Unchained
Christianity and the free world.

Mr. Shiflett is co-author (with Vincent Carroll) of the upcoming Christianity on Trial (Encounter Books).
April 17, 2001 12:20 p.m.

t was a glorious Monday at the Wall Street Journal. Dorothy Rabinowitz, who truly is a national treasure, finally won a Pulitzer, in part for slicing up child "welfare" cranks who destroy lives by wielding false charges of child abuse. The morning her Pulitzer announcement was made, Robert Bartley published a nice piece reminding us of the seismic role that Christianity has played in the moral and intellectual life of the Free World. Good news often comes in threes, so some of us sat around waiting for word that Al Hunt had finally wised up and joined a militia, but no such luck. (In fact, the day got even more glorious for the Journal — Ian Johnson of its Beijing bureau won a Pulitzer in international reporting for a series of articles on Chinese persecution of the Falun Gong religious movement.)

As it happened, however, Bartley's excellent piece was brought back to mind late Monday when a terrible news story came in: Authorities announced the possibility that 250 child slaves had been tossed into the sea off West Africa. The ship bearing these children, some as young as ten, was in danger of being seized by authorities and so its crew, it is feared, may have gotten rid of the evidence in the most horrific way possible: Feeding the children to the sharks.

Bartley's piece came to mind because of a similar atrocity that took place in the later eighteenth century, an incident that drew a sharp reaction from Christians active in the anti-slavery movement. That incident, known as the Zong slaughter, occurred in 1781 after the slave ship Zong left Sao Tome with 442 slaves on board. The ship lost its way and as a result food and water grew short. The man in charge, Luke Collingwood, made a cold calculation: If the slaves died on board, their loss would come from the hides of those who owned them. But if their presence on board the stricken ship could be said to threaten the crew, the Africans could be thrown into the ocean and charged off to the insurance company.

The result: 133 slaves were cast overboard. This greatly upset a devout Christian named Granville Sharp, who believed it was morally wrong to drown 133 Africans for insurance purposes. But as the great historian Hugh Thomas reminds us, Sharp was out of step with the powers that be. The Court of the Admiralty's Solicitor General, John Lee, dismissed Sharp's murder charge as a "pretended appeal to humanity" and further held that a master could drown slaves without "a surmise of impropriety."

This is a harsh attitude to our ears, because we forget that blacks were truly held to be subhuman. The best friends they had were Christian activists who, it should be pointed out, did not share the slaves' religion and in fact rarely if ever set eyes on a slave. For their troubles, these Christians were dismissed as zealots and ignorant meddlers. As Thomas informs us, intellectuals such as David Hume readily agreed that blacks were "naturally inferior to whites" and once commented that a Jamaican black hailed for his brains was "admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly." Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and even Mr. Rights of Man himself, John Locke, sung the same tune. Locke wrote a provision for slavery into his draft of the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina — and invested in the Royal Africa Company, which held the British monopoly of the African slave trade.

This was, in modern terms, a very polarized debate, and the Christians fought not only on behalf of slaves, but also against the mindset that made their bondage acceptable. Historian David Brion Davis notes that the crude racism of Hume and his pals "enabled orthodox Christians to make defense of the Africans a defense of religion itself. John Wesley called Hume "the most insolent despiser of truth and virtue who ever appeared in the world." Other anti-slavery leaders, including Sharp, "repeatedly identified the theory of racial inferiority with Hume, Voltaire, and materialistic philosophy in general; they explicitly presented their attacks on slavery as a vindication of Christianity, moral accountability, and the unity of mankind."

Meanwhile, the sense of compassion toward the sufferers was expressed by John Wesley in his Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774): "Do you never feel another's pain?" he rhetorically asked slavers. "Have you no sympathy? …When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides or tortured limbs of your fellow beings, were you a stone or a brute?"

Methodist preacher George Whitfield asked whites to consider the children of slaves as equal to their own. "Think your children are in any way better by nature than the poor negroes? No! In no wise! Blacks are just as much, and no more, conceived and born in sin, as white men are; and both, if born and bred up here, I am persuaded, are naturally capable of the same improvement."

The anti-slavery crusaders took on two huge adversaries: monied interests and the intellectual climate of the day — which, one would think, would make them perfect heroes for modern cinema. Yet as Robert Bartley points out, the religious fervor of Lewis Tappan — a New York industrialist deeply committed to the anti-slavery cause — was ironed out of his character (as portrayed in Steven Spielberg's Amistad). As it happens, Spielberg makes much of his own enlightened views, noisily leaving the Boy Scouts's board the other day over their policies about openly gay scoutmasters. Yet when he and other screen moguls scour history for pedestal material, they uniformly overlook the heroes of the greatest human-rights campaign in our history — or they strip these characters of their Christian beliefs, which, as it happens, were the very inspiration for their inspirational acts. To the untrained eye, this looks a great deal like prejudice — prejudice that is as ugly and debilitating in our day as in all days past.