Nathan Nielson: Welcome to The Eclective, a new publication and podcast of Books and Bridges, where we explore the wisdoms of the world and apply them to modern life. My name is Nathan Nielson, and our guest is Benjamin Park, Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has authored four books, including American Nationalisms, Kingdom of Nauvoo, and American Zion. Today we explore Theodore Parker. This orator of abolitionism, grappled with the meaning of the Bible, challenged the doctrines of Christianity, became a transcendentalist, sheltered fugitive slaves, and spoke with ferocious conscience about social progress. His view of history did not omit the horrors and pain we all see, but he believed the moral trajectory “bends towards justice.” Dr. Park will flesh out the life of a man who passionately defended the downtrodden and spoke against the cultural grain. Ben Park, it's great to have you with us again.
Benjamin Park: It's an honor to be on your show.
Nathan Nielson: Thank you. So, you've been hanging out in the Harvard archives the past couple years. Tell us what you've been researching and writing about.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, I've been very fortunate to have had a number of research fellowships this last year to head out to Boston, which is where I've been able to research the life of Theodore Parker, this abolitionist minister who was one of the most prominent orators in America during the 1840s and 1850s. And in some ways frustratingly, but in other ways, beneficially, a lot of his papers have been collected at a number of repositories at Harvard, at the Massachusetts Historical Society, at the Boston Public Library, the Boston Athenaeum. The very disparate nature of his papers kind of give a sense of how varied and widespread his influence and life was. And so, I've been spending all my time reading any scrap of paper I can find related to his life and work and ideas and all the people in his orbit.
Nathan Nielson: Yeah, thanks. So, I'm interested in the intellectual climate of Parker's time. What was going on during that time period? We're looking at, what, the 1830s, 40s, 50s? And I think he passed away in 1860. What is going on in this time? And what kind of context is he speaking in and writing in and sermonizing in?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, so historians frequently refer to this era as the Antebellum period: Ante=Pre, Bellum=War. So, pre-war. And that's not just a category we place back on the time of us trying to make sense of the past, but it really captures the spirit of the day to where they felt that a war was coming, that it was an era of division, of splintering, of crises. And so, you have a number of churches being divided, a number of voluntary organizations, political parties coming and disappearing and splintering, and then, of course, eventually the nation itself breaking into two. And Theodore Parker experiences all those divisions during his lifetime. He was raised a Unitarian. He trains at the Harvard Divinity School, he becomes a Unitarian preacher himself, but soon finds himself on the margins among Unitarian preachers due to some of his radical beliefs and pretty boisterous persona to the point where he gets kicked out of the Boston Association of Ministers, which takes quite a bit to be kicked out of a Unitarian circle back there, but that just shows how radical he was and how controversial he was. But then once he was kicked out of the Unitarians, he forms his own non-denominational congregation in Boston that by the time he has to retire due to health conditions in 1859, he is preaching to two to three thousand people every week and his words spread across the nation. And he becomes one of the most famous ministers in America at the time because he's willing to speak on all topics. He's not bound by any denominational creed or any particular affiliation. He speaks out on abolition, politics, women's rights, and of course, religion.
