George Whitefield's complicated legacy of race relations, Donald Trump and the evangelical church

George Whitefield, a well-known preacher in the 18th century, had a life-changing experience while at Oxford, Christ Church, while attending the so-called Holy Club prayer meetings run by John and Charles Wesley. While there he became convinced that mere identification with the church was insufficient, that one needed to have a personal experience with the risen Christ.


​Whitefield took this gospel of personal conversion to the Colonies, where he became a well-regarded preacher. He had a stunning oratory voice. During one in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin found that Whitefield's voice carried effortlessly for 500 feet. From this he estimated that at a single one of his open-air oratories, Whitefield could be heard by about 30,000 people at a time.

Whitefield carried the gospel of personal redemption and personal relationship with Christ up and down the Colonies, making him one of the leading architects of a movement that historians of religion refer to as the Great Awakening. His preaching, it has been said, engaged not just the head, but the heart as well. In many ways, he is one of the founders of the evangelical movement. His is an interesting and compelling story for what a man can do when he is committed to the cause of Christ.

For all that, Whitefield had an interesting track record when it came to blacks and race relations.

On the one hand, he was one of the first evangelists to preach to the enslaved. He also took to task slave owners in Maryland. Virginia and South Carolina for how they treated their slaves. In one letter addressed to such slave owners, he wrote, "Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables; but your slaves who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege."

Good so far, right?

How about this, then: Although Whitefield considered black people to be as deserving of the gospel and as fully human as white people like himself; he had no objection to slavery itself. In fact, from 1748 to 1750 he campaigned to see the Georgia colony re-establish slavery, which it had outlawed in 1735. Whitefield argued that the colony would never be economically successful without slavery, and he further lamented that an orphanage he had founded was struggling financially because it couldn't rely on unpaid slave labor. When Georgia finally reinstated slavery in 1751, Whitefield saw the legalization not only as a personal vindication of his efforts but also as a reflection of the divine will. When he died, he owned some 50 slaves. He didn't set them free, but left them to someone else.

Let's sum it up this way. Whitefield saw blacks as human, but he was willing to see them suffer the indignities of slavery, as long as they weren't treated too badly, because their suffering made it possible to accomplish other, good things.

Now it's a common defense of flawed heroes that they were a product of their times. That's really a poor excuse, though; we're called to transcend our times, and while Whitefield did this in some respects, he failed horribly at the crucial moral test of opposing slavery. This wasn't an impossible test. Groups like the Society of Friends (Quakers) had begun to oppose the enslavement of Africans in the latter half of the 17th century, not long after the practice had begun.

I'll put it blunty: Whitefield was wrong, horribly wrong. Much as all of us who engage in hagiography would lke to suggest it otherwise, there is no excuse for what he did. He sinned, and in his sin, he helped to persuade others to excuse the treatment of human beings as chattel, consigning hundreds of thousands of other humans to the chains of slavery until the Civil War, and beyond, through jim crow-era injustices like sharecropping and labor camps like Parchan Farm. If his legacy includes the spread of Christianity across the Colonies and even into the durability of the Union after the Revolution, then it also includes the brutal exploitation and oppression of black women, men and children for more than the next century. If his labors for the gospel brought glory to God, then his labors for slavery also added to the defamation of Christ.

Please hear me out on this.

What the church just did about a month ago in throwing its support behind Trump is the same thing that Whitefield did. More than four in five white evangelicals voted for Trump, despite the racist rhetoric he spewed about blacks and Hispanics. He described black neighborhoods in our cities as war zones, shared white supremacist lies about black-on-white crime, attacked the legitimacy of our first black president, got sued (twice!) by the Justice Department in the 1970s for refusing to rent to black people, condoned the day after the beating of a black protester at one of his rallies and called the protestor's First Amendent actions "disgusting," and on and on. I'm sure I don't need to detail the racism he has directed at Hispanics, or the horrible things he has said about women.

Since the election, in New York alone, bias incidents have spiked 400 percent since the election. Let me repeat that: Just in New York there have been four times *more* incidents aimed at ethnic or religious minorities since Trump was elected, over the number of incidents before. Many of these have included direct references to Trump as seeming justification for the incidents and the behavior. Look around the news and you'll see stories of bullying in kindergartens, in high school, in public by adults. A Muslim cop yesterday was called a terrorist and told to go back to Saudi Arabia. Children are being told by their classmates that they're going to be deported. Bigotry has been given license.

