Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4900967 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas J Little (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1042-1043 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaw541 |
| OpenAlex | W2589278941 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
This book, a collection of articles and essays by an international group of scholars of several different perspectives, addresses the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Presbyterians and Presbyterianism in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Africa, and the New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu). Examining the various ways Presbyterian adherents’ religious principles “conditioned their interpretations of and interactions with the institution of chattel slavery,” the volume advances the idea that distinctive features of the Presbyterian faith “made slavery a particularly problematic and fraught issue” for Presbyterian leaders and institutions (p. 1). As a number of the essays make abundantly clear, and as William Harrison Taylor and Peter C. Messer stress in their introduction, not all Presbyterians were against slavery nor were they “guided by a single principle” when confronting slavery's compatibility with Christian moral values (p. 11). Like other Protestant groups—Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists, for example—Presbyterians subscribed to an astonishingly broad range of views about slavery, with many pious adherents in Scotland and abroad arguing forcefully that the institution was morally right and justified by Christianity. Even so, in the years after 1740 a rising number of influential Presbyterian churchmen and theologians began questioning the legitimacy and morality of the institution, especially in geographical areas with relatively small numbers of slaves, such as late eighteenth-century Scotland, where the total population of African and African American slaves probably never rose above one hundred
Archaeology · Christianity · Diaspora · Ethnology · Faith · Genealogy · Institution · Legitimacy · Political science · Population · Protestantism · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Scottish History and National Identity
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2018 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |