Wesley had no patience for colonists who claimed they did not hate Africans as such or who thought economic necessity justified the practice. He castigated exactly the type of reasoning his friend Whitefield used, exemplified by members of Parliament he quotes as claiming, “But the furnishing us with slaves is necessary, for the trade, and wealth, and glory of our nation.” Wesley responds:
Wealth is not necessary to the glory of any nation; but wisdom, virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our country. These are necessary to the real glory of a nation; but abundance of wealth is not. … Better is honest poverty than all the riches bought by the tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow-creatures.
Wesley did not view slavery as discrete wrongs perpetrated by individuals. For Wesley, it could never be sufficient to leave the mitigation of such wrongdoing to the consciences of individual believers, when they are indoctrinated and formed by unjust systems. He did not promote solutions based only on a program of individual conversions, such as is still commonly heard to this day: “Society will only change one converted heart at a time.” Preaching which concerns itself only with individual conversion fails to reckon with the depth and pervasiveness of sin. As American history so readily shows, a nation of pious believers can fund and defend entire economies of wickedness without once recognizing the perversity of what they are sanctioning.
Whitefield is not the villain of this history. He is simply an exemplar of a sort of Christianity that is prevalent to this day, one that has looked to him as a gauge of successful gospel proclamation. While it now distances itself from the particular evil in which he participated, it also tends to minimize the import of his participation in it. Unsurprisingly, evangelists working within Whitefield’s paradigm today still often fail to criticize injustice or to proclaim the deliverance and disruption that characterize the reign of Jesus Christ. They’ll promise life in the age to come but constrain its manifestation in the present, for instance by ignoring or minimizing the ongoing repercussions of slavery and segregation, or even by asserting that attention to such matters compromises the gospel. By accommodating unjust norms that are beneficial to them, they leave many trapped in despondency. They tend to confront only certain types of sin in their teaching and preaching, focusing on individual sin and particularly sexual transgression, while neglecting societal wrongs that are also condemned in scripture.Whitefield’s approach deodorizes those systemic sins with appeals to “providence.” To give a crass example from another extolled figure in the American Calvinist past, in A Defense of Virginia Robert Louis Dabney rhetorically asks, “Was it nothing, that this race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race?” Dabney claimed that “for the African race, such as Providence has made it, and where he has placed it in America, slavery was the righteous, the best, yea, the only tolerable relation.” Christians cannot excuse or overlook such a perverse claim from one of their own: it must be censured as the sleight of hand it is.