Did Jonathan Edwards own slaves?

The founder of Evangelicalism had some dirty secrets

In 1997, a historian at Yale University published a startling paper. In the archives of Jonathan Edwards he’d found a letter defending slavery.

Kenneth P. Minkema’s paper, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” revealed a secret the religion had kept for centuries about the man often called ‘the father of Evangelicalism’.

Jonathan Edwards lived from 1703 to 1758.

His famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” set the tone for the faith going forward. His fiery preaching stimulated the ‘Great Awakening’ that rescued conservative Christianity in America.

He’s been a personal inspiration to many Evangelicals pastors, and has been discussed often by modern church leaders like John Piper, as in Piper’s 2006 book God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards.

I check a shelf full of biographies of Edwards. There is nothing about his slave-owning, his views on race, or even about slavery at all.

A standard reference work, Alexander V.G. Allen’s 1889 biography Jonathan Edwards, vaguely suggests that Edwards was anti-slavery.

That Edwards was a slave owner had been on the record.

His will listed his slaves. The biographers had to have known.

In 1850, a well-known minister wrote that Edwards “left behind him in manuscript an Essay on the Slave-trade.” Edwards’ essay on slavery had been used, apparently, to justify Southern slavery leading up to the Civil War. Then it vanished.

But the historians at Yale University found a few things—like a receipt for a slave, a teenage girl named Venus, who Edwards had personally purchased. That document was published in 1995 in A Jonathan Edwards Reader.

It must’ve been startling for the historians—finding the Christian hero had owned slaves. It was intermixed with his theology. The receipt for Venus had two of Edwards’ sermons written on the back.

The editors downplayed the news. His slaveowning, they informed, is “a reminder of Edwards’ place in time.”

Then Minkema found Edwards had advocated for slavery.

A draft of a letter, written around 1738, had Edwards being, clearly, a hard-core advocate for slavery. He’d attacked abolitionists.

He’d mocked people who denounced owning slaves, and said that everyone was involved in slavery, like it or not.

Another local pastor had been under fire from his congregation for slaveowning. Edwards defended the man, saying those criticizing him were out “to make disturbance and raise uneasiness among people against their minister to the great wounding of religion.”

This was a different Edwards than what Evangelicalism had said.

In 2002, Minkema published a follow-up paper, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery.” In 2003, a new biography, George M. Marden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life, had a little more.

After buying Venus, he’d bought Titus, then Joseph and Sue, and Joab and Rose, who married and had a son, Joseph. They’d worked in the Edwards house, while he was in his study creating a theological system that would be used to justify the slave trade for the next century.

So long as slaves, he maintained, were purchased legally, humanely treated, and every effort was made to convert them to Christianity—it was all fine.

Such details were offered only by ‘secular’ scholars, as the religion was silent.

Edwards knew slave owning was contrary to Christian theology.

Minkema noticed a sermon had been edited prior to being delivered. Edwards initially wrote that when the messiah came:

“…he should proclaim a universal liberty to all servants, slaves, captives, vassals, [and] imprisoned [or] condemned persons.”

But then, Edwards deleted the word “slaves.”

That is to say, Edwards altered the Bible’s presentation of the messiah in order to defend American slavery.

Edwards had legalistically defined the term “neighbor,” as in the biblical commandment “love your neighbor,” to exclude African people—since they were from a country that was geographically remote.

He liked that the Old Testament allowed slavery.

Israelites could indeed own slaves. But Edwards didn’t seem to like the rules around biblical slavery. In Deuteronomy 15:12–18, a slave could only be one for six years, then they were to be set free.

Jonathan Edwards kept his slaves to his death.

In the Bible, mistreatment of slaves is a serious violation (Exo 21:20–21). But Jonathan Edwards didn’t seem too concerned about that in a culture where slave abuse and murder was commonplace.

In the Old Testament, slavery isn’t keyed into race. If Edwards believed in following Old Testament law, then white people could also be enslaved. He or his children could be sold (cf. Exo 21:7; Neh 1:1–15, etc).

The reality is that he hadn’t believed in the Bible at all. He was using references, very selectively, to create a rule of white supremacy.

After the Civil War, Edwards’ slavery advocacy was erased.

