On self-contradiction

Frederick Douglass was a very powerful voice in terms of expressing the dichotomous nature of American Christianity. For him, white America had turned Christianity into a kind of clan religion in which they didn’t worship Christ, they worshipped whiteness. And he was very critical of what he called the slaveholding Christianity of this nation as being a self‑contradiction – something that was a total fiction in terms of the supposed Christian identity of America. So he used that to fuel his anti-slavery rhetoric, as did other abolitionists at the time.