I'm curious how you, as a religious person, would view the efforts of those who noticed slaves were suffering and responded by evangelizing them, rather than doing anything that would do any good from a secular perspective. I suppose in practice there was a lot of overlap between practical help and evangelizing, but it's hard for me to understand why any effort went to evangelizing.
As a Christian, I believe evangelizing is one important way to help people - by giving them God, who strengthens us in suffering and frees us from sin. But yes, that can't be all we do.
It's important to help people visibly here and now; it's also important to share God's good news which helps people by freeing them from sin; it's also important to do work (like political pressure about abolition) that might not help anyone right here and now but lays the groundwork for helping people a lot in the future. But not everyone can do every one of these. Some people have talents more for one of these than another, and I believe that's one way God points out that some people should be working more on the one than the other.
Brown talks about one group of missionaries who actually bought slaves and a plantation to try to evangelize them and set up a model Christian plantation. However, they got it fundamentally wrong by continuing to enslave them! That's horrible; it basically turned out as a standard plantation.
There were also some missionaries who got expelled from slaveholding colonies because they were preaching to slaves and openly saying that God considered their conditions unjust. There were other missionaries who, seeing this, quieted down and focused on just preaching the Gospel so they would be able to stay around and keep doing that good thing. I can see how they made that choice; they didn't have any direct power either way. But that left them giving people a skewed impression of Christianity.
I enjoyed Christopher's Tripod trilogy and The Lotus Caves. His teens are normal, rather than emotional wrecks or unnaturally capable, and their adventures have reasonable scope as well. Until the Tripod prequel came out years later, I thought these were HG Wells's War of the Worlds aliens from a successful follow-up invasion.
Good point! I could easily see another author telling the Tripod trilogy with much more emotionally-wallowing characters, or much more superheroically capable characters... and both of those would be much worse.
Now that I look up "Lotus Caves," I remember I'd read it as a kid but had forgotten it till now. Another fun book, I remember; hadn't noticed it was by the same author.
I'm curious how you, as a religious person, would view the efforts of those who noticed slaves were suffering and responded by evangelizing them, rather than doing anything that would do any good from a secular perspective. I suppose in practice there was a lot of overlap between practical help and evangelizing, but it's hard for me to understand why any effort went to evangelizing.
Those are both really important things!
As a Christian, I believe evangelizing is one important way to help people - by giving them God, who strengthens us in suffering and frees us from sin. But yes, that can't be all we do.
It's important to help people visibly here and now; it's also important to share God's good news which helps people by freeing them from sin; it's also important to do work (like political pressure about abolition) that might not help anyone right here and now but lays the groundwork for helping people a lot in the future. But not everyone can do every one of these. Some people have talents more for one of these than another, and I believe that's one way God points out that some people should be working more on the one than the other.
Brown talks about one group of missionaries who actually bought slaves and a plantation to try to evangelize them and set up a model Christian plantation. However, they got it fundamentally wrong by continuing to enslave them! That's horrible; it basically turned out as a standard plantation.
There were also some missionaries who got expelled from slaveholding colonies because they were preaching to slaves and openly saying that God considered their conditions unjust. There were other missionaries who, seeing this, quieted down and focused on just preaching the Gospel so they would be able to stay around and keep doing that good thing. I can see how they made that choice; they didn't have any direct power either way. But that left them giving people a skewed impression of Christianity.
I enjoyed Christopher's Tripod trilogy and The Lotus Caves. His teens are normal, rather than emotional wrecks or unnaturally capable, and their adventures have reasonable scope as well. Until the Tripod prequel came out years later, I thought these were HG Wells's War of the Worlds aliens from a successful follow-up invasion.
Good point! I could easily see another author telling the Tripod trilogy with much more emotionally-wallowing characters, or much more superheroically capable characters... and both of those would be much worse.
Now that I look up "Lotus Caves," I remember I'd read it as a kid but had forgotten it till now. Another fun book, I remember; hadn't noticed it was by the same author.