The Role of Religion in Slavery and Racism
Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, after she gained her freedom from slavery. She was living in northern America, and she wrote her book with the specific purpose of offering a personal and thorough view of slavery to the white people of the north who possessed a deficient knowledge of the way slaves were treated on southern plantations. Religion was an important aspect of Jacobs’s life because her grandmother instilled in her the importance of God and religion from a young age. A God-fearing slave was sometimes considered an oxymoron because of the way that white slave owners used religion to manipulate and oppress African slaves. Many slaves wanted nothing to do with religion, especially after gaining their freedom, but Jacobs clung to hers. It guided her life, giving her direction, wisdom, and purpose in a world that seemingly had none. Although the slave owners tried to use religion as an oppressive tool, Jacobs made it her own; she didn’t allow it to dominate her in the way her oppressors had intended.
Nina Bosničová writes in her article, Changing Perspectives on Religion in African American Women’s Autobiographies, about Harriet Jacobs’s experience with religion in contrast with other female African America writers in whose lives religion also played an important role. In her article, she examined the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou in conjunction with Jacobs’s work. Bosničová notes from her research that in both Jacobs’s and Angelou’s works, the grandmother characters in each are the “true embodiments of Christian piety. To these two women, both of whom have witnessed slavery, the belief in God is a true source of perseverance and strength in the morally corrupted world of the American South” (11). Jacobs draws a distinct line in her work between the God that the slave holders try to force upon their slaves and the God that she believes in—the God that her grandmother taught her to believe in, the God that she sees as the true God. She says, “Slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks . . . Yet few slaveholders seem to be aware of the widespread moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system. Their talk is of blighted cotton crops—not of the blight on their children’s souls” (56). In her words, she recognizes that slavery is evil. It has no moral ground to stand on, despite what slave owners might try to say. Everyone who was involved in it—whether slave or slave owner—was negatively affected by its degradation.
Jacobs dedicated an entire chapter of her book to the things that slave holders taught their slaves about religion, the north, and those slaves who had gained their freedom—all of the lies they spread to keep their slaves in line. Jacobs saw the lies they told for what they were:
They seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created the Africans to be slaves. What a libel upon the heavenly Father, who “made of one blood all nations of men!” And then who are Africans? Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves? (47)
Her and her grandmother both held fast to their belief in rejecting the idea that slavery was an institution endowed by God himself. They knew it was a blatant lie made to comfort slave holders as well as to manipulate slaves and satiate their humanistic desires for purpose in life. As Jacobs points out, who can truly know just how different the blood of a slave and that slave’s owner is? Skin color was the only noticeable difference, but Jacobs stresses the point that it doesn’t really matter. In reality, the difference is so insignificant, especially when slave owners rape their slaves, bringing mixed-racial children into the world who are then still considered black and still considered slaves. Jacobs writes that, in some cases, it becomes extremely difficult to determine whether a person is composed of more white blood or more African blood—sometimes a person with African heritage can pass as perfectly Anglican. So, what is the real gain of treating people differently based on color, when the determining factor itself is so drastically unreliable.
Throughout her book, Jacobs offers a complex and layered representation of religion showing how it is different for each of those who practice it and explaining how these differences effect the individuals’ lives and views on other people, religion, God, and themselves. Some slaves believed the lies they were told by the white men and were more alienated in their lives because of those beliefs. Other slaves refused to believe in the God they were taught about; they refused to believe in God at all. The slaves like Jacobs believed in God, but they saw the lies that institutional religion tried so thoroughly to implant in their brains. Jacobs doesn’t conclude with describing the effects of religion on the African slaves, however. She also examines the effects on the whites of the south and the different ways each of them practiced and viewed religion. At one point, she describes a man she heard of who had virtually no regard for the lives of his slaves. She recounts the story of a family friend who ended up in the possession of this slave owner and who died as a result of the owners lack of regard and vicious tactics:
He was a slave; and the feeling was that the master had a right to do what he pleased with his own property. And what did he care for the value of a slave? He had hundreds of them . . . He also boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower. (52-53)
In Jacobs’s eyes—and the eyes of many slaves—the God and faith that this man and so many other slaveholders claimed to have was one that simply could not exist. She found proof of her position on this issue through her ability to read the Bible, newspapers, and other books and writings for herself. She saw the ungodly dehumanization of the slaveholding community and the resulting evil and loss of value of life that rooted itself in those who possessed slaves.
