The exact year and date of Douglass’ birth are unknown, though later in life he chose to celebrate it on February 14. He became one of the most famous intellectuals of his time, advising presidents and lecturing to thousands on a range of causes, including women’s rights and Irish home rule. Douglass initially lived with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. At a young age, Douglass was selected to live in the home of the plantation owners, one of whom may have been his father. His mother, who was an intermittent presence in his life, died when he was around 10. Fredrick Douglass Utilizes Christianity to tell the story of his early life in many ways.
He demonstrates the way religion and its literature, the bible, had a negative influence and effect on slavery as well as the development of white Christianity. The crucible of Douglass’s prophetic Christian faith was his childhood suffering as a slave. Before his escape at age 20, Douglass witnessed and endured great cruelty, especially at the hands of Christian masters. Frederick Douglass spent most of his earliest childhood days on the sprawling plantation of the Lloyd family, one of Maryland’s wealthiest slaveholders.
According to Douglass’s memory demonstrated in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” there were two types of Christianity practice during slavery. One being the true and real version, while the other being a motivation towards slavery. Slavery was justified by the false idea of white sovereignty, which was dictated by all such religion, law, and literature. Both religion and the law are elements that restrict the human behavior, however that was not to be seen through the period of slavery. The slaves, color people, believed one version of Christianity, while, the masters, white Americans, believed in another version of Christianity.
Douglass explains that the masters used Christianity as an excuse to the cruel ways they treated slaves. Christianity helped many slaves achieve grace, but the Christianity that the masters were practicing allowed no sanguinity. Moreover, Slaves were not supposed to know anything about themselves, and if they did they would overhear their masters and recall moments in life. But one theme throughout the narrative Douglass attempts to establish is the justification of slaveholder’s behavior in beating, murdering, hardcore laboring, and violence through religion. Religion, in this case Christianity, had two different practices.
Douglass tells a time where Christianity was significant. One of Douglass’s master, Thomas Auld in March 1832, describes the effects of Christianity on an individual. At a point where Douglass was able to give dates of his life, he remembers 1832 when he began living with Auld in Baltimore, Maryland. One of Auld biggest problem was not giving slaves enough to eat, and he had bad temper. However, Auld was a master who was not too firm and at times lacked that of a master.
Douglass recalls that Auld had visited a Methodist camp meeting where he “experienced religion, Christianity, for the first time”. It was clear that Douglass saw this in a bright or positive way, being united with religious faith would change a person for the better. Douglass felt Auld would either “emancipate his slaves and if that did not do this, at any rate make him more kind and humane.” (Douglass CH IX) Douglass yet, it made his character cruel and unjust according to Douglass. Auld found religious sanctions to support his cruelty and harsh punishment. This showed the conversion to Christianity had a negative impact on Auld. Douglass does not hold back on his views regarding the slaveowners’ interpretation of Christianity.
While writing about Thomas Auld, he justified that his master had experienced a religious adaption but did not change for the better; rather, he found greater support for his cruelty through religion. At Freeland’s farm Douglass remarked how pleased he was that the man pretended no religion; according to him, “religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and the basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others” (Douglas 39). Therefore, Such slaveowners were competent of gross offences and oath but pretended that they were epitome of feature. Douglass clarified his views on Christianity.
He explained that he was not irreligious, but that the Christianity of Christ was far different than the Christianity of the southern whites. They were above all frauds and turncoats to the word of God. Throughout the work Douglass locates the true faith in the black community, where it was purer and unadulterated by racism and evil. Moreover, Religion is a major component of the novel in Douglass life. Douglass does not wary away from stating his own care to Christianity and does not disappoint to differentiate his faith from that of slaveholders.
In addition, “………. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.” (Douglass, p.30). Furthermore, Douglass explicitly felt that God had a special purpose for him.
