Historical Evidence of the Church's Failure on a Moral Issue in America and Parallels for Today.

or...Parallels between abortion and slavery;  the church's           role and the resultant Civil War

The Civil War was seen as God’s judgment on our nation by Abraham Lincoln, as is obvious in his Proclamation for a Day of Fasting and Prayer. Now, as then, we have willfully invited God’s displeasure with us on a personal and a national level. Abortion, materialism, sexual immorality, and choosing to put other gods before the LORD, beg His intervention as these pages have discussed. The moral issue of slavery as practiced in the 1800's closely parallels abortion in many ways.

Without much doubt to many church historians, the church could have stopped the deepening vortex that drew the country into the war between brothers. The church, who possessed the Biblical guidance to guide the nation toward peacefully extinguishing slavery, failed to use their position to that end.  In a similar manner, abortion leads us to future danger above what we have seen to date.

C.C. Goen, Professor of Church History at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. wrote Broken Churches, Broken Nation, (1985) about the failure of the church in America leading to our Civil War.  This web page includes numerous excerpts from this book, exhibiting great enlightenment to us today as we deal with our personal and the church's corporate failure as we interact with our  culture and become a 'salt and light' source to revitalize our nation.   Although all conclusions Professor Goen are not fully endorsed by these pages (and likely vice-versa), he makes some most valid points and directs us to keen observations by other historians.  This book is worth reading for anyone concerned with impacting our neighbors.  We should learn from history, or we are condemned to repeat our mistakes.   

Hopefully, these excerpts will yield clues to call the church to unify in the sense that scripture is God’s inerrant revealed word to man and we must not stray from this foundation without taking the nation with us. Today as before, if the nation falls, the church bears much of the blame.  Our suspicions that we have strayed are confirmed as we see parallels in the following excerpts.  The real question becomes, will we do our part to save our neighbors, at the same time saving ourselves, or will we watch, presuming our helplessness or disinterest while our nation implodes all around us?

Inclusion of these selected excerpts from the book and quotes from numerous church scholars are here to warn that if we failed then, we most certainly could fail now, and unfortunately are failing now.  Read the following with the substitution of abortion for slavery in the sentences.  We now are on this road.  Quotes from Goen are italicized.

Evangelism verses personal holiness

"The real problem was the perception on the part of the evangelicals that an antislavery church would necessarily remain a very small church. Slaveholders made it known that they would more readily "part with their church privileges rather than with their slaves."  The churches persuaded themselves that their main mission was to "Christianize the nation" by multiplying converts and their phenomenal success on this score seemed to justify the priority that placed "winning souls" above freeing slaves. But the soul winning campaigns maintained their emotional momentum only by studious avoidance of all controversial issues. The churches’ growth strategy depended on their not requiring converts to face the hard moral discipline demanded by Christian sensitivity to the evil of human bondage. So long as God seemed to smile on their zeal to bring in the unchurched, it was difficult to entertain any charge of fundamental wrongdoing. If slavery troubled a few sensitive spirits, its solution could still be delayed until a more convenient season.

Through their deliberate choice of expansion by evasion, the churches fatefully undermined whatever antislavery witness they might have had by consistently applying church discipline against slaveholding members. Every passing year found them entangled more inextricably with slavery, thus adding to the difficulty of dealing with the approaching conflict…The moral anomaly was becoming so malignant as to threaten the very life of the body that sustained it.

…Yet one must note that all controversial subjects were deliberately excluded from the prayer meetings- the means by which revivals spread –and that whatever "judgment" existed brought few slaveholders to the mourners’ bench.

The impotence of moral suasion is quite understandable in the context of a "revival" that deliberately suppressed all discussion of controversial issues.

Thus, in the period when American society was breaking apart, the churches found themselves unable to exercise effective leadership for the sake of social health and wholeness. Confronted with the glowering problem of slavery, revivalists were interested primarily in individual conversions, reformers naively urged pietistic solutions, independent Southerners set up a cry of laissez nous faire, and ecclesiocrats purchased a tenuous tranquillity by refusing to deal with the issue at all. The ethically sensitive urged at most a form of charity, but few called for systemic justice. That would have required fundamental changes in the institutional structure of American society, and no one could envision precisely what such changes might entail…"

 

Choosing Political Solutions to fix our own failure

"If public preachments against national sins failed to produce widespread repentance in the pattern made familiar by the evangelical revivals, the next step was legal coercion. If that failed, there remained only the wrath of God against sin-which easily translated into a holy war."

