Berkley Center

One of the striking aspects of this Berkley Center report is the ways in which it reveals present-day tensions among the disparate faith-based anti-trafficking efforts in Cambodia. My own research in nineteenth-century U.S. anti-slavery efforts suggests that some of these tensions may be tied to long established differences in how Christian denominations approach activism. I wonder, are American evangelicals’ and liberal religionists’ disagreements about how to perform activism haunted in some ways by historical differences with regard to the conception of the “human,” the role of suffering in human existence, and the believer’s attitude toward the state?

Historically, evangelicals and liberal religionists disagreed about the fundamental concept of what it means to be a human being. As a result, their practitioners developed quite different performances to grant or acknowledge the full humanity of the enslaved. In the early nineteenth-century American anti-slavery movement, for example, evangelicals viewed humans as burdened by original sin. Only through becoming born again in Christ could the slaves become fully human. Abolitionist “rescuers” were responsible for the souls of the enslaved; physical freedom was insufficient to restore slave’s full humanness. Often, these evangelicals saw slaves as descendants of the sons of Ham, purportedly cast out for sinning against his father. Without stretching their hands to God , the slaves could not be saved; they would not be fully human. Unitarians and Quakers, in contrast, within this same U.S. abolitionist movement, viewed God as a rational, kindly presence who would never burden humankind with sin. Instead of believing in the story of Ham, they believed in the Biblical notion of monogenesis: all humans were born the same, fully human. It was their different environments and climates that might differentiate them in terms of physical characteristics. Because these liberal practitioners believed that everyone was born fully human, they felt no pressure to proselytize. They viewed slavery not as God’s punishment but as a terrible error in reason that had to be corrected. Slavery, to them, was a sign of human error, not (as for the evangelicals) a sign of God’s disfavor.

These differences were tied to specific religious performances: while evangelicals focused on Christ’s suffering as redemption for humans mired in sin and believed in sympathizing with the suffering slaves, liberal religionists refused to believe in suffering as a pathway to redemption. They turned away from sympathy to represent slaves as rational, intelligent beings, enslaved through human misjudgments. Again, human errors could, through reason and systemic change, be corrected. The focus here was often on dismantling the economic systems that undergirded slavery.

Evangelicals also tended to accept the notion of the citizen, responsible to the state, so when enslaved persons did become born again, they became blameworthy if they did not flourish within the democratic state. These practitioners tended to want to work within the legal system, slowly changing the laws and statutes. Liberal religionists, in contrast, typically rejected the U.S. Constitution and what they called the violence of the law. They tried to work outside of the state.