Obama’s God is loving. Is this God just?

At the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, President Obama urged humility about “a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith” to the point where we commit atrocities, like slavery and Jim Crow, in the name of Christ. Critics quickly denounced Obama’s comments as un-American, while supporters defended their accuracy. But few have asked why Obama did not also link Christian conviction to the campaign against slavery and racial injustice. 

His theology is telling. Obama urged humility not just about our past but also before a loving but inscrutable God. Don’t be “so confident that you are right…, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth,” he said. He put Western Christian violence alongside ISIS’s brutalities not to condemn but to drive home his theological point: Who am I (who are we) to judge? 

Abolitionists had no such qualms about condemnation. They were so confident they were right that they damned slavery as a terrible sin deserving of terrible punishment. While appeals to a loving God also informed Christian opposition to racial injustice, threats about eternal hell carried more shock value. William Lloyd Garrison called his detractors “children of the devil who could not escape the damnation of hell.” His famous denunciation of the Constitution as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” outraged his contemporaries more than Obama’s comparatively mild comments have done today. Hell was very real to most Americans at the time and telling someone they were going there could be a serious insult. Newspapers across the nation called Garrison a “black-hearted traitor.” But he struck a nerve, which is exactly what he wanted.