We need to own this, because it's ours. The support Trump enjoyed from white evangelicals more than put him over the top to win, not the popular vote, but the electoral vote. When the church voted for Trump, the church said it was OK with his attitudes and these actions. Why did evangelicals vote for him in such numbers? Among the reasons I've heard given: he's going to be a friend to Christianity, and he's going to appoint conservative (or) pro-life judges to the Supreme Court, while a President Clinton presumably would not have.

In other words, like George Whitefield 260 years ago, the evangelical church that he helped to found has continued to carry his legacy, both good and bad. We'll bear with and even justify the continued oppression of an entire group of people (or more) if it helps us to further other goals that we consider righteous.

Whitefield was wrong, horribly wrong, to support slavery. The evangelical church was wrong, horribly wrong to support Trump. It put its faith in a man who has broken his word in hundreds of business contracts, and to each of his wives. Trump is not going to do God's work. Already he has an attorney general nominee whose history suggests he would dismantle what is left of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts; a chief counsel who is known for white supremacy and anti-Semitism, a secretary of education nominee with no support for public education; and on and on. He has continued his shakedown style of "negotiations" with Boeing that he used to destroy small businesses all over New Jersey and New York. In supporting Trump, a man with no values, the evangelical church has supported a man who opposes everything Christ stands for. The church is often quick to point out its legacy of hospitals, famine relief and other such projects. Trump is also part of our legacy.

Today's theme for Advent is "repent." Repentance is not easy, but it is necessary. It involves turning around and changing direction from where we are going. In order for repentance to happen, it requires awakening. We need to awaken not only to what Trump represents, but what the church's support of him has done to the authority and respectability of the church.

If what I'm saying here resonates with you at all, please take a look around your church. If it's a church that is on board with a Trump presidency, and sees it as a good thing, do yourself a favor. Don't try to change it. Just leave. Find a black church, join it, and discover the gospel from a different point of view. Find a church that celebrates racial diversity and actually looks like what we see in the book of Revelation, a community drawn from every tribe, nation and language. Dr. King famously described Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in America. Not much has changed in the past 50 years.

If your church has its reservations about Trump, now is the time to talk with your church leaders and elders about how to respond. Can your church offer physical sanctuary to families fearful of being deported, as the Reformed Church of Highland Park did 16 years ago? Can your church begin buying debt with the express purpose of canceling it, and setting people free? Can your church adopt a local pocket of immigrants, or start partnering with a church of a different ethnicity? If you're in the middle of a pastoral search, can you make it a priority to hire a pastor who comes from an ethnic minority?

Whitefield screwed this up because he was content to be a product of his times. Let's do better.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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A nation of immigrants and slaves

Immigration has been on my mind a lot lately, given ongoing talk of Trump's wall and the recent rise in bias incidents aimed at immigrants around the country.

I live in a city with a large immigrant population. Many of my neighbors in the city are here without documentation. So last night, I shared a short essay on Facebook on the welcome my ancestor Benjamin Nye received when he arrived on these shores in 1620. It was standard fare for the argument: We are a nation of immigrants, and should welcome other immigrants as we were.

This morning an acquaintance of mine left a comment on my post. "We are not only a nation of immigrants," he reminded me. "We are also a nation of slaves. Not everyone shared the American dream, though we all share in the American experience."

As Fahim reminded me, his ancestors didn't come here looking for a new beginning and the promise of freedom. They arrived in the cargo holds of ships. America wasn't William Bradford's city on a hill for them; it was a place where they were beaten and even hanged, until as late as the 1950s. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

It's true that Lincoln officially ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation and that the United States declared the practice unconstitutonal with the Fourteenth Amendment. It's also true that no proclamation or constitutional amendment can alter a practice as deeply entrenched in the culture and society as slavery was.

Thus the United States gave up on Reconstruction after 10 years, and pent-up resentment over the loss of white status led to all manner of repressive measures intended to return blacks in the South to the place they held prior to the Civil War, within the constraints of the new laws. Sharecropping was just another form of slavery, as were prisons like Parchman Farm. Voter suppression and poll taxes kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, and soon returned control of the Southern states and their congressional representation to whites, after a brief period of black representation.

And of course the Ku Klux Klan and its reign of terror drove those blacks north who could make the journey, to seek not better economic opportunities but basic survival. Up North, black laborers were viewed as unwanted competition by white laborers who within a generation or less after immigrating could assimilate because they looked a lot like their neighbors.

So yes, in the days of Jim Crow justice, blacks were free, but it wasn't much different from the days of slavery. Technically it was no longer illegal to teach blacks to read and write, but their schools were badly underfunded, dilapidated and worse. They were equal in the eyes of the law, but they still couldn't use the same bathrooms, drinking fountains or restaurants as whites, let alone other public facilities.

