Chances are you missed this story, even though it took place in one of the nation’s largest cities, New York City.
The Chatham Street Chapel was a well-known evangelical church in the city; well-known, in part, because its pastor was famous nationwide (or infamous, depending on your perspective). The church was known for its strong position on a moral issue. And that angered many people in the city.
During a church-sponsored meeting to explore ways to better organize the fight for the church’s position, a mob of some 1500 protestors attacked the church. Fortunately, the church’s leaders escaped out the back door just as the mob was coming in the front door. The sanctuary was left a mess, but no one was injured. This was the first of two mob attacks on the church. On another occasion, protestors took over the church balcony during a meeting and threw hymnals down onto the congregation.
When did this brazen assault on a house of worship take place? What stand did this band of evangelicals take that so inflamed their neighbors?
The attacks took place during the spring and summer of 1833. And the mob was angered over the church’s support for the abolition of slavery. Fearing for their financial well-being, these Northern protestors were willing to allow millions to be enslaved.
While Chatham Street Chapel’s pastor, Charles G. Finney, would wrestle with the question of how involved in causes like abolition a church should be, he never wavered in his opposition to slavery. Only his concern that a church might promote the cause of abolition to the detriment of its mission to save souls troubled him. Since Finney believed evidence for true conversion would include commitment to abolition, he made that cause second to the cause of evangelism. This stance and his discomfort with “amalgamation,” what we would call integration, troubled some of Finney’s wealthy supporters, like Arthur and Lewis Tappan. They believed commitment to anything less than abolition and integration was morally inadequate. Finney, like most men and women, was sometimes subject to the ethos of his society.
But make no mistake, though he seemed personally uncomfortable with “amalgamation,” he believed slavery was clearly wrong. In his Lectures on Revivals, he called it “the sin of the church,” and castigated any church, north or south, which failed to denounce the institution. And, when he became part of the first faculty at Ohio’s Oberlin College, he endorsed the school’s intention to prepare ministers who were proponents both of revival and abolition.
While Finney and other evangelical leaders, like the school’s first President Asa Mahon, were at Oberlin, the school continued to be one of the most progressive in the nation. Finney, who became Oberlin’s president in 1851, continued to encourage equality for blacks and women students. (The number of black students was never large in these days, but that it existed at all is significant.) Only when Finney’s generation passed on and evangelicalism’s influence waned did Oberlin begin to practice segregation within its student body.
Opposition to slavery and support for emancipation are parts of American evangelicalism’s heritage that shouldn’t be forgotten.
