Blessings of Liberty: How Public Christianity Made Americans Free
In his famous book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Christopher Hitchens argued that religion has had an unequivocally negative effect on human civilization. “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children” – this is how Hitchens characterized organized religion. If Hitchens was correct, we should be able to see the pernicious effects that Christianity – the dominant religion in the United States – has had on our nation’s history.
But according to historian Mark David Hall, Christianity has helped America to become a freer and more egalitarian nation. As he shows in his new book released last month, “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans,” genuine Christian faith was a major motivating factor behind the country’s most laudable achievements: establishing a constitutional republic, abolishing slavery, and protecting civil rights. With clear and evocative prose, Hall convincingly argues that we owe many of our rights and liberties to civic-minded Christians who sincerely believed that their faith should influence American culture and law. To those who worry that mixing Christianity with politics will necessarily lead to an oppressive theocracy, “Proclaim Liberty” offers a welcome rebuttal.
Hall begins his story with the Puritans whose moral and political principles, firmly rooted in Scripture, formed the foundation of American civil society. The popular imagination often characterizes Puritans as authoritarian theocrats. Given their adherence to a strictly Biblical legal code, the accusations seem justified, but Hall contends that far from being tyrannical, “the Puritans’ use of Scripture as a guide for criminal law had a liberalizing effect.” Hall concedes that by modern standards, the American Puritans could be quite harsh (adultery was a capital crime), but notes that they were frequently more lenient with other crimes, granted greater rights to the accused, and had higher evidentiary standards than European courts.
Like their legal code, the Puritans’ political philosophy was largely constructed from precepts they found in Scripture. As theological heirs to the Calvinist wing of the Protestant Reformation, Puritan New Englanders also inherited the opinion held by many significant Reformed thinkers that “the Bible only sanctioned republican governments.” They came to believe this, in part, because of their conviction that every human being is sinful and thus could not be trusted with too much power. As Hall writes, this belief led American colonists to place “a variety of checks on rulers, including regular elections and legal restraints on civic officials.” After winning their independence from Great Britain, Americans built a constitutional order on the same limited government principles handed down by the Puritans.
If America’s moral culture and constitutional politics were shaped by genuine Christian faith, Hitchens’ supporters might contend that the ghastly practice of legal human bondage paints a condemning picture of religion’s impact on a society. Hall doesn’t shy away from the truth: Slavery was widely propagated and defended by people who claimed to be followers of Jesus. But while “the Bible does not clearly and unequivocally condemn slavery,” Hall points out that many Christians saw the institution as it was practiced in America as plainly inconsistent with the Bible’s moral teachings. This belief was shared by a diverse group of Christian leaders like the Baptist minister John Leland, anti-slavery essayists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.
These Christians were convinced that their faith required them to zealously fight to end slavery. Indeed, abolitionists across the country routinely cited Scriptural passages as their reason for believing that all men are created equal. One favorite was Acts 17:26: “He … hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”
Using Scripture as their moral guide, Christian legislators passed abolition laws in every state north of the Mason-Dixon line. Their motivations were often explicitly spiritual. For example, in a 1780 manumission law, Pennsylvania representatives rejected the idea that non-whites were somehow less than human: “all are the work of an Almighty Hand.” And in 1781, Massachusetts attorney Levi Lincoln successfully helped a former slave win his freedom in court by arguing that slavery was “contrary to the Bible and the declaration of rights in the Massachusetts constitution.” Later cases would continue to affirm the unconstitutionality of slavery in Massachusetts. As Hall notes, “by 1790, the state reported that it had no more slaves.”
It is difficult to say whether slavery would have been abolished as quickly as it was in the North without the efforts of devout and civic-minded Christians. What we know for certain is that white and black Christians were on the front lines of the abolitionist movement and frequently referenced their faith as their inspiration.
In “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land,” Hall shows us how Christians, motivated by their sincere belief that all people are created in the image of God, founded and continued to reform a country that promised to protect the freedom and dignity of everyone. Even if America hasn’t always followed through on that promise, one could count on faithful Christians to be front and center working to help fulfill it.