Nathan Nielson: How does Parker play into the Transcendentalism movement?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, well Parker was going to school at Harvard at the very time that what scholars now call the Transcendentalist movement was born. He was a student when Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers his famous divinity school address. So, he would have been, he had just graduated, but he was still in the orbit. So, he attended and listened to that. And then he was part of these social clubs and intellectual debate groups that would get together and try to reimagine what an American intellectual culture should be. What comes to be known as a Transcendentalist – they believe in the individual and tapping into a conscious self rather than looking to older models. If you're a Transcendentalist you're someone who wants to break away from the past and frame a new concept of the state and the self that revolves around morals rather than traditional ideas of laws and structure. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course, is the most famous leader among this group, and his book Nature and then his many essays become instant classics in American literature. Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden – of an individual trying to return back to nature to get in touch with their true being and ideas to break away from the evil world – is another sense. Theodore Parker really swam in those waters. He built on those ideas. In many ways, his theology was the apex, the acme of theological ideas, where he took the very concepts of stripping away past traditions and exalting the self and says, well, what happens when we make a theology based out of that? Well, to him, that meant stripping away all sense of allegiance to the Bible as a literal historical text. It meant no longer seeing Christ as a divine, salvific figure that stands between you and God because you as an individual needs to be at the apex of your sense of the cosmos. And that's, of course, too much for many of their colleagues. And when Theodore Parker was denounced as a Transcendentalist, that would have been a pejorative back then and that was one of the reasons why he was kicked out of the Unitarian tradition. Now eventually, Theodore Parker and others evolved past the Transcendentalist clubs. One of the critiques that was often leveled against the Transcendentalists was they were too much about ideas and too little about action. There was often a sense that they were far more eclectic and heterogeneous than typically described. One Transcendentalist said that the only thing upon which they could all agree was that they didn't agree on anything. And so many of the Transcendentalists break off into different cultural movements and parties and Theodore Parker takes his Transcendentalist lessons and tries to then apply them directly into politics and abolition. And a few others follow him. And while others go into trying to establish communitarian efforts, try to establish more devout theological schools, some focus more on literacy. But yeah, Theodore Parker, like many others, was trained in the Transcendentalist movement before they moved on to other circles.
Nathan Nielson: Yeah, thanks. I think the atmosphere of Antebellum America was so rich and so almost, you could say, crowded with many different kinds of intellectual resources. You have Christianity, you have the Bible, you have Transcendentalism. I think even Transcendentalism was influenced by some Eastern thought from what I've read.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, they believed you could take sources from wherever you can, that the goal of the individual is to connect the truth regardless of its origins. And so Emerson and others were very open to taking ideas from what they saw as Eastern mysticism or the Oriental idea of meditation or connecting to your inner soul. And so they really try to disrupt the traditional idea of where can you get sources of knowledge and a sense of being, which was seen as quite threatening and challenging to the status quo.
Nathan Nielson: Sounds like a very Books & Bridges type of project.
Benjamin Park: Absolutely!
Nathan Nielson: So, what are some of those sources? I know Emerson read the Bhagavad Gita and I think he talked about Rumi, the Persian poet. Do you know of any others that come to mind? I'm just curious.
Benjamin Park: You know, they don't come to mind, although I've heard the same sources of Emerson and others. To Theodore Parker, the most important sources were the German higher critics. He believed that those individuals who are cutting into traditional ideas of the Bible and the history of Christianity are really where you're going to find the new truths upon which modernity are built. The direct correlation to religion was evident very early on. Theodore Parker is reading David Friedrich Strauss and others who are just kind of dispelling traditional notions of Christianity, which is what leads Theodore Parker to be cast as a heretic due to his teachings both on the Bible and on Christ. Eventually there are going to be other sources from European philosophy and anthropology that are going to be influential in less fortunate ways. Theodore Parker is also reading from a lot of the theorists on biology and anthropology in Germany, which is going to lead him to create a hierarchy of race, which even though he's an adamant abolitionist, he still believed that some races were more advanced than others. And all of these he's taken from these foreign European sources, which show that the foundations for his ideas are quite eclectic and not always as consistent as we might assume.
