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“Loosing the Bonds of Wickedness”: When Abolitionists Won the Churches

Abstract

Why was there so much more antislavery activism in some American Protestant denominations than in others? In this dissertation, I conduct a comparative case study of five national antebellum denominations to explain why abolitionists sometimes mobilized a strong, collective challenge to slavery within their own churches—and why they sometimes did not. I find that abolitionists faced suppression by denomination leaders in all five churches, but that the configuration of denominational authority shaped opportunities for abolitionist mobilization and success. In the face of opposition from leaders, church-centered abolition movements thrived only in denominations where leaders lacked the capacity to prevent their mobilization.

Across all five cases, the threat of a powerful proslavery backlash caused leaders to unite in opposition to abolitionists. Abolitionists managed to overcome this resistance when church authority was less concentrated overall, was primarily rational-legal rather than traditional or charismatic, and was also constrained by strong democratic practices. These characteristics limited leaders’ repressive capacities and increased access points for challengers, creating opportunities for abolitionists to make demands for antislavery church policy, engage in meaning-making, and harness church networks, while also turning leaders’ suppressive attempts into a rallying cry that drew additional supporters. Through these activities, they gained strength—and eventually rid their churches of slavery.

In contrast, in churches with highly concentrated traditional authority and less democratic decision-making procedures, abolitionism did not thrive. Instead, leaders successfully suppressed abolitionists by denying them access to arenas for contention, maintaining tight control over narratives regarding slavery and abolition, and excluding (or threatening to exclude) challengers. These churches have often been characterized as broadly tolerant of slavery, but I show that reality is more nuanced: instead of a widely held tolerance of slavery, the denominations with limited abolitionism were those churches in which the configuration of power lent itself towards suppression and therefore hindered the growth and success of abolitionism.

This dissertation thus addresses inadequacies in the prevailing explanation for religious responses to slavery, challenging their emphasis on theology as the core reason for why some denominations supported slavery while others supported abolition. It also advances social movement theory by showing how organizational characteristics shape opportunities for movements targeting non-state entities and by showing how successful challengers were able to widen opportunities for their movement by exploiting their target weaknesses. Finally, it speaks more broadly to the relationship between large scale political contention and the struggles that play out within civil society organizations.

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