As recently as the 1950s black Americans could be and were executed without benefit of a trial in a public lynching. Then there's what happened in places like Greenwood, Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, when black neighborhoods became prosperous.

The 1960s saw some progress, but it was far more limited than we prefer to believe. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation laws to be unconstitutional, the South saw a wave of public pools closed and private swimming clubs being opened, and white parents withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in private schools that were based on church membership or required tuition that lower-income black families couldn't afford.

Pictures of lynchings embarrassed the Southern states, so greater efforts were made to give blacks a trial. The death penalty to this day remains much higher for blacks than it is for whites, as are the number of false convictions. So lynching is still a thing. We've just given it a civilized gloss.

Blacks also are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites for the same offenses, and with much heavier penalties. Poll taxes were declared illegal, but now that the federal oversight afforded by the Voting Rights Act has been removed, Southern states have passing voter ID laws to fight nonexistent voter fraud in areas with higher concentrations of minorities.

And, lest we forget, one of the effects of our country's reliance on fines to punish misdemeanors is that we have created a revenue stream for municipalities and an incentive for municipal government to impose late fees on those who don't pay their fines promptly. I'm sure you remember the Justice Department's findings in Ferguson, Mo. Justice officials said the city had been treating the black community like an ATM.

On it goes. We've made progress in our nation in terms of racial equality and justice, but it's come against a strong current of white resistance.

I really see one way forward, to make the past be as past as we want it to be, and that's to acknowledge it properly. When I was growing up we learned in school about some figures from African American history, like Harriet Tubman, Grandma Moses and George Washington Carver, and of course Martin Luther King Jr. That's pretty much it. Slavery got one paragraph in my fifth-grade history textbook and it was pretty much "Yeah, the Revolution didn't free the slaves, but we took care of that eventually, so it's all good."

Even then my education was limited. We memorized a few key phrases from "I Have a Dream," but never even looked at "Where do we go from here?" or "Letters from a Biringham Jail," much less learned about Malcolm X. We learned about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, but never about the head injury her abusive owner gave her, or that liberty when it came after the Civil War did not allow her to ride in "white cars" on trains. I didn't know anything about Frederick Douglass until I was in my 30s beyond "He's the guy with the hair."

None of the Framers was black, but there were black people in the halls of power back then. They had names like Jupiter, Sally Hemings and Oney Judge. They too are America. So are the contrabands and the 54th Mass. Colored Infantry who fought in the Civil War, or Varnum's Continentals in the Revolution. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

If we learn their stories, and the rest of black history, like we've been learning white history, and elevate these heroes like we've elevated others; if we acknowledge the horror of what our nation did to thousands of women like Harriet Jacobs as a matter of routine, then maybe -- maybe -- we one day can say these things are past.

It's going to be a long haul.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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haunted by a ghost of the civil war

I've been haunted a lot by a ghost these past few days – not one of those terrifying Hollywood ghosts, nor a cutesy friendly children's ghost either.

The ghost I've been haunted by is the sort who makes you stop consider how well we are meeting the challenge of our times, compared to how well the ghost faced theirs. When this particular ghost was still alive, there was a war on, and his country needed him. Eleven states in the South, fearful that the president would abolish slavery, had declared themselves free and independent of their brothers in the North. So one morning he got up, kissed his mother and father goodbye, and left the Pennsylvania farm he had known his whole life.

He is an ancestor of mine whom I've only known through a family legend. As his ghost has drifted through the house, I have wondered at how little I know about him. Did he enlist because he had a moral conviction that the Union must be preserved at all costs, or was there another reason? Did he think the war would end soon, or was he expecting to be away for years? Did he ever wonder if it would be worth it in the end?

To tell the truth, until recently I didn't even know his name. All I knew was one horrifying detail of his life.

“I have an ancestor who was a prisoner of war at Andersonville,” I once told one of my best op-ed columnists. Marc Kelley wrote for the Cranford Eagle while I was its managing editor, and also worked as a Realtor in the downtown.

“Did he survive?” Marc asked. “That was an awful place, you know. The commander of that camp was the only Confederate officer to be executed for war crimes after the Civil War ended.”

“He did,” I said, “and it's a good thing for me, too. After the war, he went on to get married and have children.”

That was all I really knew about him. For the longest time, I assumed he was a Learn, since I knew he was an ancestor on my father's side. A few weeks ago an email from my father set me straight. His name was Samuel Bowman, and he was the father of my Grandmother Ruth Learn's father.

