Bound by Chains: Calvinism and the Justification of Black Oppression

I approach this subject with humility. Others—Black writers, theologians, and historians—have told this story with more authority and lived experience than I can. My task here is modest: to trace one strand of American inheritance, the Puritan reflex that equates labor with worth, and to notice how it was twisted into an ideology that justified slavery and shaped the long disadvantage of Black Americans.

Theologian Willie James Jennings argues that Christian imagination itself became racialized in the colonial period:

“The problem of Christian social identity has been a problem of racial existence from the beginning of the colonial period. Whiteness has been woven into the very fabric of Christian thought in the modern West.” (The Christian Imagination)

The father of Black liberation theology, James H. Cone, made the point even more directly:

“The gospel preached by white oppressors in America is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather it is a religion that has made peace with injustice.” (God of the Oppressed)

These insights set the frame. Puritan habits of thought about discipline, labor, and visible righteousness did not remain confined to pulpits. They seeped into law, custom, and economic life, becoming a wider social construct. Over time, those categories of judgment—who was “worthy,” who belonged, who deserved opportunity—were used to sanctify a racial order.

Colonial Faith and Servitude

In 1706, Puritan minister Cotton Mather published The Negro Christianized. He reassured slaveholders that baptism would not free enslaved Africans or threaten property rights. Instead, he promised, Christianity would make them more obedient:

“They are servants to men, yet they are the children of God … Christianity makes them better servants.”

Here, the Puritan reflex is plain. Obedience and submission were framed as signs of virtue. Work was not liberation, but discipline. Mather’s message made slavery seem less like exploitation and more like providence.

It is true that Puritanism itself was primarily a northern inheritance, while slavery was entrenched in the South. Southern states leaned Anglican, then Baptist and Methodist. Yet the Puritan categories of discipline, providence, and visible righteousness spread widely across Protestant America. When Southern defenders like Baptist minister Thornton Stringfellow later claimed that slavery was divinely sanctioned, they were drawing from the same reservoir of thought. White prosperity was read as providence; Black obedience as virtue. The language shifted, but the structure of judgment remained.

False Judgments and False Comparisons

European colonists also brought a Calvinist-inflected habit of measuring worth by visible signs. When they encountered African societies, with different dress, wealth, and religion, they read those differences as proof of inferiority. Complex systems of governance, spirituality, and knowledge were ignored.

This logic—visible difference mapped onto visible sin—smoothed the path for slavery. Africans were judged not only by skin but by presumed moral failure. As Jennings points out, race itself became theological: whiteness associated with righteousness, Blackness with curse.

The “Positive Good”

By the early 1800s, slavery’s defenders no longer spoke of it as a necessary evil. They claimed it was a divinely ordained institution. In 1841, Stringfellow wrote: “God sanctioned slavery among the Hebrews.” South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, in his “Cotton is King” speech, called slavery a “positive good,” ordained by Providence to sustain civilization.

This was the Puritan reflex in secular garb. Discipline revealed fitness. Prosperity was providence. Yet in this twisted form, white prosperity proved election while Black labor proved only duty.

Naming the Hypocrisy

Enslaved people themselves saw the contradiction most clearly. Frederick Douglass, in 1845, wrote:

“Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

Sojourner Truth, in 1851, laid bare the gendered side of the hierarchy: “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Both showed how the gospel of work had become a gospel of bondage. Labor was demanded, but never counted as worth. Suffering was praised, but only when endured in chains.

Black Faith and Resistance

Not all theology bent toward chains. Black churches developed their own traditions, rooted in both trauma and hope. The Exodus story, the cross, and the promise of resurrection became symbols of liberation.

Cone, writing in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, argued that the cross itself identified God with the oppressed. Black churches emphasized community, survival, and deliverance, offering a counter-narrative to the white gospel of labor and obedience. They became places to organize, to resist, and to reclaim worth outside white judgment.

Reconstruction Betrayed

After emancipation, Black Americans built schools, held office, and voted. For a brief time, labor and worth aligned. But the Compromise of 1877 ended federal enforcement of Reconstruction. White terror burned schools, suppressed votes, and lynched teachers. Sharecropping and convict leasing re-enslaved freed people in all but name.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, captured the reversal:

“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

For Du Bois, racism was not just a political act but a cultural order. He called it “a public opinion that became a world opinion.” Poverty was recast as evidence of Black failure. Success was punished because it threatened the myths that justified centuries of oppression.

Parallel Systems and Their Destruction

Faced with exclusion, Black Americans built their own communities of excellence—schools, businesses, neighborhoods. Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, was one such place.

But Black achievement was often met with violence. In 1921, a white mob destroyed Greenwood in one of the worst acts of racial terrorism in U.S. history. Across the country, similar attacks struck when Black prosperity seemed too visible.

These assaults reflected a deeper fear: if Black Americans could prosper, then the entire moral scaffolding of white supremacy—that only the “elect” could thrive—was exposed as a lie.

The Long Echo

The logic of visible righteousness never disappeared. Segregation, redlining, sentencing disparities, the “welfare queen” myth, and demands for “respectability” all rested on the same assumption: that worth was proven by behavior, and some groups must work twice as hard to be seen as good.

James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, named the refusal at the core of white innocence:

“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Purity, discipline, labor, providence—these Puritan habits of thought had become a national alibi. They were no longer just theology. They were a social construct, embedded in law, policy, and culture.

Conclusion: The Weight of Judgment

Puritan thought did not invent racism. But it gave racism a durable moral scaffolding. The reflex that equated labor with worth was twisted into an ideology that sanctified bondage, justified hierarchy, and explained away suffering as deserved.

Black thinkers from Douglass to Du Bois to Baldwin have long exposed the hypocrisy. Cone and Jennings remind us that theology itself was bent. And Baldwin reminds us that America’s greatest crime may be its insistence on innocence.

The chains were physical, but the justification was ideological, and reckoning with that legacy is part of our unfinished work.

Bibliography

• Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.

• Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1975.

• Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.

• Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

• Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935.

• Hammond, James Henry. Speech on the Admission of Kansas, under the Lecompton Constitution. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858. Commonly known as the “Cotton is King” speech. Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1858.

• Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

• Mather, Cotton. The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity. Boston: B. Green, 1706.

• Stringfellow, Thornton. A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery. Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1841.

• Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Speech delivered at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 1851. In Frances Dana Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1. Rochester, NY: Fowler and Wells, 1881.

• —. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time. Edited by Olive Gilbert. Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1850.

• Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

• Wilkinson, Charles. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001.