Does That Make It Right?
By George “Chip” Hammond
Last year my wife and I visited Colonial Williamsburg. We went the week after Christmas, which meant that most of the exhibits were closed for renovation and research. The diminished number of exhibits also meant diminished crowds. We nearly had the place to ourselves. What exhibits were opened gave us almost unlimited time to speak to the docents who guided the tours. These historians are extremely knowledgeable about Virginia’s past, and particularly the history of Virginia’s second capital.
We were among a group of only a half-dozen people that joined the tour on slavery in Virginia. I learned a great deal about the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the changes to common law that gave more power to slave owners and less rights to enslaved people, and the conditions under which enslaved people lived, worked, and died.
By the time independence was declared from Great Britain, chattel slavery of dark-skinned people was already a century-and-a-half old institution. Many of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson among them, saw the tremendous incompatibility of the institution with the principles they were espousing. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson attacked slavery but was persuaded by fellow patriots that the southern states would never join in a confederated union if the clause were included.
“Although many of our founding fathers had a range of attitudes spanning philosophical disagreement to outright loathing of the institution, the economy had become so dependent on slavery that they could not figure out how to end it without doing serious economic harm to the new and vulnerable nation,” said the docent. “The only people who freed their slaves in notable numbers and at cost to themselves were those who underwent a religious conversion.” My ears perked up. In today’s world it’s uncommon to hear anything that reflects well on religion.
Our guide told the story Robert Carter III who, after a spiritual awakening under the preaching of a Baptist minister, eventually manumitted all his slaves. Doing so required him to pay a fee to Virginia for the privilege, as well as providing a stipend – seed money – for newly freed slaves to get a start in society, and a legally binding promise to financially support those who were too old to make their way in society.
From time to time, I hear people defending the colonial institution of slavery because “it was commonly accepted,” and because “every family of means kept slaves.” “It’s wrong to judge people of a certain age by modern standards. We must judge them by their own standards.” This statement is only true if there is no God, and so if there are no moral absolutes. Sadly, I have sometimes even heard Christians parrot it.
In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis observed, “Many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society – some particular school, college, regiment, or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as normal (‘everybody does it’) and certain others as impractically virtuous and quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society, we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person would ever dream of doing, and our ‘quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency.”
Although many professed colonial Christians living in that “local pocket” of history owned slaves and those who impoverished themselves by divesting themselves of their slaves at cost to themselves were considered impractically virtuous and quixotic, it is obvious today that owning another human being is something that no decent person would do, and those who freed them were operating only by a minimum standard of decency.
Though Lewis’ essay is not about slavery, his words are pertinent and penetrating: “There are those odd people among us who do not accept the local standard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite different behavior is, in fact, possible. . . These people, even when separated widely by space and time have a suspicious knack of agreeing with each other in the main . . . as if they were in touch with some larger opinion outside the pocket.”
For Christians, the spirit of the age – the fact that “everyone is doing it” – can never be an excuse for immoral behavior. Invoking it, we easily justify every vice from slave owing to holocaust. To invoke it is to deny the very existence of the God we say we worship, for it is deny that there are absolute moral standards.
The sins of the past are lessons for the present. We do well to spend some time reflecting on where we like rogue sheep have simply followed the herd of the present world – even of other professing Christians – as they act in defiance of God’s holy standard. And where we have, we need to repent.
I quote Lewis once more in closing: “We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were of no [present] concern, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ. If we have repented these . . . sins, we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”