Nathan Nielson: Does the abolition movement consist of a lot of Transcendentalists? Did the Transcendentalist movement kind of flow into abolitionism, or is there any kind of tension between the two?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, there definitely was, there's a lot of similarities and overlap. And more so, if there is one political issue that a majority of people identified with Transcendentalism would later align with, it would be the anti-slavery movement. Now, I think a distinction is quite crucial at this point to where a lot of the Transcendentalists, and frankly, a lot of people in the American north, would have identified as anti-slavery, right, regarding slavery as wrong, that the chattel enslavement of human beings should not be practiced. But then to take the next step from being anti-slavery in principle to abolitionist in practice was a much more rare step than we'd like to think. Because it's easy to say, hey, slavery is bad. It's a lot harder to say that I am going to oppose the federal government's policies on the enslavement of human beings in the south than saying slavery is a moral immediate issue that needs attention. To be an abolitionist, you typically needed three things. You needed to oppose, you needed to fight for the immediate emancipation of slavery, right? Not this gradual, slow-paced change. You argued against the compensation of enslavers, saying we're not going to buy the enslaved off of people and then compensate the enslavers who are losing their property because again, if you're an abolitionist, you don't believe human beings are property, so you're against compensation. And you're also in favor of integrating the newly emancipated African Americans into society rather than trying to ship them out west or back to Africa or down to South America. So to be an abolitionist, you typically had to be for immediate emancipation, no compensation for enslavers, and for racial integration, and very few people in the north, and indeed very few people, very few among the abolition, or among the Transcendentalists, were willing to take that step. Theodore Parker was definitely one of them, and he took that step a lot earlier than several of the others. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau – they don't take that big step to abolitionism until the 1850s when a number of other major political and national episodes kind of radicalized a number of individuals. But Theodore Parker very early on, by the early 1840s, recognized that the true conclusion of the Transcendentalist voyage is abolitionism. And I'll note that several of his colleagues recognize this belatedly after John Brown, the famous abolitionist who tries to lead an enslaved insurrection in Virginia where he's eventually caught at Harper's Ferry and is hung in 1859. When he dies, Henry David Thoreau delivers an oration in which he says John Brown is the true Transcendentalist. He was willing to reach that point quicker and more powerfully than the rest of us, and therefore he should be praised. And so, it took Thoreau two decades to get to that point of recognition, but he finally got there.
Nathan Nielson: Oftentimes Christianity takes credit for the abolition of slavery. But the story is not quite that simple because the Bible in many places has a chance to denounce slavery but doesn't fully denounce slavery. In fact, it advises the slaves to remain in place and to not fight the system. And so, I'm just curious how this group of Transcendentalists, who believed in an eclectic source of truth, how they came to use their version of Christianity to be one of the main sources that would kind of defy and resist this institution.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, it's a great question. And I should say at the start that there is no unanimous position on that as well. So, Theodore Parker's position was very popular, I would argue, but it was far from the only one. And in some ways, it was quite contradictory when compared to some other abolitionists who use Christianity. But in general, Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, a number of other abolitionists, they denounced American Christianity and the American Christian churches as what they called the bulwark of slavery because they argued that those churches were the biggest supporters of enslavement. I mean, some even had their own specific Bibles in which they would cut out the emancipatory verses and keep those of the “slaves be obedient to your masters.” And that would be how they teach. I mean, if you go back a couple of centuries, Christianity ends up being the thing that justifies and enables slavery to take root in America in the first place, because at the start slavery was something that was based on civilization in the mind of many, but eventually religion provided a framework in which people can say, actually, we can start a shadow practice because we are fulfilling this Christian order of bringing salvation to these different races and we're bringing civilization to them. And therefore, Christianity proves to be a crutch. Now, as many biblical scholars who know the text a lot better than me will say, there is as an eclectic, that word keeps coming up, an eclectic assortment of teachings regarding slavery in the Bible. In some places it's pretty clear that it allows the practice. And there are other verses that some people came to interpret as being anti-slavery in nature, and then they marshal that in support of their abolitionist activities. And the anti-slavery movement in America, to succeed, ended up requiring all those different types of people to come together. It required those who believed that the Bible was an abolitionist text, that the truth is going to go marching on, right? The Harriet Beecher Stowes of the world who, when they write Uncle Tom's Cabin, they're arguing that abolition is a Christian duty. It also required people like Theodore Parker and his thousands of followers who said that actually, traditional Christianity needs to be shorn and we need a much more humanistic form of gospel that Theodore Parker still defined as Christianity, but a majority of Christians wouldn't have recognized as Christianity. And so Christianity, just like any collection, a smattering of ideas and policies and allegiances, can be molded for these different circumstances. Whereas some used it as the bulwark of slavery, others believed it was the touchstone for abolition.
