President Obama has received a lot of well-deserved criticism for his recent remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After condemning terrorists who “professed to stand up for Islam,” he told the largely Christian audience:
Obama’s comments were patronizing and somewhat beside the point given that almost all of today’s religious violence is committed by radical Muslims and almost none of it by devout Christians.
His remarks about slavery and Jim Crow also left out an important fact. While many Americans did attempt to use Christianity to justify slavery and Jim Crow, true Christian teachings played an important role—and I would argue an essential role—in eradicating those two scourges.
Christianity was the driving force behind abolition. Many American abolitionists were inspired by the anti-slavery movement in Great Britain, which outlawed slavery thirty-one years before the United States.
Nobody played a bigger role in that movement than William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a Conservative Party minister of parliament who for decades was a lonely voice for abolition. He was also an evangelical Christian who drew strength from his faith.
At a time when many argued that slavery was the will of God, Wilberforce believed he had been called upon by God to help end slavery.
Wilberforce’s case against slavery was unabashedly Bible-based. And he wasn’t afraid to invoke a little fire and brimstone to drive his point home. “We must believe,” he wrote in an open letter published a month before the House of Commons voted to abolish slavery, “that a continued course of wickedness, oppression and cruelty, obstinately maintained in spite of the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down upon us the heaviest judgments of the Almighty.”
The American anti-slavery movement was similarly animated by Christianity. Most of the early abolitionists were northern white and black churchgoers (though there were some “free thinkers” involved as well).
Rob Rapley, who wrote a PBS series on the abolitionists, has said, “Every one of the abolitionists was shaped very much by their faith. In fact, they would have defined themselves first by their faith before any other category.”
The Civil Rights movement was also rooted in an abiding Christian faith. Martin Luther King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, once said, “Throughout the epic freedom struggle of African Americans, our great sustainer of hope has been the power of prayer.”
Many of the principal civil rights organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to name two—were essentially coalitions of churches. And many of the movement’s leaders—King, Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth—were Christian pastors.
King was a Baptist minister who regularly stressed that the battle against inequality and bigotry was at its core a spiritual one.
In his seminal “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King addresses “My Dear Fellow Clergymen,” invokes “God” fifteen times, “lord” twice, and “Jesus” five times, and uses the word “Christian” seventeen times. He quotes Saint Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, along with Jesus Christ himself.
King signs off not with an appeal for his release or even by encouraging his lieutenants to keep up the fight, but rather with “I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith.”
King’s argument for racial equality was so compelling because he rooted it in the Judeo-Christian foundation of our country. In his 1964 speech “The American Dream,” King reminded the audience that the Declaration of Independence “says that each individual has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state. They are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God. Very seldom if ever in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.”
King was sustained by the knowledge that his cause was righteous. Once, when King’s house was firebombed, he told a crowd of supporters that had gathered outside to seek retribution, “Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with this movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.”
The anti-slavery and civil rights movements were championed by people who put their faith in a God who commands His followers to love and forgive—and who sacrificed His only son so that we may be freed from the chains of this world and have everlasting life in the next.
Muslims, in contrast, worship a prophet who was a military leader and who himself owned slaves. The Koran and Islamic history are replete with violence of exactly the sort we are seeing today. In fact, violence and vengeance are not just byproducts of Islam; historically speaking, they have also often been fundamental to its practice.
Christians shouldn’t get on their high horse and think that they are better than anyone. Humility is a heavenly virtue, after all. But neither should we ignore the profound good Christianity has done, especially when confronted with the twin evils of slavery and Jim Crow.
Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.