With a little searching, I was able to find an online database of records pertaining to the Civil War, including a list of POWs at Andersonville, more formally known as Camp Sumter. I'd checked before but had been unable to find anyone named Learn in the database. Now that I had the right name, I went back to see what I could find. It wasn't encouraging.

According to the database, a Pvt. Sam Bowman died on July 20, 1864, while held at Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Ga. The cause of his death is listed as diarrhea. No other information was listed, aside from his unit — 147th New York Infantry, Company H — which told me nothing. Most likely Pvt. Bowman was buried in one of several mass graves on site.

The snippet of genealogy my father had included in his email mentioned that Samuel Bowman, born in 1842, had enlisted in the Union Army with his older brother James "J.J." Bowman. It also reported that Sam and his wife had one child, a son.

The Andersonville records do not list a James Bowman, who is buried at the Cambria Mills Cemetery in Fallentimber, Pa. I assume that J.J. made it home after the war had ended, and I hope that he lived a long and happy life with his wife, Eliza, and however many children and dogs they had.

But Sam! The story of his family seemed too painful even to consider. If he died in 1864, Sam couldn't have been more than 22 when he died. Was his wife already visibly pregnant when he left, or was she not yet showing? Did they even know?

Maybe their son already was born. Just imagine the tableau: She stands there in the early morning as J.J. and her Sam leave together. As she watches him go, never to return, she cradles their young son in her arms, or maybe feels him tug at her dress from where he stands next to her on the porch.

It's easy to picture her, young face darkened with foreboding; and just as easy to imagine the grief that would have pierced her heart when news came that her husband had died. She would never take another husband. When her son became a man himself, he married and continued the Bowman line. Picture the single mother, raising her son with the help of her late husband's family, reminded daily of the man she had loved as the son he had left her grew daily into his likeness.

But then, history smiled and I was pleased to discover that my original story was more correct. There was more than one Samuel Bowman at Camp Sumter. Pvt. Bowman died, but my ancestor Sam didn't.

When Sam left Camp Sumter and made the long trek home, he stopped along the way and courted Elizabeth “Fanny” Swain, and married her. They had one son, whom they named Edgar and raised together. When the time came, Edgar married May Cartwright. Together they had four children of their own, the second of whom was named Ruth Virginia Bowman. She was my grandmother.

Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 died, primarily from scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. When rescue finally came at war's end, the prisoners' deliverers described them as skeletal, emaciated, and covered with filth and vermin. There are pictures on the Internet. They could just as easily be pictures of Holocaust survivors.

As Marc had told me, the general pardon that President Lincoln extended to the rebel soldiers at the end of the Civil War did not extend to the commander of Camp Sumter. The record shows that Capt. Henry Wirz was tried and hanged for war crimes, the only Confederate official to be so tried and convicted.

(To be fair, some historians dispute that Wirz was responsible for the conditions at Camp Sumter, and instead blame the overcrowding and infectious disease, both due to circumstances beyond his personal control.)

In many ways, Sam Bowman is the perfect ancestor at a time like this. Like Lincoln, Gen. Ulysses Grant strode through his time like a titan. By dint of his position, his character and his drive, he moved the river of history from one bed to another. Claiming him as ancestor would be an exercise in vanity, like trying to make myself better by the association. Sam, on the other hand, was a nondescript nobody from central Pennsylvania.

My great-great-grandfather saw the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln. He saw the nation quit its half-hearted attempts at Reconstruction, and may have heard about the rise of jim crow justice and how by brute force the resentful South undid much of the hard-won work the Union did in liberating the slaves.

Sam may even have heard stories about the Great Migration as blacks fled a reign of terror in the South that would have put ISIS to shame, and ran North to places like New York and Chicago in the hopes of life, liberty and a future.

I only can imagine how he'd react to hearing that the Republican Party, once the Party of Lincoln, had forsaken that heritage and descended into what it's become now; and how it had elected a man as unstable as Donald Trump and so openly racist that the Ku Klux Klan was celebrating his election as their vindication.

Sam Bowman fought to save the Union. I'd hate to think of what he'd say to see it now, and I wonder how he would fight to save it again.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Breaking it down for Steven King

Steven King has an interesting question.

King, R-Iowa, was part of an MSNBC panel discussion on Monday afternoon, hosted by Chris Hayes, along with Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire; and reporter April Ryan. Discussion turned to the predominantly white makeup of the Republican Party, and King objected. The problem? He's tired of this whole “old white people business.”

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about?” King asked. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Hayes asked.

“Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of Western civilization.”

