The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality

The Old Testament prophets were full of such expectations: after a time of deep shadow, a light would dawn; the valleys would be raised up and the mountains brought low; swords would be beaten into ploughshares (instruments of death becoming instruments of life); Jubilee would be declared (the time when debts are cancelled and slaves released); and

It’s in the accusation that a viewpoint is “on the wrong side of history”. Apparently, history is headed somewhere—somewhere that can be known in advance. Somewhere better. Such a belief in progress is not a human universal by any stretch. In previous cultures, it was the past that was viewed as better than the present. After all, the past was real

For abolition to spread from Protestant Britain to Catholic and Muslim lands, there needed to be a work of “translation”. Diplomacy required that the language be altered. In 1842 a new phrase was coined. Slavery, said the lawyers, was a crime, not against the Creator, not against Christ, but “a crime against humanity”.

Preaching was a vital component, but beyond the spiritual authority which abolitionists conveyed, there needed to be political authority to enforce abolition. It certainly helped that Britain “ruled the waves”. As the world’s greatest naval power it could police the Atlantic, and as the world’s greatest empire it had the clout to negotiate the spre

But in the 19th century—through decades of campaigning and, in America, a brutal civil war—the spiritual would become manifest in the political. The “self-evident” truth of human equality, which was nothing of the kind, would become evident nonetheless. Slavery, a human universal, would be abolished in the West, and a decidedly Christian conscience

Douglass is able to call his former enslaver both an “agent of hell” and a brother. This is a sophisticated view of both humanity and evil—a view born of the Christianity which both Douglass and Auld professed, but which in actuality confronted them so differently. When the truth of Christ is brought to bear (rather than borrowed as a bulwark for e

“The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me, the wails of millions pierce my heart, and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip, the deathlike gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman, the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast

As with church abuse, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Galileo affair, the point is not that these things weren’t so bad, all things considered. On the contrary, when all things are considered, these events are truly evil—Evil with a capital E. But their evil is judged by the good which they pretended to value.

why do we recoil so instinctively from such an imposition of force? Once again, the crooked line testifies to the straight…