Frederick Douglass

The Argument

Frederick Douglass is the most important American autobiographer of the nineteenth century and one of the most powerful writers in the English language on the subject of what slavery does to the human soul — both the soul of the enslaved and the soul of the enslaver. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a masterpiece of the genre he helped invent: the slave narrative as argument, as testimony, as literature.

His relationship with Christianity is complex and precisely observed. He distinguishes sharply between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of America — the first being his standard, the second being the hypocrisy he is attacking. The slaveholders who used Scripture to justify slavery were not, in his account, misapplying Christianity. They were revealing what happens when Christianity is used as an instrument of power rather than a judgment on it.

For literary apologetics, Douglass is essential because he takes the Gospel seriously enough to use it as a standard of judgment. His critique of American Christianity is not a critique of Christianity. It is a critique made from within Christianity, using its own claims as the measure. That is the most demanding form of apologetics: holding the tradition accountable to itself.