Nathan Nielson: It makes sense that Transcendentalism would be a kind of spark to light this anti-slavery fire because – maybe I should even say Judeo-Christian values here – because drawing upon the idea that the true essence of religion should be kind of plucked from the institutional interests, should be centered in the individual conscience, and the idea going way back to Genesis that every human being is created in the image of God and therefore has some kind of inherent divine spark or worth and that each individual carries a conscience within them, it makes sense.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, that's exactly what Theodore Parker was teaching. That's why he said even though he came to reject the Bible as a historical literal text, even though he came to see Jesus Christ not as a divine, salvific being, but as a great human who was able to accomplish a lot of good, he still believed that the Christian tradition, more than any other tradition, had been able to capture those beliefs and the divine sense of self. And that's why he tried to save a sense of Christianity for the modern world. And so, what other people saw as heresy, as someone stripping away the true fundamentals of Christianity, Theodore Parker believed that he was actually finding the core. And the term that he used, and he used this as the title of his most famous sermon, he wanted to shed away the “transient” notions of Christianity so that he could find the permanent core. And that was his goal, and that's what he tried to marshal in his fight against slavery.
Nathan Nielson: How did his sermons shape the environment of his time and how did his sermons flow through time and develop in such a way that they even shape our day today? Can you trace that influence a bit?
Benjamin Park, Yeah, of course. So, Theodore Parker, as I mentioned, by the time he formed his own non-denominational congregation, was preaching to thousands of people a week from his pulpit in the music hall in downtown Boston. He also became a bit of a celebrity. His pamphlets and his books would spread across the nation and his books were always a collection of his sermons and orations. And then he would go on speaking tours where he would travel across America to large crowds. And he had some pretty influential followers. If you go through his correspondence at his various papers collections across Boston, he's writing William Seward, the famous senator from New York. He's writing Charles Sumner. In fact, he's really, really close friends with Charles Sumner, the senator from Massachusetts. He's writing governors. He's writing the major politicians. He is embedded within the new circle of activists who formed the Republican Party. And perhaps one tangible example of his reach is one of his most devoted followers outside of Massachusetts William Herndon, who is famous for being the law partner for Abraham Lincoln. And William Herndon was in many ways a minister of Parkerism. He did not belong to any organized religion. He believed Parker preached as close to true doctrine to him as he could find. And so, he would evangelize Parker's ideas to others, including sharing all of his most important sermons with Abraham Lincoln, his law partner. And one of the phrases that Theodore Parker became known by in the 1850s was his definition of democracy, which was a form of government in his mind that was going to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” A phrase, of course, that eventually gets appropriated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln was said to have once declared that Theodore Parker was the closest thing to a minister that he actually listened to because Abraham Lincoln, of course, famous for trying to keep an arm's length from organized religion. But Theodore Parker spoke to a segment of people who were dissatisfied with the status quo. And then other sermons of his had long lasting influence. And one of his other famous phrases that comes from an 1852 sermon is that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” That moral arc that all humanity is pushing for, a phrase that will later be picked up by Martin Luther King Jr. And so, even if Parker's name slowly disappears from the public consciousness after his untimely death in 1860, his legacy lasts long afterwards.