To him, the casual events of his early life could not be accidental rather, they were meant by a compassionate divine power. Douglass had a presentiment that it was not his fate to remain fettered in the South, and indeed, the events of his life clearly support that belief. Yes, Christianity had been distorted, twisted, and changed by whites in the South and the norths for decades. Slaveholders often hid behind explanations of the Bible which suited and, they believed, overlooked their behavior.
Douglass makes a demand that “reliable Christianity’s can be found in the black community, not the white” (Douglas 30). He criticizes against the duplicities of slaveholders and points out many instances of brutality, avarice, ignorance, deceit, and blasphemy. From side to side, oratory Douglass could take the expectations regarding religion held by his white readers and turn them upon their heads. Besides, he reserved his harshest judgment for the nation’s churches. Nearly every white Christian either defended slaveholding or refused to speak against it.
Douglass ridiculed their pretensions to righteousness with a warning. Douglass spent a lifetime insistent with white Christians, as members of the leading culture, to acknowledge how completely slavery had unrecognizable sight of reality and kept them from loving as Christ loves. Douglas had no illusions about the possibility of destroying all wicked and fully realizing the kingdom of God on earth. But, in aspiring expectancy of a world without slavery, the visionary Douglass begged his fellow Christians to chop to the narrow path of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. Douglass suspected that the answers he heard from white southern Christians could not be right.
In fact, decades after being subjugated to the evils of the slave system, Douglass accepted his former master’s invitation to sit at his bedside as he took his last breaths. Somehow, even after enduring years in chains as another Christian man’s property, Douglass demonstrated the powerful Christian ethic of loving one’s enemy. An active participant in church ministry, Douglass required his children to read an entire chapter of the Bible before dinner each night. Passing the book around the table, each child was expected to read a verse until the chapter was complete. Speaking on his own conversion to Christianity, Douglass wrote: “I finally found my burden lightened and my heart relieved. I loved all mankind, slaveholders not excepted, though I abhorred slavery more than ever.” (Douglas) Further, Douglass is telling the story of a slave who made the mistake of telling his master the truth about his poor treatment.
The slave was severely punished, showing that slave owners aren’t interested in the truth. Instead of admitting that slavery is an oppressive system, the slave masters require that their slaves flatter them. This is probably related to the ways slave owners treat religion, using their version of Christianity to make themselves feel better, rather than facing the truth about slavery. In another instance, Douglass began living with Mr. Wilson at St. Michael’s. As young as Douglass was when he moved in with Mr. Covey on 1st of January 1833., he remembers when Mr.
Covey gave him “a sever whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little fingers.” (Douglass 35) This is puzzling to hear of a man who is committed to faith, but his actions seemed to be contradicting. Shortly after Wilson began participating in religious activities. Douglass began to identify a difference in Mr. Wilson through the way he “tied up a lame young woman and whipped her with a heavy cow skin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip”. Douglass states that the way Mr. Wilson justified his behavior was by using the religious literature, repeating a passage of scripture “He that know his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many strips.” This demonstrated that the religious literature help provided master’s with the evidence they needed to defend their actions. Either this was the incorrect way Christianity was practiced or humanity was presented in an ambiguous way.
The presence of religion goes on further when Douglass introduces Mr. Covey, another master he was assign too and was a “professor of religion” (34) and a religious class-leader at the local Methodist church. He also had a reputation of breaking apart young slaves in which Douglass refers to him “as a nigger-breaker”. To conclude, “narrative of a Frederick Douglass” is the story of his life from the time he was born a slave to the time of his escape to freedom in the North.
Douglass debates the role of religion, Christianity, which was written in literature known as the bible had two versions true Christianity and the white Christianity that helped in strengthening slavery. Frederick Douglass became a religious man once he escaped the slaver, he believed that on person cannot consider in Christianity and slavery at the same time. Christian slave owners espoused values of kindness mercy, and moral honesty, which were not applied to their own slaves. That it so says, these Christian had a double norm when applying their religious values.
