The faith of Frederick Douglass
Oklahoma native explores how Scripture helped shape abolitionist’s convictions
An Oklahoma native explores how Scripture helped shape the abolitionist’s convictions.
An Oklahoma native explores how Christian faith shaped the life of one of America’s most famous and revered abolitionists.
D.H. Dilbeck’s new book “Frederick Douglass: America’s prophet” was released on Wednesday — a fitting date because it was Douglass’ birthday, and it fell right in the middle of Black History Month.
Douglass was born a slave on Feb. 14, 1818, in Maryland, and he died in 1895 in Washington, D.C. Much is known about the 19th-century orator and statesman through his autobiographies, speeches and the accounts of others who knew him.
A history scholar, Dilbeck, 30, said his book explores Douglass’ faith because it was an integral aspect of his life that begged to be explored further and at length.
Dilbeck, a graduate of Oklahoma Christian School, Oklahoma Baptist University and the University of Virginia, is currently a student at
Yale Law School in Connecticut. He is the eldest son of the Rev. Hance Dilbeck — former senior pastor of Quail Springs Baptist Church and current executive director-treasurerelect of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma — and his wife, Julie.
In a recent telephone interview, D.H. Dilbeck discussed how his interest in Douglass led him to write a book on the abolitionist’s fervent faith. The interview has been edited for clarity and space.
Q: How did you become interested in Frederick Douglass?
A: I think Douglass is one of the most important and heroic figures in American history, certainly in the America in which he lived in the middle part of the 19th century and the Civil War, in particular.
I think Douglass is a man of such courage and moral clarity that he’s a compelling figure for me for that reason. I find that the more that I read what Douglass wrote, I have a clearer understanding of what America is and it can be at its best and what the Christian faith, rightly understood and rightly practiced, can be at its best.
Q: What made you begin to do research for a book?
A: When I was reading Douglass’ famous first autobiography (1895’s “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”), at the very end of that book in the appendix, he talks a little bit about the way Christianity was used by slaveholders and their allies to justify slavery.
He goes at length to make the case for why their proslavery understanding of the Christian faith is just totally out of step with what he liked to call the true Christianity of Christ. And that piece of the autobiography piqued my interest.
I thought this seems to be a man of deep personal faith and a kind of rich understanding of the Christian faith. I thought there are stories that probably haven’t given Douglass’ faith its proper due, that maybe this was an angle on Douglass’ life that needed exploring.
Q: How did your friends and family members respond when they learned you were writing a book about Frederick Douglass?
A: I got a positive response, generally. I think most people, even if they don’t know much about Frederick Douglass, have probably heard of him at least once or twice.
I found that most people were intrigued to learn more about him, about how this man of undeniably deep Christian faith tried to use the substance of that faith to make arguments against slavery in the final years of its existence in the United States.
I found that people find that there is something compelling about the way Douglass forces us to confront the way we don’t altogether practice what we preach.
Q: Can you explain why you call Douglass “America’s prophet”?
A: When I call Douglass “America’s prophet,” I have in mind something like the Old Testament prophets . ... What I mean by that is simply that this is someone who is trying to speak a clear word of moral conviction to a people who professed to believe certain things about God especially but did not in their daily lives live up to the moral and religious commitments that they claimed to hold most dear.
So when I say Douglass is a prophet, I kind of think of him holding up a mirror to Christian slaveholding America and saying “Do you profess to believe these things about Jesus Christ and you claim to follow the moral teachings of Jesus Christ, but it’s time for you to look in the mirror and confront all the ways that your actions and especially slave holding totally contradict those teachings of Christ that you claim to hold most dear.”
Q: In the book you talk about how Douglass came to know God. Can you talk about that?
A: Douglass was born in the slaveholding South, and he grew up hearing white Southern ministers preach a proslavery gospel, preaching to slaves that it’s your Christian duty to submit to your masters.
But in his young teens he had the chance to live in Baltimore for a time, and ... though he was still a slave, he began to attend services at black Methodist churches.
These were churches that were mostly made up of free black Methodists, though there were some slaves that attended there, as well.
It was really in these churches that Douglass came to see a radically different version of the Christian faith and actually not a Christianity that told slaves to submit but a Christianity that said Jesus Christ preaches liberty to the captive.
So it was this process of attending these church services and also learning to read — he secretly learned to read in Baltimore, primarily by reading the Bible — those two things together ... that really set Douglass on the path (toward God). He had a classic evangelical born-again experience while he was in Baltimore.
Q: I’m hoping you will expound on this powerful excerpt from the book: “For his entire adult life, Douglass nurtured his faith in tension, the tension between his assurance in the truth of Christianity and his frustration about how most Americans practiced it.” You say he never resolved that tension, but it gave meaning to his faith.
A: To my mind, it is really kind of the defining feature of the life of his faith. He never lost any doubt in the truth of Christianity, and he never lost hope in God’s goodness and his love for the slave.
And yet, at the same time, he lived in a time and place in which most Christians either tolerated slavery or even more than that, celebrated slavery — thought it was a good thing.
And so he had come to terms with that — how can I believe Christianity to be true and yet at the same time as I look around have to come to terms with the fact that most of the Christians around me in slaveholding America accept slavery, this institution that I think to be so fundamentally contrary to the spirit of the Christian religion.
It’s kind of a classic problem in a way. Are you going to let all the ways that followers of Christ fail to live up to Christ’s teachings totally turn you off the faith altogether? Douglass wrestled with that at times, but in the end, he never let it happen.
Q: What kinds of things did you use for your research?
A: I used two main sources — one is the three autobiographies that Douglass wrote throughout the course of his life. They are rich resources about his life.
The other is the speeches that Douglass gave . ... It’s in those speeches that Douglass most clearly sets forth his understanding of Christianity and his religious argument against slavery.
Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?
A: First, I would say that a simple goal I had was I thought that Douglass’ deep faith was a side of him that most people didn’t know much about, and I wanted recover that and tell the story of his life in a fresh way from that angle. So that was one goal. But I think an even more important goal than that is it seemed to me the message Douglass spoke to the America he lived in continues to have relevance even to the present day. If there’s any sort of core message that tied together Douglass’ life and career, it was simply that Americans, American Christians in particular, always had to be mindful of the way that their actions didn’t live up to the faith that they professed with their lips, that they had to constantly be mindful of how they acted and how they treated others — for Douglass, how they treated those who were enslaved — completely contradicted what he liked to call the true Christianity of Christ.