The Slavery Question

by John Lawrence

5. Duty to slaveholders demands non-fellowship with slaveholding. The course pursued by the popular churches involves the souls of slaveholders in imminent peril. Their consciences are lulled into quietude or narcoticized by deadly moral nostrums, skillfully prepared and treacherously administered by time-serving, fleece-seeking hirelings, who assume the sacred office of shepherds. Many of them are not aware of their sin and danger, and how can they be aroused while honored in the church and flattered as good christians, and imitators in the slaveholding business, of the good old patriarchs? To save these men the church must be plain with them, and require repentance of all their sins, and especially of the sin of slaveholding, as a condition of a place in the temple of God.

6. Duty to the slave demands non-fellowship with slaveholding. The oppressed have a claim upon the church, because Christ died for them, and they are, while enslaved, in such a situation that they can neither love him with all their powers, nor do much to establish his church and publish his name in the earth. Hence it is the duty of christians and christian societies to break off the fetters which bind not only their limbs but their minds. The American church is able to emancipate every slave in the land. Who doubts that it is its duty? But in order to do this glorious work, the principle of strict non-fellowship with slaveholders must be adopted. Let every church in America declare slavery to be a sin and exclude slaveholders from its communion, and the doom of slavery will be sealed. All the laws and compromises and compacts which the ingenuity of the prince of darkness could invent would not preserve it. It is the church which is the bulwark of slavery. Not one day could it stand up in this country without the strength imparted to it by a powerful but awfully corrupted church. “Let all the evangelical denominations,” says Albert Barnes, “but follow the simple example of the Quakers in this country, and slavery would soon come to an end. There is not vital energy enough; there is not power of numbers and influence enough, out of the church, to sustain it. Let every religious denomination in the land detach itself from all connection with slavery, without saying a word against others; let the time come when, in all the mighty denominations of Christians, it can be announced that the evil has ceased with them FOREVER, and let the voice from each denomination be lifted up in kind, but firm and solemn testimony against the system—with no ‘mealy’ words; with no attempt at apology; with no wish to blink it, with no effort to throw the sacred shield of religion over so great an evil—and the work is done. There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour if it were not sustained in it.” Hence the reasons for non-fellowship with slaveholding are as vast as the interests temporal and eternal of millions and millions of our fellow-creatures, and as vast as the treachery which leaves them in chains! Depend upon it the curse of God will come down upon the American church in a storm of fiery vengeance if it arise not and do justice to the slave!

7. If slaveholders are admitted to church-fellowship no class of sinners on earth should be excluded. The church cannot consistently expel from its communion the rich man who grinds the face of the poor laborer that reaps down his fields, and at the same time retain the slaveholder who lives entirely upon the unpaid labor of the poor. He who occasionally cheats his neighbor out of a few dollars cannot consistently be censured by the church while the man who cheats whole families out of domestic comfort, home, education, and their all, passes without reproof. The occasional adulterer cannot receive church discipline in the presence of him who compels his slaves to live together without the sanction, and without the protection of the law. He who steals a sheep cannot be cast out from a church in which he who steals men occupies a high seat. As slaveholding is a violation directly or indirectly of every commandment of the Decalogue, if it cannot and must not be disciplined, then church discipline is useless; and all classes of sinners should be admitted and retained in this Holy Temple, unless the principle be established that he who commits a petty offense shall be cast out, but he who has the heart and courage to commit a high offense, a daring crime, shall remain in full fellowship. I have wondered how slaveholding church members could try and expel from a religious society a poor negro who, in addition to his peck of corn per week, had stolen a little meat, while they were conscious of robbing that same negro of the products of his daily toil, and of his own soul and body.

8. To maintain its independence the church must discard fellowship with slaveholders.—In no case have slaveholders been willing to occupy an humble position in a religious body long. They assume to be pre-eminently the members of the church, and the press, pulpit, and General Assembly or General Conference, must, unequivocally, endorse, or patriarchalize their slaveholding. The history of all the pro-slavery churches in America is proof of this remark. A few slaveholders are able to change entirely the action of a powerful ecclesiastical body—to range it on the side of oppression, to silence or subborn its witnesses, to shut up its sympathies and take away the bow of hope from the slave. How many of the hundreds of ministers in the whole south are free to utter their convictions on slavery to day? How many religious presses are unfettered? If then the church would stand upon the solid rock of truth, unawed by the popular will, uncorrupted with gold, the immutable friend of man, proclaiming and enforcing the whole truth, it must keep out of her communion legalized and practiced tyrants.

9. Regard for decency, refined sensibility and common humanity, urges non-fellowship with slaveholders. The members of a slaveholding church become insensible to the grossest outrages upon the better feelings of slaves, and they habitually commit acts, without a blush, which, one should think, would pale the cheek of a demon. For illustration take a well authenticated fact: “A runaway slave in 1841, assigned the following as the reason why he refused to commune with a church of which he was a member. ‘The church,’ said he, ‘had silver furniture for the administration of the Lord’s supper, to procure which they sold my brother! and I could not bear the feelings it produced to go forward and receive the sacrament from the vessels which were the purchase of my brother’s blood!’” But the members of that church, generally, were altogether without feeling upon the subject, and were as little disturbed in selling a slave to purchase silver ware for the sacramental table, or to pay a parson, or to support a missionary, as in selling a mule for the same purposes.

10. If slavery be fellowshiped in the church, then slaveholding preachers will be coming around and preaching the gospel to us! A dealer in human flesh will undertake to teach us to be just and merciful. We will be expected to receive the elements of the holy sacrament from hands that use the cowskin occasionally on the backs of slaves! It is notorious that churches which fellowship slavery have an exceedingly dumb and callous ministry on the subject of oppression. Frederick Douglass, I think it was, who said that the hardest master he ever served was a Methodist Protestant preacher. The following incident will illustrate this thought: “A minister of the gospel owned a female slave, whose husband was owned by another man in the same neighborhood. The husband did something supposed to be an offense sufficient to justify his master in selling him for the southern market. As he started, his wife obtained leave to visit him. She took her final leave of him, and started to return to her master’s house. She went a few steps and returned and embraced him again, and started a second time to go to her master’s house; but the feelings of her heart again overcame her, and she turned about and embraced him the third time. Again she endeavored to bear up under the heavy trial, and return; but it was too much for her—she had a woman’s heart. She returned the fourth time, embraced her husband—and turned about,—A MANIAC!”—(Anti-slavery Record.)

Good God! can any one plead for the admission of such cruelty into the bosom of the church and into the ministry?

And let it be remembered that this preacher simply did what the legal relation authorized, and what all slaveholding ministers may do without ecclesiastical censure.

11. If slavery be fellowshiped in the church, then we shall be compelled to sit in religious meetings, class-meetings and conference meetings, and hear a good experience told by one who lives on the toil of wretched slaves, and who would sell at public sale one of our own brethren in the Lord, yea, even ourselves, if the laws would allow it. Take the following specimen of a Methodist sister, and ask yourselves how you would like to attend class with her.