Fred. Doug

David Vazquez

Mrs. Frost

American Lit, Per. 6

2 December 2006

Christianity and "Christianity" in the eyes of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass experienced first hand the hypocrisy of southern Christian slaveholders who were heavily involved in their churches, yet they starved and whipped their slaves and treated them merely as property. One must wonder how a man of God can even have slaves in his possession. These men would entertain many people of the church in their homes and feed them until they couldn't eat, yet they would barely give their slaves enough food to survive on. They would give their guests a nice and comfortable place to sleep, yet they would not give their slaves a bed or blankets. This must have changed how slaves viewed Christianity, and maybe even Jesus. Frederick Douglass describes in his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the hypocrisy he found in these Christian slaveholders.

Many slaveholders in the South severely whipped and beat their slaves, sometimes even killing them. "He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes" (33). Douglass' master, Captain Auld, would quote this from the Bible to give justification for whipping his slaves. It is a terrible thing for a Christian to use Gods Word to try to justify that whipping slaves was okay, and must have given slaves false examples of Christianity. Douglas assumed that when his master came to Christ that he would become more humane to his slaves, and maybe even emancipate them, but this was not the case. After his masters conversion he found religious sanction for his slaveholding cruelty, making him an even worse man. (32) Douglass believed that once God was in his master's life that his master would live a life reflecting God's love and mercy. He was turned off to find out that this was not the case, and that it had the opposite outcome. Douglass did believe in God and Christianity, but incidents like this demonstrated to Douglass that the southern church was filled with hypocrisy.

Douglass thought there to be a vast difference between the Christianity of Christ, and the Christianity of this land. "I recognize the widest possible difference - so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked... I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of