This is of great importance.  This is exactly where we have come.  Christians once preached on the evil of abortion.  As this became relatively silenced in the modern day church, Christians have chosen 'legal coercion', attempting to overthrow Roe vs. Wade.  We fight (and lose) the battle in courts and by trying to elect  "pro-life" politicians as we attempt to end abortion through legislation.  We neglect to follow God's directions in the scripture, however.    'Legal coercion' has failed for 30 years (how much more evidence do we need?), leaving us with the third step, God's wrath pouring out against us, as brought on the Civil War. 

"In the judgment of Dwight Lowell Dumond, "the failure of the churches at this point in our history forced the country to turn to political action against slavery, and political action destroyed slavery as a system but left the hearts of the slaveholders [and, it must be added, of other white Americans] unregenerate and left oppression of the free (Afro-Americans) little less of an evil than slavery had been."     

"As James G. Randall put it, "It was small minorities that caused the war; then the regions and sections got into it." … protests were ineffective, and other states soon followed South Carolina into schism, led "by a decisive minority, at a time when the majority was confused and indecisive."… without the active and energetic support of the clergy, already in defiant separation from their Northern ecclesiastical counterparts, secession would have had far less chance of adoption."

Christians are quickly becoming a minority as we lose our saltiness.   We are being carried by our society over a cliff into the abyss of deserving God's judgment.  Minorities of people, again today, are directing the masses of nominal Christians (if there is such a thing) into great danger.  History is made primarily by a committed minority (like our founding fathers) and their impact on the rest of the people willing to be carried by the stream.   Today, instead of the founder's deep commitment, Christians are largely seen as indecisive, foolish and weak when we should be meek, united and powerful with God's help.  Unfortunately it is highly unlikely our Lord will bless our efforts as we show our lack of faith, our failure to keep His commandments and doubt His Word as it is written.  Unfortunately, all it takes are a few committed evildoers to hurt us as well.  We need commitment.  

 

Impacting our Culture

"A hint of organicist thinking came belatedly from the editor of Harper’s Magazine just as Lincoln was being inaugurated. Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists, the editor wrote, were both doctrinaire groups who "persist in treating us as if we were got up by some chemical formula, and could be made and unmade at pleasure, instead of being a living body, with living antecedents and consequents". The division of the churches, he went on, had made many think that "the body of Christ is a nonentity, and Christianity is only a personal opinion." The same fuzzy thinking is now dividing the nation, as if "our nationality is little more than a bundle of ideas" and which of these is right must be settled by a contest of force."[You might] as well say that a man’s family is a bundle of opinions," the writer concluded, "and instead of cherishing the welfare of the household as a solid, vital fact, the great thing were welfare of the household as a solid, vital fact, the great thing were to agitate it with discussions on the rights of parents and children, and let love starve itself out in the eternal war of words." But his admonition came too late to do much good; the war of words was about to give way to a contest of cannon and muskets.

Elkins added that "religious vitality everywhere was overwhelming, but that vitality lay primarily in demands for individual satisfaction which took inevitable and repeated priority over institutional needs."  Even the definition of sin, which is crucial to a people’s sense of social responsibility, has historically been remanded in America to the individual, or worse, to itinerant preachers whose popularity rested on condemning immoralities that their hearers rarely committed.

A sufficient number of converts, it was assumed, would progressively rid society of all its evils, while masters could discharge their responsibility to slaves by providing religious instruction and treating them with kindness-which remained at best paternalistic and patronizing."

Again, religious instruction against sins in our society bears little fruit without a genuine fear of God and disallowing any compromise in relation to these specific sins.  If this had been heard from pulpits through the North and the South, undoubtedly the impact would have been greater, likely enough to turn the tide of physical conflict.

"More than one scholar has concluded that it was precisely the inability of the churches to do anything about eradicating slavery, no matter how uneasy their consciences may have been about the immorality of it, that confirmed their feeling of helplessness toward all social reforms demanding any kind of structural change."

