Abolition and the social gospel
Evangelicals and Quakers lead the campaign that ends the British slave trade and slavery, while other Protestants defend slavery from the Bible; later, the social gospel turns faith toward industrial poverty.
- Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves — Adam Hochschild, Houghton Mifflin (2005)
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
- Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South — Albert J. Raboteau, Oxford University Press (1978)
- Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s — David W. Bebbington, Unwin Hyman (1989)
Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issued a protest against slavery as early as 1688, and in 1787 a committee in London, mostly Quakers, founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The evangelical MP William Wilberforce carried the cause in Parliament for twenty years until the slave trade was abolished in 1807, and slavery in most of the British Empire in 1833. In America, Protestant abolitionists, Black and white, from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Beecher Stowe, made slavery a moral crisis.
- Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves — Adam Hochschild, Houghton Mifflin (2005)
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
But churches were divided. The Methodists split in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845, when Southern Baptists formed their own convention. After the Civil War, as industrial cities filled with poverty, the Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) became the manifesto of the “social gospel”, which held that Christians must transform unjust structures, not only save souls. It shaped labour reform, the mainline churches and, later, Martin Luther King Jr.
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
- Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South — Albert J. Raboteau, Oxford University Press (1978)
Faith that every person bears God's image drove Quakers, evangelicals like William Wilberforce and Black preachers to fight slavery for decades, against powerful interests.
- Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves — Adam Hochschild, Houghton Mifflin (2005)
- Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s — David W. Bebbington, Unwin Hyman (1989)
Many white Protestants, especially in the American South, defended slavery as biblical, and the issue split the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845. Enslaved people often heard a gospel of obedience from their masters' preachers.
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
- Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South — Albert J. Raboteau, Oxford University Press (1978)
Why it matters today
Protestants point with pride to abolitionists like Wilberforce and the Quakers, and with shame to the churches that blessed slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest US Protestant body, was founded in 1845 in defence of slaveholding missionaries and apologised in 1995. The tension between personal salvation and social justice, sharpened by the social gospel, still divides Protestants.