Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America by Studying Frederick Douglass and His Times
I am commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America by studying Frederick Douglass and his times.
There is no understanding Douglass without knowing his connection to prophetic Scripture. As a former slave, who was not considered a citizen and could not vote, he was still subject to being taken off the street anywhere in the United States under an approved United States law called the Fugitive Slave Act. He was still at risk even after purchasing his freedom. As someone who prevailed in a physical altercation with his own slavemaster, and lster escaped, he advocated active resistance by enslaved people based on his understanding of their "natural rights" as humans .
His clarity of intellect, writing, and speeches about the absurdity of promising liberty and justice for all, when it did not include all, was the basis of his life’s work. He came to believe that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document. He laid 100% of the blame for allowing slavery to continue at the feet of a pro-slavery version of Christianity.
This excerpt from the book is very instructive regarding his philosophy. I see parallels with pro-slavery Christianity of that time and Christian nationalism in our time. Both distort scripture and want to integrate civil laws with religion for self-serving purposes.
Chapter 13
BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON
I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down . . . to build, and to plant. —JEREMIAH 1:10
Frederick Douglass had learned the hard way that oppression, loss, and anger had to be controlled and braced with knowledge if a former slave with an extraordinary mind was to survive in the United States. He was a man of the nineteenth century, a thoroughgoing inheritor of Enlightenment ideas, but for justification, and for the story in which to embed the experience of American slaves, he reached for the Old Testament Hebrew prophets of the sixth to eighth centuries BC.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were his companions, a confounding but inspiring source of intellectual and emotional control. Their great and terrible stories provided Douglass the deepest well of metaphor and meaning for his increasingly ferocious critique of his own country. Their Jerusalem, their temple, their Israelites transported in the Babylonian Captivity, their oracles to the nation of the woe to be inflicted upon them by a vengeful God for their crimes, were his American “republic,” his “bleeding children of sorrow,” his warnings of desolations soon to visit his own guilty land. Their story was ancient and modern; it gave the weight of the ages to his cause.
Their awesome narratives of destruction and apocalyptical renewal, exile and return, provided scriptural basis for his mission to convince Americans they must undergo the same. The Old Testament prophets helped make Douglass a great ironist and a great storyteller; they fueled his growing militancy and brought pathos and thunder to his voice as they also shaped his view of history itself. Douglass not only used the Hebrew prophets; he joined them. The Hebrew prophets delivered their sayings and poems orally in public gatherings. Whether Douglass understood this or not, it makes his oratorical use of the jeremiadic tradition all the more poignant.
As Isaiah “came . . . and said,” and Jeremiah followed God’s call to “go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem,” so Douglass proclaimed antislavery oracles to vast public audiences in proslavery America. God had visited Jeremiah and instructed him, “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth,” and given him his calling. Beginning with the black churches he attended in Baltimore, where he would have first heard preaching on the Exodus story, Douglass had reached that moment as well. He was an American Jeremiah chastising the flock as he also called them back to their covenants and creeds.