Nathan Nielson: Yeah, let's talk more about that moral arc. It's a lovely visual. It's a lovely sounding poetic phrase. And it sits within a context of, or a set of assumptions about, how history works. So, tell us, what is this moral arc? Is it a projection of our hope, or does it kind of reflect the laws of history, how history moves?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, in many ways, Theodore Parker was, despite being a very influential and thoughtful minister, he was not always systematic and clear in some of his teachings. So, for instance, when he talks about this moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, there are some things we know he wasn't referring to. He wasn't referring to a predetermined march that had been set in stone from before the foundations of the world. Predestination was one of the doctrines that he was vehemently against. He believed that that was one of those disgusting ideas that humanity had moved beyond. He also was not someone who believed that he had a better view of what the future could be. He did not see himself as a fortune teller or a prophet in that sense to where he knows what future is going to happen. Rather, he believed that the moral arc was something that human beings don't just follow, but that they shape, and that it requires human action. And so, when he was arguing that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice, that is based on an assumption that people are going to continue fighting for that change, because if people do not fight for that change, that arc is not going to bend toward justice. So, that arc is never fully fleshed out in his mind of how exactly it's going to happen. It's going to take strenuous effort in his mind, which requires collaboration, which requires having hope, but it requires taking actual action. And that's where he often moved beyond his Transcendentalist colleagues to where he believed that we actually have to get together, work as a union, get over our individualism, and actually put our fingers in the soil to make this reality happen. And so, I think that's what he meant by the moral arc bending toward justice.
Nathan Nielson: Thanks. Much of what Parker has said in his sermons, in his writings, has already seeped into our consciousness as moderns in our time now. But give us a sense for how abolitionism was viewed at that time. Were they in a stark minority? Were they crying from the wilderness? How were they viewed?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, they were absolutely a minority. As I mentioned before, many northerners were anti-slavery in principle. But even those people who were anti-slavery in principle, they looked with skepticism toward the abolitionists as disruptors, as miscreants, as people who are going to overturn society as we know it. And so, for instance, one of Theodore Parker's earliest experiences when he was at Harvard Divinity School was he was walking in downtown Boston with his family, and he saw a mob tearing apart William Lloyd Garrison's print shop in Boston. William Lloyd Garrison was one of the most prominent abolitionist ministers or preachers, a newspaper man, in New England. And his stuff was being torn apart in Boston. Abolitionist halls were being torn down in Philadelphia. They were being denounced by northern politicians. And so, to be an abolitionist meant being on the margins of society. Theodore Parker embraced that role. He liked the idea of being not just a prophet in the wilderness, but someone who is reviled by the elite. And so, when Theodore Parker and others were denouncing the slave power, which they often did, they weren't just thinking about the southern plantations. They weren't just thinking about pro-slavery senators like John C. Calhoun. They were thinking about northern enablers, northern politicians, northern factories who were not being willing to speak out on the issue. And so, this is something I think gets lost when we place our modern-day notions on the Civil War era to where we think that the division that the Civil War was going to embody was going to be around a geographic line, the Mason-Dixon line of North versus South. Theodore Parker did not envision a Civil War like that. Theodore Parker envisioned a Civil War of neighbor versus neighbor. Theodore Parker envisioned that the abolitionist forces were going to be fighting the pro-slavery forces and that there were going to be lots of northern people as part of those pro-slavery forces. This was going to be more like a civil war that the American Revolution was. And so, the abolitionist fight was something that they believed was fulfilling the idea that it was a minority willing to stand up for what was right against the existing establishment who were enabling slavery to flourish.
Nathan Nielson: It's an interesting example of how the prophetic voice works and how the prophetic spirit often resides in the minority.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, I think of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous letter from Birmingham jail, where he says that his biggest frustration is not with the adamant segregationists, but the white moderates, the people who weren't willing to see the urgency of the time. That was Theodore Parker as well. Theodore Parker, one of the phrases he became famous for was he said that the biggest problems in America are the “lords of the loom and the lords of the lash.” The lords of the loom are those who are in the south, with their whips, whipping the enslaved people on plantations, sorry, those are the lords of the lash. And then the lords of the loom are those who are in charge of the factories in the north, who are taking all the cotton produced in the south and producing shirts and pants and clothing for everyday Americans. And that those two groups are working together. So, Theodore Parker often spoke against the establishment and that to be a truth teller, a fighter for these civil rights requires going against the establishment.
