Augustine and Slavery
Augustine is America’s public theologian again. Joe Biden invoked him in his inaugural address. Prominent conservatives, including J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, cite him as an influence. Vance called Augustine instrumental to his conversion to Catholicism and chose him as his patron saint. Hawley claims that only a return to Augustinian Christian Nationalism, expressed most saliently (in his view) by the Puritans, can “save America.”[1]
Issues abound in Hawley’s framing. He sharply contrasts Christian Nationalism against “bloodthirst and conquest,” “ethnic hatred,” and “blood and soil nativism.” But this is ahistorical. Catholic Portugal, Spain, and France, and Protestant Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark drove the Atlantic slave trade. The British empire colonized one-quarter of the world’s population. Catholicism was the state religion of Fascist Italy. Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht soldiers wore belt-buckles reading, “Gott mit uns.” Christian nationalism has not been innocent of bloodthirst, conquest, ethnic hatred, or nativism.
However, even if we grant Hawley’s framing, digging deeper into Augustine’s thought reveals why Augustinian Christian Nationalism is unviable. Doing so will also surface other aspects of Augustine’s thought that chasten the triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism that characterize not just Christian Nationalism but most contemporary politics.
Hawley ignores Augustine’s endorsements of slavery and religious coercion. Central to Augustine’s justification of chattel slavery was his idea that all humans are slaves of God. Some of God’s slaves are faithful; others are runaways. God allows his runaways to fall into chattel slavery, through which masters are to help their slaves return to God’s service. Chattel slavery’s core theological purpose is to help slaves become Christian.
Many Puritans echoed this reasoning, including Cotton Mather in his essay, The Negro Christianized.[2] Against theologians who argued that Christians may not own one another as slaves, Mather insisted that converts make the best slaves. Christian slaves take obedience to earthly masters as their heavenly duty.[3] Augustine would have agreed. Christ, he said, “did not make slaves free, but bad slaves good.”[4]
Augustine defended religious coercion in a similar way. During his last two decades his political preoccupation was soliciting imperial power against a Christian sect called the Donatists. The Donatists held that law cannot and should not aim to compel piety. Augustine responded that coercion could disrupt people’s slavery to false religion and encourage them in faithful slavery to God. Along similar lines, the Puritans coerced Native Americans, hung “witches,” and expelled religious dissenters.
Critics worry that Christian Nationalism legitimates domination and religious coercion. If Christian Nationalism is rooted in Augustine and exemplified by the Puritans, they are right to worry.
But this is only half of the story. Animated by the idea that all humans are slaves of God, Augustine’s politics also chastens common political excesses. His inheritors too often fail to heed his warnings. Let’s consider three: Augustine against triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism.
Triumphalism
Augustine wrote City of God to refute those who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. Often overlooked, however, is his concession that Christianity didn’t save Rome from falling. This is because no earthly city is Christianity’s ultimate concern. Some Christians, such as Eusebius and Orosius, thought that Christianity did and would continue to secure Roman triumph. However, Augustine sought to redirect Roman attentions towards the heavenly city. He is no ally of those who hope that Christianity will save America.
Indeed, he is no ally of those who take their political community to be integral to world history. Augustine denied that God’s plans in human history guarantee any particular community’s flourishing. Twentieth-century Augustinian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr criticized American messianism on these grounds. History may progress without America.[5]
This might distress people accustomed to the language of America as leading the free world. Such language is invoked not only by political conservatives, but also by liberals like Biden and Barack Obama.[6] Romans, who had for centuries seem themselves as the centerpiece of civilization, were similarly distressed by Rome’s sacking in 410. Augustine’s counsel to those unmoored by Rome’s fall was clear: look beyond earthly cities towards the heavenly city.[7]
Materialism
In City of God 15.5, Augustine argues that only a city whose shared loves are noncompetitive goods can be stable.
Why? A good is competitive if increasing the number of people sharing in it decreases each person’s share. Material goods are typically competitive: the more money (as share of a currency) one person has, the less everyone else has. A good is noncompetitive if increasing the number of people sharing in it does not diminish each person’s share. Noncompetitive goods tend to be immaterial. You can have more peace without my having less. For Augustine, the most perfectly noncompetitive good is goodness itself. Paradoxically, as more people share it, each person’s share increases.[8]
Political communities typically value material resources – land, water, minerals – and other competitive goods – power, authority, glory. One person cannot have more of such goods without others having less. Augustine warned that communities organized around competitive goods generate factions that battle for an increasing share at others’ expense.
This is one reason that contemporary Christian nationalists are so often racist and nativist; they aim to secure material and other competitive goods for white Christians at the expense of racial and religious minorities. However, Augustine’s anti-materialism poses a challenge to everyone, not only Christian Nationalists. One Augustinian, Martin Luther King Jr., recognized that materialism “blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth.”[9] Racism places the costs of materialism disproportionately on racial minorities. And so, King claimed, racism and materialism travel together.
Imperialism
King identified a third “triplet” that goes with them. He called it militarism. Augustine might have called it imperialism. A city organized around competitive goods will be driven to expand and capture more of them to maintain or increase the amount each citizen enjoys, even at outsiders’ expense.[10] So Augustine explained Roman imperialism. So Simone Weil inveighed against French colonialism: “how many men have we deprived of a fatherland whom we now compel to die in order to preserve ours?”[11] And so can we diagnose the slave trade, manifest destiny, hegemony.
A city whose shared loves are competitive is willing to exploit outsiders. By contrast, a city whose shared loves are noncompetitive invites outsiders to share in its goods. For Augustine, just cities are anti-imperial, refusing to expand in ways that harm others even when doing so would be profitable.[12]
Augustine understood how difficult it is to imagine an earthly politics that avoids triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism. He rooted this difficulty in human resistance to divine mastery. Only a community that prefers suffering injustice to inflicting it will avoid these wrongs. And only a community that accepts its slavery to God will have such preferences.
Conclusions
You will have noticed a tension in Augustine. His arguments against triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism, and his arguments for slavery and religious coercion are of a piece. Central to both sets of arguments is his thesis that all humans are slaves of God.
Christian nationalists who claim Augustine’s authority fail to appreciate this. They typically embrace the triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism he criticized, ignore the slavery he endorsed, and wink and nod towards the religious coercion he advocated.
Modern thinkers like Niebuhr, King, and Weil have looked to Augustine for ways beyond triumphalism, materialism, and imperialism. But neither they nor their inheritors sufficiently attend to slavery’s entanglements with the better parts of Augustine’s thought. Political Augustinians are surely right that Augustine has much to teach us. But he also leaves us much disentangling work to do.
Toni Alimi is assistant professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.
Notes
[1] https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/09/sen-josh-hawley-america-founded-on-christian-nationalism/
[2] Mather, The Negro Christianized, 9.
[3] Mather, The Negro Christianized, 13. For more on slavery among the Puritans, see Wendy Warren, Slavery in Puritan New England.
[4] Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 124.7
[5] Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
[6] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2017/01/19/thank-you, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/07/24/remarks-by-president-biden-in-statement-to-the-american-people/
[7] Augustine, “Sermon: The Sacking of the City of Rome.”
[8] City of God 15.5
[9] King, “The Three Evils of Society.”
[10] City of God 4.15.
[11] Weil, On Colonialism, 78.
[12] City of God 4.15.