In our last blog, we introduced the religious doctrine of providential design. Now, it is time to examine all the ways this religious viewpoint poisoned attitudes in American Christianity toward African Americans in the US for many years. We left off by stating that it absolved slaveholders from individual responsibility for the horrors of slavery.

How Providential Design Reinforced Racism Within  American Christianity

For racists, however, the idea of providential design had much greater merit than just absolving slaveholders of individual responsibility. Some of its adherents believed it also called for the removal of African Americas from the United States. Now that they were Christians, it was time for them to return “home” and spread the Gospel to other Africans.

The next step in God’s plan for American Christianity was an exodus of African Americans, leaving the US purely white as God had, presumably, wanted it to be in time. Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan (note the senator’s name honors a staunchly pro-slavery American politician) favored the migration of African Americans to Central Africa as his preferred solution for the “Negro question in the South.” This would rid America of “troublesome coloreds” and bring American values and Christianity to a part of Africa “badly in need of both.”

(Where are Native Americans in this view, you might ask? Well, the late 19^th century also saw many believe in the idea of the “vanishing Indian.” This was the belief that all Indians were bound to go extinct because they couldn’t adapt to modernity.)

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Slavery Becomes a Positive Good Once More in American Christianity

Thus, slavery could even become a credit to slaveholders. They had sacrificed time and effort to teach ignorant African slaves God’s truths. For hundreds of years they had tolerated benighted dark-skinned people. But, through faith and patience, they’d redeemed the Africans among them. Now, they could claim their reward: A United States without any African Americans. (If, by now, you’re reciting the lines of the poem “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling, well done. The same logic is at work in that poem at times.)

Let’s keep going. The suffering of the slaves, extreme though it was, was also a good thing. Why? It would make them better missionaries. As the Reverend Louis Grout explained in 1881:

“And when, in olden time, God would make choice of a people to be conservators and propagators of his truth in the world for ages, how did he prepare them for their mission? Not by sending them to college, but by sending them down to Egypt; and there, for long generations, did he keep them in bondage, and then for other long years in wanderings in the wilderness, till he had fitted them for his work, and ground into them a character which all the fiction of ages has not ground out of them. So with the people of whom we speak—what an experience have they had in suffering! Surely, God must have in store for them some great and wondrous mission, for which he has intended this experience to be both presage and preparation.”

Final Implications

Other implications of providential design are troubling as well. If God were merciful and just, but omnipotent, too, couldn’t He find a shorter route to Christianizing Africa than ripping millions of people from their African homes, subjecting them to brutal treatment over 250 years, and then sending them back? It seems that missionaries might have achieved the same result without all the pain and suffering. Not to mention the problematic concept that any person or church denomination could claim to know the will of an all-knowing deity.

Finally, there’s the cultural assumptions inherent in providential design. The part of providential design claiming that it was the duty of African Americans to redeem Africa also implies that Africans needed redemption. Or, put another way, African religion and culture was inferior to what Christianity offered. By definition, Africans lived in darkness and ignorance, in this case, no matter their cultural achievements in art, music, or anything else.

I wish I could write that this doctrine of providential design was dead and buried. I’m not convinced it is, however. At least, I hear echoes of it occasionally, even today. The paternalism that underlies providential design remains, to some extent. So does the American Exceptionalism and complex of cultural superiority that underlies it. Providential design also lives in modified form in some teachings of Christian nationalism. I’d like to see it buried for good. That would truly be providential.

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