Unlearning the Lies from the Theologians of Slavery-Part 1

Last updated on: July 7, 2014 at 9:06 am by Guest Contributor

Unlearning the Lies from the Theologians of Slavery-Part 1 2014-07-07T09:06:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Warren Throckmorton shares a bit more from historian Thomas Kidd on “George Whitfield and Slavery.” Kidd helpfully confronts the seriousness and enormity of this grim reality:

The most challenging issue for a biographer of George Whitefield (as with Patrick Henry) is his identity as a slave owner. I admire Whitefield and Henry, as well as similar figures of their time such as Jonathan Edwards or George Washington, but their owning people as slaves remains an unavoidable moral problem.

How does one admire a historical figure who kept slaves? How does an author fully convey his disapproval of American slavery, while not condemning an individual altogether?

That last question leads Kidd astray. In typical Southern Baptist fashion, it elevates the maintenance of a proper “stance” on a moral question above the importance of the moral question itself. That puts the focus on the author and “his disapproval” rather than on the evil being disapproved. And that, in turn, unhelpfully elevates the matter of guilt over the matter of responsibility.

That spins Kidd away from the substance of the question he began discussing and into an unfortunate appeal to Hegel’s Bluff:

I am not sure that I have gotten the balance exactly right, but we want to avoid two extremes.

One extreme might suggest that Whitefield was a great man of God, and that harping on his owning of slaves denigrates his memory as a Christian hero.

The other extreme might say that whatever Whitefield accomplished for God was fatally tainted by his owning slaves, so he is better forgotten or just used as a cautionary tale.

Yes, it would be foolishly extreme to think that the only possible approach here would be to either ignore Whitefield’s defense of slavery or to ignore Whitefield. We certainly should avoid the foolishness of self-serving NABA NABA-ism (“I don’t own slaves so therefore I am Not As Bad As Thomas Jefferson and so therefore I must be good”). And Kidd, to his credit, also seeks to avoid the dismissive, compartmentalizing approach that overlooks grave evil so as not to tarnish Whitefield’s “memory as a Christian hero.”

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