow on my head, from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was completely stunned by the blow, and fell, heavily, on the ground, among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall, they rushed upon me, and began to pound me with their fists.

Douglass survived the encounter and escaped, although with injuries. But, he says, “Not fewer than fifty white men stood by, and saw this brutal and shameless outrage committed, and not a man of them all interposed a single word of mercy.” Such was the nature of slavery, that the basic humanity of the enslaved was dismissed and the demands of natural justice denied.

After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a famed abolitionist speaker and reformer. His speeches were marked by appeals to the Bible as a source for addressing injustice as well as accounts of his experiences as a slave. He called the slave system “the offspring of hell itself,” and pointed to the hypocrisy of Christian slaveowners. “It makes no difference whether the slaveholder worships the God of the Christians, or is a follower of Mahomet,” said Douglass, “he is the minister of the same cruelty, and the author of the same misery. Slavery is always slavery; always the same foul, haggard, and damning scourge, whether found in the eastern or in the western hemisphere.”

Douglass knew this firsthand. His former owner Thomas Auld was, in fact, a Christian. Douglass describes how Auld had become a Christian and the results:

In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane.

Douglass was to be “disappointed in both these respects.” Auld’s conversion to Christianity “neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before.” Indeed, says Douglass, Auld’s Christianity made him a worse slave master: “After his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.” Despite the many evidences of Auld’s piety, his conversion had no positive impact on his treatment of slaves or attitude toward the slave system.

Douglass was convinced that a truly biblical understanding of the human person would lead to liberation in its fullest sense. This would include spiritual liberation from bondage to sin. But it would also manifest in the liberation of those who were physically enslaved. And more than that, it would empower those who were freed from slavery to sin and chattel bondage to live flourishing lives of service, productivity, and charity. In later speeches such as “Self-Made Men” and in his editorializing in the newspaper he co-founded, Douglass proclaimed the virtues of entrepreneurship, enterprise, and industry as means for the improvement of the lot of the poor, whether black or white.

True conversion has consequences. Douglass and Auld, many years later, met and experienced a kind of reconciliation. Auld expressed his regrets and his hope for life after death. For his part, Douglass understood that Christianity is a faith that makes comprehensive claims, and that while conversion and regeneration does not immediately make us perfect or sinless, it does of necessity set us on a path of sanctification. These consequences are most immediately to be found in our spiritual lives, our devotion, worship, and practices of piety. But these consequences must also flow over into the rest of our lives, our professional work, our communities, and our social and political engagement. Conversion to Christ has consequences.