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3. Religious Liberty
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Liberty vs. Slavery
Christianity and the American Church
Ideals vs. Practice
America’s Past, Present, and Future
Summary
Analysis
Douglass points out that the American church is not just indifferent to slavery—worse than that, it is actively supportive of it. Slavery has become codified in American Christian teachings, with the church teaching that the master-slave relationship is a normal one sanctioned by God. Douglass asserts that this is not true Christianity, but in fact a twisted and blasphemous imitation of it that has nonetheless been accepted by the American public.
Douglass’s anti-church sentiment would have been quite radical for his time, but it’s notable that his criticisms here are distinct from anti-Christian rhetoric. On the contrary, Douglass accuses the church of being a perversion of true Christianity. This is not only a condemnation of the church, but of Americans in general, since they’ve accepted this blasphemous Christianity.
Themes
To Douglass, even atheism is preferable to Christianity taught by pro-slavery ministers. He accuses these ministers of turning Christianity into a machine for cruelty, and states that pro-slavery faith leaders do more to compromise Christianity than all the writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke combined. He states that the pro-slavery church strips the love from Christianity and turns it into a religion of oppression that welcomes individuals who brutalize their fellow man. Quoting the Book of Isaiah, he urges the church to “cease to do evil, learn to do well.”
Given that Douglass is a devout Christian, his claim that atheism is preferable to pro-slavery Christianity drives home just how despicable he finds the church. The writers he cites are Enlightenment-era proponents of Deism, whose belief in empirical knowledge over spiritual revelation often led to disdain from traditional Christians. Thus, Douglass invokes them in order to further emphasize just how far American Christianity has strayed from true faith due to its support of slavery.
Themes
Douglass goes into more detail about the specific nature of the church’s guilt, which is not only about their teachings, but about their refusal to push for abolition. He points out that, given the church’s enormous societal influence, they could easily bolster the abolitionist cause, but choose not to do so. He claims that, if the entire institution of the church rallied against slavery, the entire system would be eradicated near-instantaneously. It is for this reason, he continues, that the church carries a profound guilt for their part in the continuation of the slave trade.
In this section, rather than focusing on what the church does support (namely, slavery), Douglass focuses on what it don’t support: abolition. The distinction between these two criticisms is important since, as Douglass points out, the church has so much influence that either position it takes is essentially the position of the American public. In other words, Douglass not only paints the church as having strayed from true Christian values—he also implies that it has squandered its influence and effectively made a malicious choice by refusing to come out in support of abolition.
Themes
Douglass says that abolitionists have been asked to spare the church in their criticisms, but he argues that such criticism is unavoidable—after all, the stakes are too high to ignore the powerful institution that is allowing America to continue its slave trade. He goes on to name a long list of influential ministers who supported the Fugitive Slave Act and uses this as evidence that the entire institution of the church is corrupt. However, he also takes a moment to praise those ministers who are the exceptions, such as his friend on the stage with him.
Douglass returns to his rhetorical technique of moving from the general to the specific. In this instance, he does so by naming specific prominent ministers who support slavery in order to highlight just how endemic pro-slavery sentiment is in the American church. While Douglass also takes a more positive tone in naming abolitionist ministers, the fact that this list is much shorter and described as “exceptions” further emphasizes the bleak state of American Christianity.
Themes
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