Frederick Douglass: Religious Slaveholders

Douglass' audience for this work is those who want to know the cruelty of slavery. His audience was anyone who was interested in the topic. A majority of white men and women either didn't own slaves and wasn't able to see the cruel inhumane nature of the act or they were numb to it because black people were viewed as less than humans. If you remove the humanity from a person you become numb to any cruelty. Douglass' goal was to prove and show how slavery was inhumane and offered nothing but cons to the slaves and their masters.

They were often humiliated for fun. Women were constantly raped and their husbands had to watch. Masters often took slaves and beat them to a bloody pulp with the whip. (Doc 8) Afterwards they would stuff them into boxes in the heat or cold. If the masters wanted to humiliate them some more they could sell off a man’s wife or child.

According to the article Nero Persecutes the Christians, 64 A.D., “In their [Christians’] very deaths they were made the subjects of sport…” The article briefly explains how inhumane and revolting the abuse of the Christians were. The punishment of the martyred were repulsive; for the Romans mocked the Christians by nailing them to crosses after their religious leader. Also, they were tied to stakes and burned, serving as a lights to brighten the evenings. Even the emperor, who had only invented the cause of the fire, joined in on the disdainful mockery. Christians were covered with wild animal hides and thrown to the dogs to be torn apart.

Slavery: Effective on Slaves and Slaveholders In Frederick Douglass’s autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass recounts his life in slavery to reveal to his readers the horrors of the American slave system. To effectively inform his readers of the corrupt system, he publicizes the slaveholders’ hypocritical practice of Christianity. Although he himself is a Christian, Douglass’s narrative is a scathing commentary on the ironic role of Christian religion in the Southern slaveholding culture. Throughout his book, the author expresses and exemplifies his perspective on religion by illustrating the falseness and hypocrisy of the Southern people. To start off, Frederick Douglass suggests that the Southern people’s religion is false and insincere.

Why am I a slave? and with this question my youthful mind was troubled for many days, pressing upon me more heavily at times than others. When I saw the slave-driver whip a slave woman, cut the blood out of her neck, and heard her piteous cries, I went away into the corner of the fence, wept and pondered over the mystery. I had, through some medium, I know not what, got some idea of God, the Creator of all mankind, the black and the white, and that he had made the blacks to serve the whites as slaves. How he could do this and be good, I could not tell.

Not being able to make their own decisions, the slaves were forced to do and follow certain beliefs. The colonist believed that all slave had to be Christians and if not the slaves were forced to convert to Christianity. The life of a slave was terrible, form horrific living conditions, to abuse both physical and mental for example “ A slave should know nothing but to obey his master” (Douglass, 41). Slaves were being brainwashed into believing that their soul purpose in life was to obey their masters. Slave masters prohibited the slaves from learning how to read and write because the slave masters knew that knowledge was key to success.

We first meet him when he is trying to kill a woman he has gotten pregnant. As the woman is a slave it is pretty much assured she is pregnant because the preacher had been raping her. He actually deserves much more than he actually got. He is the lowest of the low, a hypocritical preacher who has no doubt used religion to justify his evil actions. He is a prime example of the upper crust of southern society abusing slaves.

In Chains, Isabel the protagonist of the story is branded on her cheek with the letter I for insolence. Isabel did not deserve such a harsh punishment for only trying to escape the grasp of her evil owners. Branding is one of the worst, most brutal punishment a slave could have (Simkin). Isabel says “The glowing iron streaked across my face like a comet” (Anderson 23). Masters of slaves were afraid that if their slaves converted to Christianity then they would feel equal (The Life of…).

In the sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of Angry God" given by Jonathon Edwards, whom was born on October 5, 1703 and one of the people to trigger the Great Awakening, informs those, living in the 18th century, who have not been converted to Puritanism will find themselves in the hands of the devil and endlessly suffering in the pits of Hell. In this sermon preached to a crowd of unconverted men (people who are not apart of Puritanism) in Connecticut, Edwards emphasizes how God is an angry and merciless ruler and treats those unconverted like a pest and is willing to get rid of them. So Edwards advocates those who are unconverted to urgently convert to Puritanism, a form of Christianity popular in 18th Century America, or else they will find themselves being endlessly consumed by the flames in hell with no mercy of stopping. These Puritanism tenets, God is an angry ruler and God's salvation can be found in Edwards sermon.

Another key factor Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to criticize the human nature and hypocrisy of all people is the community of Salem, as a whole. At the meeting that the entirety of Salem seemed to be attending, the Devil says to the holy group, “Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin” (38). Growing up Hawthorne feels like a sinner as he doubts his ancestors for their so called ‘holy’ actions during the Salem Witch Trials. He feels like a hypocrite himself for thinking they went against god, while he, in judging them is doing essentially the same. LIkewise, in the story Goodman Brown feels like a sinner for leaving his wife and betraying his faith only to find out that so has the rest of the town, and he is not as