Ta-Nehisi beat me to the punch again, but I still have some things to say about this understanding of slavery and abolition from Megan McArdle, which is plainly ahistorical.
Indeed, though I myself am pro-choice and mostly irreligious, it seems more likely to me that the main effect of faith is to spur people to embrace causes that are personally and socially inconvenient. Slaveowners didn’t need religion to motivate them to defend slavery; they had a powerful financial interest in doing so.
Yes, slaveowners had a financial incentive for slaveholding. But that in itself did not make it something the rest of the country was willing to sanction. That required the endorsement of a moral authority, and in a country as religious as the United States there was no moral authority greater than god. So both the pro-slavery and abolitionist movements enlisted scripture to make their points, but to argue that the pro-slavery side was somehow a matter of secular economic interest and not also upheld by a widely held religious belief in black inferiority is simply wrong. In fact, slavery could not have existed as it did in the United States without the various religious rationalizations made in its defense. Slaveholders needed religion to preserve the system. This is why Frederick Douglass felt compelled to respond to criticisms that he was “anti-Christian” as a result of his Narrative of the Life of a Slave by saying, “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference,” or perhaps more directly, “The slave prison and the church stand near each other.” Does this deny the religiously inspired moral courage of the abolitionists? No, it merely says that religion had as much to do with upholding slavery as it did in abolishing it.
McArdle adds:
By contrast, what self-interest was served by the abolitionist movement then, or the pro-life movement now? There’s a legend among many pro-choicers that everyone in the pro-life movement is a patriarchal, selfish man who wants to force women to have babies in order to control them. In fact, women and men are roughly equally likely to be pro-life. The best that pro-lifers get out of their movement is–having to carry their own unwanted pregnancies to term.
Well, no. Pro-Lifers can carry their own unwanted pregnancies to term with or without the legalization of abortion, because pregnancy is not illegal. While McArdle’s construct sets up a sort of man-hating disdain for anti-choice activists, the truth is that most women who are pro-choice simply object to the idea that having an abortion is an easy or trivial decision for them, rather than simply one they themselves should be allowed to make. It’s not as though only one side unfairly caricatures the other, either. For every woman who thinks that pro-lifers are all “patriarchal, selfish men,” there is someone who accuses women of having abortions as an ideological rite of passage.
Furthermore, between the issue of slavery and the issue of abortion there is once again “the widest possible difference.” Abolitionists were fighting for the freedom of living, breathing, human beings who were enslaved and treated as property merely because of the color of their skin. Pro-Lifers are fighting against the right of women to decide when and where to make a family, on the premise that personhood begins at conception. This is a religious notion, while in slavery, the objective reality of their humanity could only be denied slaves by ignoring the both the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and by adhering to self-defeating pseudoscience. The armies of doctors and scientists who proclaimed the inferiority of black folks nonetheless used them for experimental purposes in the name of medical advancement; there was simply no way to argue that treatments developed on blacks could be replicated on whites if they were actually a different species.
Reasonable people can objectively disagree about the origin of life and personhood, but denying the humanity of slaves was based on prejduice propped up by flimsy legal logic, pseudoscience and faith.
— A. Serwer
