George Fox and Slavery

Johanna Jackson and Naveed Moeed, the authors of “George Fox Was a Racist” (FJ June-July 2024), have done us a service by reminding us of the ways that George Fox and other early Quakers failed to overtly oppose the institution of slavery. But I think they have missed some of the nuance in Fox’s 1671 visit to Barbados.

As Katherine Gerbner has shown in her 2018 book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, and her subsequent Friends Journal article (“Slavery in the Quaker World,” Sept. 2019), “Seventeenth-century Quakers . . . were radical but not because they were abolitionists. Instead, Quakers like George Fox were radical because they suggested that Blacks and Whites should meet together for worship.” To understand this claim, it is important to recognize that at the time of Fox’s Barbados visit, the main “justification” for enslaving Africans was that they were “heathen” (i.e., not Christian). There was a presumption that Christians do not enslave fellow Christians; any enslaved person who became Christian presented a challenge to this prevailing ideology. According to Gerbner’s Friends Journal article, this is “why English slave owners found the prospect of slave conversion so threatening: when enslaved people became Christian, it challenged the justification for slavery, which was religious difference, i.e., it was considered legal to enslave ‘heathens’ but not to enslave Christians.” Accordingly, in the years after Fox’s visit, Barbados officials enacted a law (1676) that forbid Quakers from worshiping alongside enslaved Blacks by imposing fines; several Quakers suffered for disobeying the law.

Quaker and other missionaries, as well as their Black converts, challenged and undermined this religious justification of slavery. After his visit, Fox published a pamphlet, To the Ministers, Teachers, and Priests . . . in Barbados, chastising others for ignoring the spiritual life of the enslaved. This seems to have catalyzed other denominations (Anglicans, Moravians) to attend to the religious instruction and conversion of those enslaved. As Gerbner shows in her book, bills were introduced in the British Parliament encouraging these mission efforts, but also for the first time affirming the legality of holding these new Christians in slavery. Thus, the unintended and unforeseen consequence of Fox’s spiritual approach was that the justification for slavery morphed from religious (“Protestant supremacy”) to racial (“White supremacy”). By the early 1700s, the main justification for slavery was not that Africans were not Christian (more and more were), but that they were Black. Enslaved Blacks who became Christian could no longer expect to be manumitted.

We should be wary of the bias of presentism, of interpreting the past by the ethical standards of the present—lest we be judged by future generations for things to which we are currently unaware. We all fervently wish that Fox might have used his visit to Barbados to offer a forthright denunciation of the institution of slavery. But he was living in the wake of two thousand years of institutionalized slavery, which was only in his lifetime morphing into the particularly vicious practice of racialized chattel slavery.

So, was George Fox a racist? I think that is the wrong question. Then as now, the culture we live in is saturated with racist presuppositions and prejudices. The question is not whether a specific individual is or is not a racist, but rather how racism impacts that individual’s life—and how the individual impacts the culture’s racist presuppositions. In Fox’s case, the record is decidedly mixed. By encouraging Blacks and Whites to worship together, he asserted the spiritual equality of all, regardless of outward circumstances, and so in a small way began the process of undermining what was then the predominant justification of slavery. But clearly, he failed to take the logical next step and advocate for the legal and physical, as well as spiritual, equality of those enslaved.

Perhaps instead of debating whether Fox was a racist, we can evaluate him as we should all historical characters: take inspiration from his genuine accomplishments—while learning from his mistakes.