Nathan Nielson: Do you think Parker did have a prophetic voice?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, I mean it depends on how you define prophetic. I mean he definitely spoke to issues that would only later be adopted. He was also a prophet in the sense to where he recognized his marginalized and despised status. He relished it in some ways, he hated it in others. Every year he would write about the day that he was expelled from the Unitarian Association and say: Today is the anniversary. It doesn't bother me anymore, but today is the anniversary. And then a year later, today is the day that doesn't bother me anymore. So, I mean, it's definitely something that stood in his consciousness, but he believed that he was despised and kicked out and kicked around due to his prophetic status. And he took great, great pride in that position.
Nathan Nielson: Another topic that speaks to this is his views on women. When I was doing some research on this episode, I read this interesting tidbit of information about how, apparently, Elizabeth Cady Stanton is said to have credited Parker with introducing her to the idea of a heavenly mother in the Trinity. What were his views, generally, on women and religion and society?
Benjamin Park: Yeah, I had mentioned earlier that Parker was not always fully coherent or consistent or systematic in his theology. His theology on women is probably the best thing that I still haven't fully wrapped my head around. On the one hand, he did introduce the idea of a divine feminine figure. Did that actually mean an anthropomorphic man and woman as kind of a husband and wife? I'm not quite sure, he was never quite fully fleshed out of what a divine status would be or even what exactly the next life would entail, although he was certainly sure that there was a next life in some form. But he did believe that there was a divine sense of femininity that will continue on. He also was an outspoken proponent of women's rights in the civic sphere. Did that mean that he was in favor of women's suffrage? Not always. You could be in favor of women having some rights but not being equal citizens. That's another place to where I think he was not fully committed to the idea. So, it's one that I want to fully flesh out. Because you definitely have some places where it seems pretty clear he's in favor of women’s suffrage. Other places where he seems pretty worried that women’s suffrage would result in a lot of detrimental effects on society. He embraced some pretty progressive ideas concerning domestic roles of women, but he also maintained a lot of stereotypes of what women could do or should do. Like a lot of people from throughout history, he was pretty contradictory on the roles of women and the potential of a divine feminine. But he definitely was open to a lot more. And I think that the greatest testament, as you've already mentioned, was he inspired many others, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to find a sense of the divine feminine. So, Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously creates a woman's Bible as a supplement for the Bible. Theodore Parker would have seen that as a success, that instead of just forgoing religion altogether, Parker was able to convince Stanton that no, actually there is a space in non-traditional Christianity or religion in general where you can push for your change. And that really was a goal of his. And so, Stanton kind of reflects at least some of the successes of Parker's ministry.
Nathan Nielson: I think Parker's life in general shows how all societies are kind of enclosed in their own horizons and it takes a special kind of insight or a special kind of individual to kind of see outside the horizon, see beyond that enclosure and introduce those new ideas into a society. And I think Parker is an example of that, because a lot of what he said is kind of just the air we breathe now. Well, let me just move to a close here and just read the full quote about the moral arc of the universe from 1852. He said, and this is in that sermon you mentioned: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice.” So, Ben Park, thank you very much for being a part of this discussion and educating us, expanding our understanding of how the prophetic voice works, what abolitionism was about, and how we can take these ideas and incorporate them into our lives today. So, I'm excited about the book that you're writing. You say you're in the writing stage. You have about a year left. Although I don't want to place any kind of a deadline on this.
Benjamin Park: Yeah, I hope to have it done in a year, which means it'll probably come out in a couple of years. But in the meantime, I'll continue to evangelize for some aspects of Parkerism. I'm thrilled with the conversation. You're asking the right questions, and I'm so glad we're having these kinds of discussions.
Nathan Nielson: Thanks, I'll missionize for you as much as I can. We're looking forward to it.
Benjamin Park: Thank you.
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