Jacobs did not always find that slave owners emulated such evil dispositions, however. In some cases, she found that they seemed nearly as upright as she thought Christians should be, and they seemed merely misguided in a time that taught both slaves and slave owners that slavery was an institution instigated by God:
I knew a young lady who was one of these rare specimens. She was an orphan, and inherited as slaves a woman and her six children . . . [She] was very pious, and there was some reality in her religion. She taught her slaves to lead pure lives, and wished them to enjoy the fruit of their own industry. Her religion was not a garb put on for Sunday. And laid aside till Sunday returned again. (53)
One of Jacobs’s main goals in sharing her story through this book was to show the white people of the north how complex the relations of color, gender, and religion were in the south in regards to slavery and racism. She makes it a point to show how some of the slave owners seem just as trapped—or at least just as brainwashed—in the system they’ve created as the slaves are. The lady Jacobs talks about in this passage doesn’t seem to evoke the typical slaveholder persona that is depicted in similar works like that of Frederick Douglass, but Jacobs still points out the pitfall of this lady’s religion.
Despite her apparent piety in relation to the man described in the other passage, Jacobs describes a woman who merely acts uprightly within the system that purports the evils of slavery. Likewise, Jacobs also talks about her first mistress and the real love that she had for that woman. In her recollection of the time she spent as her property, she notes that the woman had a great impact in her life and was a mostly upright Christian woman herself. When her mistress died and willed her to a family member, however, Jacobs notes that the mistress’s actions contradicted her views on Christianity that she taught Jacobs. Jacobs says in retrospect, “I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice . . . she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege . . . I bless her memory” (5). Part of Jacobs’s motivation for discussing a multifaceted view of slavery in which she examines all of its dynamic effects on everyone involved is the emotional connections she had with many of those who were by nature supposed to be her enemies.
This conflict that Jacobs brings up in her discussion on the interracial relationships of the American south is the same conflict that Mark Twain grapples with in his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His position on the subject of religion is in opposition to Jacobs’s, however. Mark Twain was fascinated with lies and with the “art” of lying. He often wrote and spoke about the lies told by individuals as well as the grander lies told by institutions, religions, governments, cultures, etc. (Camfield, 105). His story follows Huckleberry Finn—Huck for short—on an adventure down the Mississippi river with an escaped slave named Jim—which is an interesting, though probably merely coincidental, choice of name for the character given the post-emancipation period in which Twain was writing this story. Jim Crow laws began coming into effect in 1877 which was one year after Twain began writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is clear that the issue of racism—and even slavery despite the 13th amendment—was a topic that was prevalent during the time in which Twain was writing his book. The large impact that Jim Crow laws, religion, slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation all likely had on the development of his story is interesting to consider.
According to Gregg Camfield in his article, The Art of Judicious Lying, Mark Twain was fascinated by lies throughout his lifetime. Lying was a central theme in many of his books and speeches as he examined the implications of institutional lies and the interplay of different forms of lying. Camfield says, “Twain’s anxiety about deception in education extended to the highest level—that is, to the colleges that ostensibly confer a liberal education. About these he wrote . . . ‘All schools, all colleges have two great functions. To confer and to conceal valuable knowledge’” (109). He believed that concealment or withholding of information was a mode of lying that was not to be taken anymore lightly than outright spoken lies. According to Camfield, Twain’s attention to lies, specifically pertaining to their functions in societies, poses the question, “if your civilization lies and you don’t know it, are you at all culpable in expressing those lies? If, on the other hand, your culture’s ostensible truths are lies and you know it, are you lying if you fail to challenge those beliefs?” (110). It is out of these questions that the central themes of Huck’s story arises. Huck often finds himself at odds with authority figures—whether it is his father, educational systems, religious institutions, God, government. This tension exemplifies Twain’s own suspicions about the world pertaining to authority, trust, and lies.
Twain’s views on Christianity were always highly skeptical, but as Camfield points out, “By the late 1870s he was absolutely convinced that common notions of Christian afterlife were lies, as he put it” (110). Like Jacobs, Twain wanted to write about the role of religion in the institution of slavery; unlike Jacobs, however, Twain was against religion as a whole—not just its downfalls as a mode of immoral justification. His issue went beyond that of Jacobs’s and into his personal feelings of skepticism toward any form of authority. As Camfield notes, though, “he did with unusual vigor try to challenge religious faith in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (111). Twain’s suspicious disposition can definitely be felt throughout Huck’s story and within Huck’s own character. The entire book essentially is a multidimensional attack on the institution of religion. In part, he criticizes religion through symbolism on the grounds that it is just as ridiculous as any other superstitious activity or belief. Throughout the story, the characters engage in superstition that the reader will implicitly find ridiculous. In the first chapter, Huck talks about different sounds of owls, dogs, the wind, etc. all telling him bad omens. He then burns a spider with a candle which he claims is a bad omen. To avoid the bad luck of this action, he performs rituals which he knows to be useful for keeping witches away or helping find lost horseshoes (286). Twain includes these kinds of superstitions throughout the story, highlighting their ridiculousness, and his point comes across when he ardently equates that superstition to religious faith. A few chapters later Huck talks about how old Miss Watson told him that prayer would grant him whatever he asked for: “But it warn’t so. I tried it” (294) Huck explains to the reader. The representation of superstitions—both religious and otherwise— in the text raises the notion that either all or none are worth believing. The view has some merit, although many would agree that most superstitions do not all fall on the same points in a plotline of believability.
