Chapter 20 - Religion

Summary

While Frederick Douglass’s fame as an ex-slave and man of letters is widely known over two continents, Europe and North America, his career as an evangelistic orator outside of the United States is far less familiar to Douglass scholars. With attention turned toward a religious consideration of Douglass’s career as local preacher, then international abolitionist in the revivalist tradition, this article connects Douglass to a specifically black form of prophetic performance against the Pharisaism of proslavery Christianity in the U.S. South. In increasingly agnostic and humanistic terms, Douglass voiced his antislavery jeremiad against American Christianity in a months-long public performance of revivalistic speech-making in Christian England and Ireland in 1845-47.