Who is our God?  Isn't He big enough?  If He is for us, who can be against us?  Or will we suffer the same failure today as happened over a century ago?  'Without Me you can do nothing!'  Churches can do nothing without God's help.  How can God maintain His integrity by blessing a church that ignores His commands?  How can we be adequate tools for true salvation of our family and neighbors as our own lives are mired down in troubles from our past and current sins?   We become helpless not because of the God we serve but because of ourselves.    

"In their mounting agony over what was inescapably a moral crisis, Americans were left without decisive guidance from their moral mentors, and the nation descended inexorably into what William Seward called, plausibly enough in 1958, an irrepressible conflict."

 

Church Leadership

"George Junkin, a Northern leader of Old School Presbyterianism, laid special blame on his own denomination. Southern Presbyterians, he lamented, held the controlling power in their hands. "I could name a half dozen of Presbyterian ministers who could have arrested the secession, if they had seen fit. Notoriously, the Presbyterian ministers of the South were the leading supporters of the rebellion. It could not have been started without them."

The Northern clergy were no less ready than their Southern counterparts to transform the conflict into a crusade…. Neither side questioned the sacredness of its cause, and each interpreted the conflict in all the richness of biblical imagery.

There seem to have been few voices raised within the churches recognizing the possibility that God, as President Lincoln was to put it in the cadences of the Second Inaugural, had given "to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense [of slavery, etc.?] came."

It would be problematic, if not downright fatuous, to claim that if the popular denominations had held fast to their early condemnations of slavery and had nurtured an unswerving commitment to oppose it consistently within their own ranks, they could have maintained a united moral witness and saved the nation from its long and bloody tragedy. History never discloses its alternatives. But one can legitimately decry what Allan Nevins, an astute historian with profound human insight, called "wretched leadership" in a time of deepening crisis… for if political leadership was wretched, so was religious."

May this not be repeated!  Are we repeating it again?  More on church leadership:

"Earnest T. Thompson, magisterial historian of Southern Presbyterianism, deplored the lack of decisive leadership in both church and state: "The fact that this bloody and unnecessary war took place is a mark of the failure not only of the political but also of religious leaders, both North and South." The fatal flaw in antebellum church leadership was that ecclesiastics were less distressed by the evils of human bondage than concerned with the tasks of institutional maintenance. In the critical decades of the 1830’s and 1840’s, their efforts were directed more to muting the moral issue of slavery than to confronting it forthrightly. Even "church-oriented abolitionism," as John R. McKivigan termed it, though resolute enough in its own circles, had minimal impact on denominational leaders because for them, ecclesiastical peace was always more important than antislavery activity. By the time they were forced to take a position, it was too late to prevent a schism or even to shore up their stand against slavery.

Harriet Martineau was outraged and wrote: "the acquiescing clergy, who, if they do not understand [Christianity’s] principles, are unfit to be clergymen; and if they do, are unfit to be called Christians." She neatly caught the paradox of those who "uphold a faith which shall remove mountains, who teach that men are not to fear ‘them that kill the body, and afterwards have no more that they can do,’ [and yet] are the most timid class of society; the most backward in all great conflicts of principles. She wondered what kind of apostle Paul would have been "if he had preached on everything but idolatry at Ephesus, and licentiousness at Corinth." Her sarcastic answer: "Very much like the American Christian clergy of the nineteenth century," who preach against every sin but slavery."

OK, that is pretty harsh.  Does it truly fit today's leadership?   Maybe.  Either way, there are some legitimate concerns brought out here.   We must examine ourselves against scripture to see if this is God's view of us.

"Charles C. Cole said that the coming of the war "indicated a failure in leadership on the part of the [Northern] clergy just as much as on the part of the statesmen and politicians"….Both Northern and Southern church leaders, therefore, must be charged with serious dereliction to moral duty in shaping public opinion on the monumental immorality of slavery and in directing popular sentiment away from disruption and war.

Even if churches were unable or unwilling to exercise their influence to bring about structural changes in American society, they nonetheless had the option of making slaveowning by church members morally questionable and therefore subject to church discipline-but they refused to act before it was too late to avoid disruption.