Twain’s more explicit—and more notable specifically in the context of this paper—charge against religiosity is its use to indoctrinate and brainwash societies through self-serving lies. In a sense, Huck represents Christianity as a whole—or rather what Christianity and religion are capable of instilling, specifically into the minds of young individuals. Camfield says, “Twain shows superstition to be a confusion between subjective desire and objective truth . . . [Huck] wants to believe his quasi-animistic beliefs, so he cherry-picks data to confirm his desires” (112). Huck seems to make up his beliefs about the world as he goes along; it can be seen in the example mentioned above when Huck tries to apply good luck rituals to remedy his incident with the spider, even though he knows that these are remedies for other maladies and probably won’t be effective. Huck’s actions can be applied to the mindset of slave owners who “cherry-picked” through Biblical passages for any stretch of logic that fortified their belief in the so-called God-given right they had to own slaves. One such passage, found in Genesis 9:18-27, has to be filled in with so many details and twisted to such an extent before it can fit with the slave-holder’s narrative. In the passage, Noah gets drunk and his youngest son, Canaan, finds him in his drunken nakedness. Canaan tells the two older brothers who walk backward into the tent with a blanket to cover him. When Noah sobers up, he says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant” (Genesis 9:25-27). Basically, the idea that supports slavery here is that Canaan is the father of Africa, and the older brothers are the fathers of white nations. Anyone of unbiased opinion could easily denounce it as a stretch of the overzealous imagination of men seeking any possible form of justification for their actions. Another popular passage is less of a stretch:
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh . . . as unto Christ . . . doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free (Ephesians 6:5-8).
Essentially what this passage is saying is that anyone who finds himself in the charge of another man—in a wide variety of different situations, not just slavery—should be obedient to the master because that obedience is actually obedience to the Lord in the position in which he has placed a person. While it may be valid to infer that the message of these verses to African slaves would be to remain obedient to their masters, the passage in no way actually condones slavery or states that it is a divine practice. On the contrary, nowhere in the Bible does God support slavery, but a slave owner would quickly point out that he likewise never explicitly condemns it.
Camfield shows in his article that the shift in Twain’s narrative from an attack on religion to an attack on slavery and racism in relation to religion occurred as a result of the Jim Crow laws which began systematically oppressing African Americans during the time in which he was writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1882—two years before the book was published—Twain visited the Mississippi Valley. Camfield writes, “There he met George Washington Cable, who convinced him that not only would the South never progress until it got over its racism, but that the racism was so deep and so bad that blacks were being re-enslaved, under the cover of ‘Jim Crow’ laws” (115). The dynamic he needed to combat this racism in the post-Reconstruction South was conveniently already set up through the relationship of Huck and Jim. He needed only to push the development of that relationship into a direction that would evoke empathy in readers for both Jim and Huck and show the complexities of the indoctrination of both slave and slave-owner in the South.
The dynamic of their relationship already had the background of religion to accurately show Huck’s development and the interplay of religion and slavery in the South. At one point in the story, Huck begins to consider the “consequences” of his desperately wicked involvement in helping a runaway slave. He thinks about poor Miss Watson and how she doesn’t deserve to have him stealing her slave and taking him down the river. So, he plans to write a letter to her explaining everything, but he is initially hesitant in writing the letter because he believes that it will only result in both his and Jim’s lives being miserable back home. He seems to be rationalizing a justification not to do the “right thing.” Eventually, however, upon realizing that he can’t even pray due to the detrimental condition of his heart, he breaks down and writes the letter. The result of this action on his emotional state is remarkable, making him feel free of the sin. After sitting for a while longer, he begins to think about all of the good times he and Jim have shared over their journey down the river. Letting these thoughts into his head only complicates the situation for him, eventually leading him to change his mind again, more resolute than ever: “I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then I says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore [the letter] up” (Twain, 526). Twain positions, in that moment, Huck as a hero for defying institutional religion and following his heart’s deepest conviction about Jim’s personhood and ultimately their friendship. Huck’s willingness to forsake his religion and “go to hell” in order to save Jim shows the value that Huck finds in Jim and ultimately calls the reader to find that value in all slaves—in all African Americans.
