The Anti-Racist Christian Prototype,Frederick Douglass
“Come forward, colored friends – come forward! You too, have an interest in the blood of Christ. God is no respecter of persons. Come forward and take this holy sacrament to your comfort.”
On a typical Sunday in Antebellum America, you could hear these words spoken over many Christian congregations. Communion bread and wine were distributed by a white minister to white parishioners first. Then, he sanctioned the leftovers of the Lord’s Table for their “colored friends.”
One Sunday, a casual observer watched his people—Black people—walk forward in response to the white minister’s summons, like black sheep without a shepherd.
He walked out.
Abolitionist pioneer Frederick Douglass observed the scene above and recorded it in his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom. Douglass’s disgust at this service is just one example of his complicated relationship with Christ, Christianity, and our so-called Christian nation. Like many of Africa’s American born children, Douglass had a Christian faith forged within a web of contradictions. The same people extolling the blood of Christ drew blood from his back with a whip after Sunday’s sermon. White ministers who preached “God was no respecter of persons” also told him that God ordained Black people to be property and branded like cattle.
For Douglass, the Christianity of this land was only good for abortive promises of freedom in Christ and leftover sacraments. Douglass was fed up with these religious professions and their racist liturgies, and it showed. But Douglass did not give up on Jesus. He loved “the religion of our blessed Savior.” And his love for Christ motivated his hate for the slaveholding, woman whipping, mind-darkening, soul-destroying religion that laid at the foundation of Christianity’s history in the U.S.
It’s hard to put an adequate label on the legacy of Frederick Douglass. He was a master orator, articulating the angst and hopes of the Black freedom struggle. He was America’s prophet, using scalpel-like words to rebuke and correct the ailments of our republic. He was an abolitionist, leading in political movements to dismantle racism and systems of oppression. Douglass was a Christian, but a Christian of a different sort than his white contemporaries.
Douglass’s faith profile reveals the religious inspiration behind his career and rounds out a fully orbed view of this complicated man. His antiracist sentiments and abolitionist duty flowed from an internal reservoir of Christian faith. Secular antiracists, like Malini Ranganathan, attribute their roots to abolitionists like Douglass and name him as the plow that helped till the ground for antiracist discourse today. For this reason, I suggest an appropriate label to add to his legacy is Antiracist Christian.
Profile of an Antiracist Christian
Image-bearers of God
Douglass’s speeches and writings are linked by several Christian themes that collectively give a snapshot of his religion. He often used the theological assertion that all humanity shared a Creator as a rhetorical tool to argue for equality. Douglass believed the image of God and divine genius apprehended in humanity were not destroyed, regardless of the “brutalizing effects of slavery upon slave and slaveholder.” The truth that the African slave was God’s image and not a thing to be owned, was a word to uplift the slave and indict the enslaver. What grounds did white people have to function as a pseudo-deity, creating their own world ex nigreos and stolen land? Douglass’s Christianity denounced that black bodies were less than human and announced it as an “abomination before God” that had dehumanizing consequences not only for Black people but white supremacists as well. But he held out hope for the country and the church because there was something about all people that transcended race and pointed to an antiracist future—the imago Dei.
Pro-freedom
Freedom was an integral theme of Douglass’s work. Douglass scholar, David Blight, states that “well before [Douglass] read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of liberation.” His words of freedom were fueled by a longing for God-given inalienable rights. Douglass’s Christian imagination was shaped by his resonance with the tales of Israel’s liberation from Egypt and his belief that the “arm of the Lord is not shortened” concerning injustice. In his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Douglass confronted the gross hypocrisy of the American church for its aiding and abating slavery. His commitment to freedom drove his commitment to anti-slavery and anti-lynching laws, even if it meant he needed to appear “anti-church.” For Douglass, if the church assumed a favorable position towards oppression, the church deserved to be on trial, awaiting God’s judgment.
Hope-full
Hope is hard to grasp when your hands are shackled. White supremacy did not just steal bodies, but it tried to rob Black people of hope. Douglass refused to bow his knee to despair. He knew not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul as he advocated for a day when “Ethiopia’s [children] will stretch their hands to God” and flourish in this nation. When America gave Douglass an abundance of reasons to leave or give up trying to agitate the consciousness of white America, he found hope, namely hope in God.
Seeking a Beloved Community
Lastly, Douglass believed in the brotherhood of humanity and what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would later call God’s beloved community.
“We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world … In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.”
— Frederick Douglass, 1869
Anticipating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass delivered these words in his speech, “Our Composite Nationality.” Douglass painted a picture for what Blight calls “a pluralist future of human equality” in post-Civil War America. Douglass fought for a day when the idea that “one class must rule over another” would be banished. However, even before the ink of the Emancipation Proclamation dried, the ground was soaked in blood as mass lynching, and Jim Crow filled the void of chattel slavery. The “apocalyptic vision” espoused in Douglass’s speech is just as poignant today as whiteness continues to vie for supremacy. Douglass’s vision for America is strengthened by God’s vision of “every tribe, tongue, and nation,” standing as equals. Americans needed and still need this vision that arises out of the Apostle John’s Revelation from God, which says a day is coming when racism will be a distant memory. We are not there yet, but maybe Christians like Douglass can be the architects shaping America, born again.
For further reading on Frederick Douglass:
The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader by Frederick Douglass and William L. Andrews
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David Blight
What To the Slave is the Fourth of July? By Frederick Douglass
Written by Courtlandt Perkins
Bio: Courtlandt follows Jesus as a husband, father, and son. He is an avid reader and loves to think and write about God, how to read Scripture, and the African diaspora. Courtlandt has an M.Div and a ThM but he is most proud of being the leader of the LeBron James stan club.