Summary
Douglass introduces his next target for his abolitionist argument: the Christian Church. He argues that the Fugitive Slave Act is an infringement on religious liberty, but that Church officials are too indifferent to see it as such. Thus, Douglass concludes, the Church is complicit in the continuation of slavery in America. Not only that, but the Church has sided with oppressors by endorsing the master/slave relationship as something consecrated by God.
Passionately, Douglass pleads to welcome any other form of religion in America than its current one, saying that to side with the oppressors is to reduce the Church to a repulsive state. "It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs," he says (80). But, Douglass asserts, the Church is doubly guilty because it alone has the power to stop slavery with its supreme influence over the American people.
Douglass declares that those within the Church who endorse or remain indifferent to slavery are blasphemous. He compares the Christian Church in America to that in England, noting that the English Church restored liberty to slaves in the proper effort to "[improve] the condition of mankind" (83). To be anti-slavery in England, Douglass argues, is not to be anti-Church whatsoever.
Analysis
Douglass's attack on the Christian Church in America aids his argument in two major ways. First, it underscores his investment in revealing the hypocrisy of American slavery, as he quotes extensively from the Bible itself and highlights how the teachings of Jesus Christ are fundamentally at odds with the notion of slavery. In so doing, Douglass reveals how the Church, too, has become complicit in the perpetuation of evil. In a shocking admission, Douglass says, "welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty" (80). Here, Douglass essentially blasphemes in order to showcase how blasphemous the Church's support of slavery truly is: he, a man so learned in the Bible that he quotes it more than any other text in his speech, would choose "anything" over the current Christian Church in the United States. Douglass ultimately suggests that true Christians would oppose slavery rather than become apologists for it.
Second, without saying so explicitly, Douglass's argument against the Church also offers a solution and roadmap for his abolitionist audience. He says: "Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds" (81). Here, as Douglass argues that the Church is repulsive in its complicity, he also lays out a clear-cut plan for how the Church could swiftly put an end to slavery. He highlights each facet of the Church's structure, condemning them for their lack of action but also, paradoxically, showing his audience how these same complicit entities could return America to a state of true liberty. Thus, Douglass's argument against the Church is as much an attack on its failure to act as it is a plan for reversing that failure in the name of continued Christianity.