Further into the story, Twain continues to explore his fascination with lying through the unfolding events. After Huck destroys his letter and vows to help his friend, Jim, he finds that he has to partake in, what Twain and Camfield call, judicious lying. As Twain points out multiple times over the course of his life, lying is inevitable. The object in life then is not to avoid lying, but to use it in a way that benefits others—unselfish, honorable, judicious. “A virtuous lie may be better than a cruel truth” (Camfield, 119). Huck in the beginning of the story has no problem lying for his own personal gain or entertainment, but he learns by the end of the story the importance of lying for the benefit of others instead. Twain seems to believe that lying is so far engrained into our existence even in basic social interactions that the only way to be an upright person in this culture of lies is to emulate lies that benefit a morally good end.
This is a dilemma that both Harriet Jacobs and Mark Twain confront within their respective works. On one hand, fiction is technically a form of lying by which an author relays some truth to the reader. So The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is entirely a lie because none of the events actually happened, but the story holds an air of truth and real world applicability. Similarly, Jacobs writes her autobiography in an interestingly fictitious way. She changes the names of all the characters in her story, and she even changes the timelines and specific details of some events. One could argue that any autobiography is likely made up of many lies which work together to hold a general truth. One could even argue that fiction and non-fiction are not actually all that different—there is more of an interplay of the two within every work. One cannot exist solitarily without the other. Both Jacobs and Twain use this interplay of fiction and nonfiction to achieve their goals within their works.
Their goals actually ring very similar despite their historical positions on opposite sides of the emancipation proclamation. They both sought to enlighten the North about the mindset of white and black southerners and the resulting difficulties that African Americans faced—whether as slaves or “free” citizens. Their books are calls to action to those who would rather turn a blind eye to the suffering of others and gloss over that suffering with lies that pacify their sense of humanity and community. Throughout history sojourners of truth have spoken out in defense of the victims of oppression and discrimination, calling to action those who stand in a position to help but who are often too uneducated about the situation to act or even care.
A modern cohort within this community of activist writers is Michelle Alexander who wrote the book The New Jim Crow. “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” she writes in the introduction (1). In her book she tells the story of how she came to realize that there is a new epidemic of Jim Crow laws in the United States: the war on drugs. In a time when Obama was the president of the United States—a time when, as Alexander points out, we would think racism and systematic oppression are truly dead—she realizes that discrimination is in fact alive and well and functioning heavily still within our government and judicial system. Like Jacobs and Twain in their respective time periods, Alexander writes her book to those who have benevolent hearts but who fail to grasp the gravity of the situation they are a witness to.
Furthermore, all three of these authors call us to action as a country and as humans in general; they call us and future generations to action by urging us to seek out truth within societies and institutions that lie to us. They caution us to remain skeptical always, not taking anything at face value. They plead for us to acknowledge those who, whether we notice it or not, are being oppressed. Every day the targets of oppression shift and change, but oppression itself remains an ugly force we must combat. Whether it’s religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, political views, or any other form of difference we might have as human beings, we must constantly remain vigilant against those who would seek to sew division and enforce practices of oppression through laws, religion, medicine, etc. Only through vigilance, open-mindedness, and understanding can we create a world that is safe for all people—a community in which all can survive and thrive.
Works Cited
- Alexander, Michelle, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2012.
- Bosničová, Nina. “Changing Perspectives on Religion in African American Women's Autobiographies.” Brno Studies in English, vol. 31, no. 11, 1 Jan. 2005, pp. 111–118., https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/104211/1_BrnoStudiesEnglish_31-2005-1_13.pdf?sequence=1.
- Camfield, Gregg. “The Art of Judicious Lying.” The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 105–123., doi:10.5325/marktwaij.16.1.0105.
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, et al. Four Great American Classics. Bantam Classics, 2008. (281-616)
- Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Signet Classics, 2000.
- King James Version. Blue Letter Bible, www.blueletterbible.org. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.
- Patterson, Robert J. “A Triple-Twined Re-Appropriation: Womanist Theology and Gendered-Racial Protest in the Writings of Jarena Lee, Frances E. W. Harper, and Harriet Jacobs.” Religion and Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2013, p. 55. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2014701934&site=ehost-live.
- Rae, Noel. “How Christian Slaveholders Used the Bible to Justify Slavery.” Time, Time, 23 Feb. 2018, https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/.
- Selby, Gary S. “Mocking the Sacred: Frederick Douglasss ‘Slaveholders Sermon’ and the Antebellum Debate over Religion and Slavery.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 88, no. 3, 2002, pp. 326–341., doi:10.1080/00335630209384380.
- Urofsky, Melvin I. “Jim Crow Law.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 21 Aug. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law.
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