JesusCreed

So when the enslaved Africans in America began to use deliverance rhetoric rooted in the Exodus they were carrying on a Protestant tradition and, at the same time, subverting those who had used the same rhetoric for their own conditions. Prior to the use of deliverance rhetoric to support abolition, some English and Americans were seeing a moral problem in the enslavement of whites — orphans and criminals especially — and the transportation of the same to colonial locations. The glaring contradiction of this very point, seen for instance in John Locke (who opposed [white] slavery but supported the African slave trade), took a century to realize. In the heart of the Enlightenment, some 3.26 million Africans were transported across the ocean to become slaves. Many turned to the Bible for supporting slavery, including the very typical insistence that liberation in the Bible is spiritual and not social or ethnic or racial (e.g., George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards owned slaves). Our next post will look at the scriptural imagination of the abolitionists and their uses of the Exodus narrative.