Hayes cut off the discussion immediately, undoubtedly hoping to stop an ugly discussion before it grew even uglier. (He since has conceded that he might have made the wrong decision.) But let's give King some credit. He has tried to initiate an important discussion on race in our country. What noteworthy contributions have non-whites made to the United States, to the West and to human civilization in general? It's only fair to ask.

For starters – and this is an easy one – black labor powered the engine of the North American economy for about two centuries. Black slavery began in 1619 when colonials brought African slaves to Virginia to work the plantation fields, but it was really in the 1660s that slavery grew and hardened into a hereditary institution in which blacks would work, and whites would reap the benefits of that labor.

For the next two centuries, blacks would receive only the barest compensation for labor that consumed their every waking hour for six days a week, while their stolen wages fattened the wealth of the white families that owned the labor camps where they toiled. (In our genteel way, we call these “plantations.”) It's safe to say that without stolen labor artificially suppressing the price of cotton, the American economy never would have been as powerful as it was by the time of the Civil War.

But I'm sure that King is tired of hearing about slavery, so let's not dwell on that. We'll also overlook the cultural contributions of black performers such as Sidney Poitier, Paul Robeson, Diana Ross and Louis Armstrong; the very existence of jazz music and spirituals that have been mainstays in church or around campfires for generations, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”; and cultural icons like Bugs Bunny, largely derived from Gullah stories of Brer Rabbit.

We also should discount the contribution of the black and Chinese laborers who built the railways out West. I'm sure King wouldn't count that as significant, since anybody could have built railroads or paved roads. The real movers and shakers were the tycoons who owned the businesses and who received millions of dollars from the efforts of these laborers. God's eyes are on the workers, but it's the wealthy who matter to us.

Should we focus on people like Daniel Hale Williams, the first person to successfully complete open heart surgery? Williams was black, but perhaps he won't count for King, because Williams only pioneered a new lifesaving procedure in medicine and didn't actually discover a new field of medicine.

Other such inventions and innovations include blood banks, the refrigerator, the electric trolley, the dust pan, the comb, the mop, the brush, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, traffic signals, the pen and the pencil sharpener.

Still, these are mere inventions, King might object. That Kenmore refrigerator is important, and you miss it when it stops working in the heat of the summer, but that's not as foundational to civilization as the very notion of democracy.

Alas, it is not. So let's look at the foundations, and see where they lie.

Agriculture began around 9,000 BCE far from Europe, in the fertile crescent, where farmers started to raise wheat and barley; and around 8,000 BCE in South America, with the first potato farmers. Cultivating crops may mark the start of human civilization, since agriculture allows formerly nomadic people to settle down and begin to see one spot of land as home.

As agriculture improves, the land begins to support more people in smaller areas. Cities are about as foundational to civilization as we can get, and the first known cities were nowhere in Western Europe, Eastern Europe or the United States. The oldest cities arose in ancient Sumer, around 7500 BCE. Writing first appeared around 3200 BCE, in Sumeria and in Egypt. China developed its first writing around 1200 BCE.

There was approximately nothing going on in Europe at this time. Greece was in decline and had entered a period called the Greek Dark Ages, and everything else we've learned of the rest of Europe we've had to deduce from graves.

Back to those ancient cities. Living in close proximity to one another often gives rise to other innovations. With space at a premium, there is a need to stack people atop one another more efficiently.  So architecture also may be said to have originated in Sumer, along with government and means of records-keeping.

That also means that economies (and economics) began in Sumer, although money wouldn't come along for several centuries. Lydia, a city-state located in present-day Turkey, generally is credited with minting the first coins in the seventh century BCE, but it was the Tang Dynasty of China that gets credit for inventing paper currency in 740 BCE.

King also claims credit on behalf of Christianity, for its contributions to Western civilization. It's worth remembering that Christianity isn't actually a European or Western religion. It began in the East, and embraces many Eastern ideals such as the union of body and spirit, and judging a man on his actions rather than on his words. The gospel was preached in Africa before it reached Europe, and the biggest churches today are in Asia, not the United States. How anyone could link this to white people is beyond me.

So, there you have it, Mr. King. I'm no historian, but while I'll agree that European and American societies have gifted the world with tremendous literature, music, art, philosophy, science and God knows what else, I'm not sure there is any basis to your claim that we've done more than any other race, color or ethnicity. Discount the black contribution to America, and you erase America. Discount Africa and Asia, and you've just erased human history.

Tired of this whole “old white people business?” Then come on out and join the rest of the human race, Mr. King. There's a whole lot going on out here, and you don't want to miss out.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.