106 - Puritan Race Virtue, Vice and Values 1620-1820

Puritan Race Virtue, Vice and Values 1620-1820
By Joseph R. Washington, Jr.
American University Studies. New York, Peter Lang, 1988. 507 pp. $57.90.

Joseph Washington, who has a Social Ethics doctorate from Boston University, teaches in the Department of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania. His earlier works include Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity (1964, 1984), and Black Sects and Cults (1972, 1984).

This present work is a significant scholarly study, although at times stylistically rather difficult to read, especially when compared to his earlier writings such as his most readable Black Religion.

His purpose is to analyze some of the major figures of "Evangelical Calvinism" including Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Hopkins, along with a variety of Baptists and others, as to their words and actions as they relate to class values, color-consciousness and caste virtue.

The study is based on the assumption that the "establishment YankeePuritan denominationalists" were the power elite prior to the Civil War. The faith and ethics, then, of Calvinism were shaped by people who adopted the existing "race/ethnic test," thus effectively rejecting any claim of Black Americans for justice.

For example, Washington traces Jonathan Edwards' idea of justice and observes it was always related to what he calls "religious regulative-justice," and not "secular and civil social justice." His conclusions are that Edwards, Brainard, Hopkins, and others never argued for the "just right" of blacks as they argued for Indian Americans; or for their "natural right to justice"; or to have whites be "upright and just in all our dealings with them" or that state contracts be regulated by those "who would deal justly by them."

The importance of this work is its focus on race issues and attitudes of the Puritan establishment-issues and attitudes that are generally omitted from the studies of their theology and from assessments of their place in shaping the "New England" and the larger "American" Mind.

Donald A. Wells
Massachusetts Bible Society
Boston, Mass.