An exercise in discernment

I read Ownership by Sean McGever with an eye on how he handles the topic of discernment, even though the word discernment was not the focus. Over the past year, I have read about a dozen books on discernment, trying to grapple with the purpose and limitations of Christian discernment. One of the reasons for starting this project was reading Henri Nouwen’s book Discernment and how he grappled with discernment for himself. I am not going to rehash that post again, but while Nouwen received spiritual guidance and help from a pair of priests, after the death of all three and about ten years after the book was published, it became more widely known that the two priests that Nouwen confided in were serial sexual and spiritual abusers. Nouwen described them as some of the most holy men he had known. Nouwen’s discernment about those men is a good reminder of the limitations of our discernment, but also that historical judgment and tools can be helpful as a means of helping to see our natural limitations of perspective.

McGever makes the simple but important point that our geographic and social location impacts our decision-making (and discernment) because it impacts how we see choices. None of Edwards, Whitfield, or Wesley’s grandparents owned slaves because the slave trade was not yet in wide effect. However, the difference between whether their grandchildren owned slaves was significantly impacted by whether they were in England or the US. Geography and social location always impact choices.

In his discussion of Whitfield’s creation of the orphanage, he presents Whitfield’s positive reasons for doing so. There were orphans, and those orphans needed care. The colony administrators were willing to give the orphanage start-up land and some start-up money. Whitfield and the colony administrators assumed that the orphanage would be self-sufficient after the initial startup.

My day job is as a non-profit consultant. One trend in non-profit grant-making since the early 2000s is that there needs to be a plan for sustainability as part of a grant. But non-profits, by definition, are not profit-making organizations. After-school programs do not generate revenue if they are primarily serving at-risk students. Clinics serving homeless youth don’t make money on the side without violating the organization’s main mission. But this is exactly the problem that Whitfield got into.

Whitfield needed to make money by finding a crop or business that the orphanage could do to pay for the ongoing costs of running the orphanage. They started with White indentured servants. Then, they started relying on the orphans themselves to do labor on cash crops. Eventually, Whitfield and the administrators lobbied to change the law of the state of Georgia so that they could have African slaves work to make the orphanage self-supporting.

On Twitter the other day, there was a thread about how ethical choices don’t just need ethical ends but also need ethical means to get to those ends. Whitfield had ethical ends (care of orphans), but once in the weeds of the organization, he eventually moved to unethical means because the ethical means he tried hadn’t worked. This is often where discernment falters because when things seem not to be working but you still feel called to continue, there is a temptation to move to unethical means or change our ethics to allow for what we previously considered unethical.

I think you can summarize this argument about Whitfield’s change in understanding of slavery as his theology changed because of his economic interests, not that his theology influenced his economic interests. This generally fits with the arguments of a wide variety of others. Edward Baptist studies the economics of slavery and thinks that the justification and expansion of slavery were largely a result of the economic success of slavery. Joel McDurmon, a lawyer studying the legal construction of slave law in Christian American colonies, largely concludes that economic interests drove legal changes, not that legal changes led to economic results. Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar writing about the US Constitution and slavery, points out that those opposed to slavery had many opportunities to oppose the expansion of slavery, but for the most part, their economic interests meant that they opposed slavery as an ideology, but they did not put feet to those beliefs and because it was against their economics interests.

Jonathan Edwards, until recently, was not evaluated for owning slaves. Within the past couple of decades, as interest in Edwards has increased, there have been recent documents that have raised questions about his understanding of slavery. Edwards does seem to have changed his views toward the insinuation of slavery, but not owning slaves. He bought at least one slave directly from a slave ship but eventually came to view the slave trade as immoral, but not slavery as a whole. There was some change, but not much.

The third subject is John Wesley. Wesley did come to an abolitionist position, but not until near the end of his life. He was slightly older than both Edwards and Whitfield but lived about two decades longer than both. Wesley had direct experience with slavery when he was in Georgia and was familiar with the institution of slavery more abstractly before that point. He argued for the education, especially Christian education, of slaves but not initially against the institution of slavery as a whole. Wesley did challenge Whitfield about owning slaves but did not break the relationship over slavery and argued against ending the institution of slavery.

McGever believes, and I think he is right, that had Wesley grown up in America or come to America for a longer time, Wesley may have also eventually owned slaves and never come to his late-in-life abolitionist position. Had Edwards or Whitfield lived longer or had different social circumstances, they may have come to similar conclusions as Wesley did later in life. Our social circumstances do not excuse our individual choices, but they do influence them.

I think many reading this book may not be aware of the basic facts in the first 80 percent of the book. So, that initial 80 percent is important to lay out the facts that McGever is dealing with to get to the main focus in the last 20 percent. In the last 20 percent of the book, there is an evaluation of how to think about the three, not just as a historically distant evaluator but as a Christian who shares in the legacy of all three. McGever directly tries to help us, as modern readers, see ourselves in all three. He is trying to help us see that we all have the capacity to have cultural blind spots, but we also can overcome those cultural blindspots by listening to others and history.

Quakers and others of this era strongly resisted slavery and not only worked toward its end but also made financial and other sacrifices because of their Christian convictions. More than the other two, Wesley was willing to listen to this minority report and learn from it. But it did take Wesley years to change, and even while he did change, his change was late enough that some of the institutional inertia of Methodism did not oppose slavery and did not fight for the full humanity of Black Christians, especially in the US, leading to the eventual split of Methodism and the institutional dehumanization of its Black members, as illustrated by Richard Allen and Absolum Jones.

I would have liked to have an explicit discussion of discernment and the ways that historical events and understanding can inform Christian discernment, but even without an explicit discussion of discernment, I think that this is a helpful exercise that will lead to better discernment for those willing to read and understand what Sean McGever is trying to do here.

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