Juneteenth is an occasion to celebrate the triumph of America’s abolitionist movement. Though a landmark achievement, the emancipation of black Americans did not end racial injustice in the U.S. Rather Jim Crow segregation necessitated the birth of the civil rights movement a century later, achieving similar success in ending legal racial discrimination. But a key attribute of the success of the abolitionist and civil rights movements was their grounding in Christian virtue.
The church played a central role in these movements, with many civil rights leaders also being leaders in the church. Today, leaders of Black Lives Matter and other black leftists are attempting to usurp the legacy of prior generations of black activism without the Christian ethics that defined it. Absent Christian grounding, BLM, DEI, CRT, and the remaining alphabet soup of racial identity politics have inevitably descended into a grift that has achieved little for black Americans.
Frederick Douglass relied on Christian theology to argue for the emancipation of black slaves. In his autobiography, Douglass observed how his master’s conversion to Christianity actually made the master more cruel because of how the newfound moral certainty affirmed his pro-slavery views. But Douglass dismissed slavery’s proponents as fundamentally unlike Christ, comparing the “Christianity of Christ” that sought justice to the “Christianity of America” that defended slavery. This contrast was powerful to his audiences because it challenged America’s self-perception as a Christian nation, urging Americans to live up to their Christian principles by permanently ending the institution of slavery.
Harriet Tubman