That subject has been little discussed. I write to Kenneth P. Minkema, and he kindly replies. About the slavery references disappearing, he writes:

“It seems the image of JE as a model of Christian thinking and living led to a willful ignorance of the reality, or at least an unwillingness to confront the ramifications of it.”

Does it prompt a re-reading of Edwards as a theologian?

Minkema thinks so. He adds:

“There’s no denying JE’s historical significance in his own time and his profound influence in subsequent centuries, and so he remains a figure who warrants study. But when it comes to appropriating his thought or recommending his life, his views and practices on race and slavery compel a serious reappraisal of a person who could speak so eloquently about the beauty of God and yet held fellow humans in bondage, and used the Bible to justify it. Of course, and sadly, he was quite typical of white Protestants of his era.”

Modern Evangelicals had to try to explain it.

When Edwards’ history as a slave owner would come up, there’d be a lot of sighing that everyone is full of ‘sin’, etc. It was tricky to say more. To cancel one Evangelical leader for even virulent racism could lead to the whole religion being in danger.

The great Protestant founder, John Calvin, had known of the modern slavery of Africans. He could seem to discourage it, but left the door open to its ‘necessity’.

The founder of the Moravian church, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, held that “God has punished the first Negroes with slavery.” Such talk was common.

George Whitefield, a prominent preacher in colonial America, told slaves “their hearts were as black as their faces.”

The key Evangelical study Bible, The Scofield Reference Bible, was written by a former Confederate soldier, and he called for slavery in its pages.

But some key Christian leaders had protested slavery. John Wesley, the Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, wrote in 1787:

“Ever since I heard of it first I felt a perfect detestation of the horrid slave trade.”

How had Wesley been different?

I sit reading about slavery in Jonathan Edwards’ day.

Charles Wesley, John’s brother, travelled in America in 1736, and heard of “the cruelty of masters towards their Negroes,” and pursued accounts of it.

He reports in his diary:

“The giving a child a slave of its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport, was, I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange that being thus trained up in cruelty, they should afterwards arrive at so great perfection in it; that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often met at Mr. Laserre’s, should, as he himself informed L[aserre], first nail up a Negro by the ear, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown all over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for four months after. Another much applauded punishment is drawing their slaves’ teeth. One Col. Lynch is universally known to have cut off a poor Negro’s legs, and to kill several of them every year by his barbarities. . . . I shall only mention one more, related to me by a Swiss gentleman, Mr. Zouberbuhler, an eye-witness, of Mr. Hill, a dancing-master in Charleston. He whipped a she-slave so long that she fell down at his feet for dead. When by the help of a physician she was so far recovered as to show signs of life, he repeated the whipping with equal rigour, and concluded with dropping hot sealing-wax upon her flesh. Her crime was overfilling a tea-cup.”

Had Jonathan Edwards wished to give Christians of the time a sense of purpose, he might have started here.

With the Black Lives Matters protests in 2021, Jonathan Edwards’ slaves were remembered.

John Piper had briefly discussed the issue back in a 2013 interview. But with an eye turned to Christian racism, he was pressed into a fuller reply.

He was surprised, he reports in a blog post, to have learned of Jonathan Edwards owning slaves. He writes:

“I had read Edwards diligently for twenty years — all of his major works and many sermons and smaller treatises and letters, plus at least three biographies — but had never noticed anything suggesting he owned a slave.”

He doesn’t ask why that would be.

He ends by suspecting that Edwards had been a kindly Christian doing his best to help people. Edwards tried, perhaps, to “rescue” Venus and Titus, and to work “for beneficent purposes” to assist “at-risk black children.”

Most Evangelical leaders to this day have been openly racist.

The ‘great’ evangelists—Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham—all had segregated rallies.

Christian colleges and seminaries—Dallas Theological Seminary, Bob Jones University, etc.— remained white-only as long as they could.

Evangelical churches were segregated. In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.”

Charles Stanley, the Atlanta pastor, was a noted “segregationist,” according to the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, which adds:

“…as late as the 1970s he had guards stationed outside the church to keep African-Americans out.”

That didn’t make it into Stanley’s 2016 autobiography, Courageous Faith: My Story From a Life of Obedience. This book, I reflect, has no discussion of race. A startling absence given his time and place.

But in Evangelicalism, the racism is concealed in official histories. You’d only see it in odd references, or archival finds—or in the silence. 🔶