Leaders of all groups realized correctly that an antislavery church would remain a small church, and few were willing to accept the limitations that a consistent stand against human bondage would impose on church growth. In starkest terms, most churchmen chose institutional concerns over human liberation, and that choice has to be judged a moral failure of enormous proportions."

The last paragraph portrays incorrect humanly thought processing, also embraced by some leaders today.  Who would have predicted a carpenter's son could do what was done, with 12 common, 'unlearned' men?  The church grows when people see commitment, lack of compromise, as in China and Sudan.  Once the scriptures are modified to be culturally correct, they then  fail to be God's inerrant word and then become mere suggestions for a civic organization. 

No fear of God?  Anyone's opinion is as worthless as anyone else's. 

"Alex de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830’s and remarked: "you meet a politician where you expected to find a priest."

William Warren Sweet, a Methodist historian a generation ago observed that "the church does not lead public opinion on such matters as the slavery issue, but rather, tends to follow public opinion."

Republican ideology demands that the denominations follow, rather than lead, their constituencies. "Republican ideology," moreover, was reinforced by revivalistic appeals, which had swelled the ranks of the popular churches while reducing the demands of moral discipline.

"But such warnings went unheeded, and even after six hundred thousand American men had died by their brothers’ hands, in the stillness at Appomattox there was little contrition in the broken churches that had prefigured the broken nation.""

 

Conclusion and Plan of Action

Can we fix this?  It is possible- if our 'preachments' become more Bible centered, teaching the fear of God and with a 'no holds barred' attitude toward sin.  Perhaps God will spare us before greater pain and suffering.  Without Christians cleaning our own house, we are simply doomed. 

"Antislavery evangelicals in the North rejected "southern sociology", of course, but had little to offer in its place."

May we continue to offer other solutions such as adoption services, etc.   We really have been doing the right thing here, offering a better solution. 

"William Adams, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in New York City, urged would-be reformers to "begin as God does, with the heart of the individual man; acquaint him with his destiny, and qualify him for it; and you may leave all other questions to an easy, natural, and inevitable solution"…The improvement of society, therefore, depended only on the conversion of a sufficient number of individual sinners."

This is partially true.  Even the early church had factions that were misguided, oftentimes distorting scripture to justify personal preferences.  This underscores the need for biblical based teaching as our only source of God-given, inerrant, truth.  This, plus instillation of the true 'fear of God' upon the individual sinners will guide believers to appropriate decisions.  Fear was present when the Holy Spirit moved in Acts and undoubtedly was part of the process of unifying the early church. As a united front, exhibiting the truth and our unwavering devotion to pleasing God, a sufficient number of individual sinners will be converted, much as was present during our country's foundation.

We are in this vortex again.  The zeal to 'win others for Christ' ahead of personal and corporate holiness has contributed to this dilemma.  God probably will best use one who seeks Him wholeheartedly.  Although God can use a crooked stick (unfortunately I qualify for this distinction) to draw a straight line, how can we best please Him, be used by Him and to impact others for Him?  We must develop our own holiness, fear of God and a totally sold out commitment to God's commands to show others the culturally incorrect Christian lifestyle as the disciples had done. 

We are waging a war against political powers in a political fashion that was not God's instruction.  He commands us to do His will, putting His issues first, whatever the cost.  The results are up to Him.  We now alienate pro-abortion, homosexual, and other individuals when they see our war being waged in the political realm, not through the spiritual warfare that God directed us to pursue.  They are not our enemies, they are deceived and need God's love as much as we do.  We must never be silent regarding sin, we should support appropriate values and legislation.  We must not engage in a political policy that allows compromise of God's values, no matter who the politician may be.  Shouldn't we show other Christians what is most important?  Isn't that the way God's will is communicated to our neighbors?  How could politics be more effective than to follow God's direction not to compromise His 'issues'?  Standing firm with God and divorcing ourselves from man-centered political power thinking becomes a great witness to our culture, as it did in the past and currently in other countries.

If we continue to try to increase 'church growth' without personal discipleship, we will remain largely ineffective.  If we do as God directed, the gates of Hell will not stand in our way.  

 

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