{"id":1638,"date":"2013-01-08T08:08:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-08T08:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/01\/what-every-american-should-know-about-frederick-douglass-abolitionist-prophet.html"},"modified":"2013-01-08T08:08:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-08T08:08:00","slug":"what-every-american-should-know-about-frederick-douglass-abolitionist-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/01\/what-every-american-should-know-about-frederick-douglass-abolitionist-prophet.html","title":{"rendered":"What Every American Should Know About Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

Understanding Frederick Douglass, the great black leader and abolitionist, requires an appreciation of his religious faith. As an atheist friend of his once said: \u201cthere was one obstacle to a loving and lasting friendship \u2014 namely, the personal Christian God.\u201d<\/div>\n
For most of his career Douglass believed in a living God who could change the world. \u201cAll things are possible with God,\u201d he declared. \u201cI believe in the millennium,\u201d a literal heaven on earth as described in Revelation. Love and freedom were for him the hallmarks of Christianity. His faith fueled his hope in an immediate end to slavery and racial oppression.<\/div>\n
Douglass saw himself as a prophet heeding God\u2019s will. Prophecy enabled him and other abolitionists to bypass biblical and theological defenses of slavery. For hundreds of years, slavery and racism had been virtually unquestioned institutions, with theologians consistently defending these forms of brutality. Slavery existed in ancient Israel and early Christianity, and it appears in the Old and New Testaments. Israelites enslave non-Israelites; Jesus heals a centurion\u2019s slave but does not grant him freedom; and Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters and returns a runaway. In antebellum America, most ministers defended (or ignored) slavery, and many argued that Africans bore the mark of Cain and were the children of Ham, cursed by Noah to be \u201cservants of servants.\u201d For Douglass, the Bible\u2019s overarching message of love and freedom trumped these comparatively isolated defenses of slavery.<\/div>\n
Douglass\u2019s spiritual journey began in 1831, when he was a 13-year-old slave living in Baltimore. His father was a white man whom he never knew. But the black minister Father Lawson became a father-figure, prompting a conversion experience. \u201cI seemed to live in a new world, surrounded by new objects, and animated by new hopes and desires,\u201d he recalled. \u201cMy great concern was, now, to have the world converted\u201d to anti-slavery Christianity.<\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Understanding Frederick Douglass, the great black leader and abolitionist, requires an appreciation of his religious faith. As an atheist friend of his once said: \u201cthere was one obstacle to a loving and lasting friendship \u2014 namely, the personal Christian God.\u201d For most of his career Douglass believed in a living God who could change the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Every American Should Know About Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Prophet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Understanding Frederick Douglass, the great black leader and abolitionist, requires an appreciation of his religious faith. 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