William Arthur Ward once said, "Real religion is a way of life, not a white cloak to be wrapped around us on the Sabbath and then cast aside into the six-day closet of unconcern." Religion is the one thing that people can usually tolerate but never agree upon. Each faith seems to have an ordained assumption that they have the correct thoughts on how to life one's life or how to think about things or the way to act in certain situations. Still, each religion has its own "sub-religions." If someone refers to Christianity, there are several different religions that are blanketed under that umbrella: Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, and Presbyterian are just a handful. The inconsistencies that are associated with everyone's belief about religion run into deeper ruts of confusion. This confusion leads people to have distorted views as to what they believe and what their religion is all about. This is no different from the feelings about slavery by Christians in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Throughout the novel, Christianity presents itself in a few different lights; as a twisted and deformed glimmer of what religion is supposed to be with undertones of bigotry and prejudice, an innocent yet naive child that brings joy to everyone he or she meets, and as Uncle Tom himself, the standard for what a Christian is supposed to be. These different portrayals of Christian living come from Stowe's own beliefs about Christians and brings them into the light. Many people during the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe and even now regard religion as a means of getting out of the requirement of having to go to Hell by being a part of a religion. What these people do not realize is that there is more to just being able to say that they are Christians and getting out of the punishment for their sins. They must be examples of what it is like to be religious and practice it with fervency and commitment. Miss Ophelia was Stowe's embodiment of these people that are trying to cheat their way out of spiritual punishment. She admits to having feelings of bigotry toward blacks. "I've always had a prejudice against negroes [ ] and it's a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but, I didn't think she knew it" (246). Miss Ophelia's aversion toward African Americans shows that to be human is to be flawed; however, it is still unchristian to be so.
In Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, personal accounts that detail the ins-and-outs of the system of slavery show readers truly how monstrous and oppressive slavery is. Families are torn apart, lives are ruined, and slaves are tortured both physically and mentally. The white slaveholders of the South manipulate and take advantage of their slaves at every possible occasion. Nothing is left untouched by the gnarled claws of slavery: even God and religion become tainted. As Jacobs’ account reveals, whites control the religious institutions of the South, and in doing so, forge religion as a tool used to perpetuate slavery, the very system it ought to condemn. The irony exposed in Jacobs’ writings serves to show
In the earliest part of Harriet?s life the whole idea of slavery was foreign to her. As all little girls she was born with a mind that only told her place in the world was that of a little girl. She had no capacity to understand the hardships that she inherited. She explains how her, ?heart was as free from care as that of any free-born white child.?(Jacobs p. 7) She explains this blissful ignorance by not understanding that she was condemned at birth to a life of the worst kind oppression. Even at six when she first became familiar with the realization that people regarded her as a slave, Harriet could not conceptualize the weight of what this meant. She say?s that her circumstances as slave girl were unusua...
who is more commonly known by his pen name, Mark Twain. He was born in
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, written by Samuel Clemens, is a novel that challenges the views of society and questions life through the eyes of an adolescent boy. By sprinkling traces of spirituality and religious views throughout the story, Clemens creates a "martyr-like" profile for his lead character Huckleberry Finn. Huck uses his religious views as his own conscience and challenges the status quo rules of his pious society to make his own decisions which leads him on a path to personal growth.
While lying on her death bed, in Chapter 26 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, little Eva says to the servants in her house who have gathered around her, "You must remember that each one of you can become angels" (418). In this chapter and the one before it, Eva has actively worked to make the people surrounding her into "angels," taken here to mean one who is saved by God. In chapters 33 and 34 of Stowe's book, Tom similarly works, though more quietly, to turn the other slaves at Simon Legree's plantation into "angels." Both of these scenes, and particularly the evangelical characters within them, reveal Stowe's Methodist theology, a theology that rejects the predestination of earlier American Christianity. In Stowe's theology "each one" of the people can be saved; God's love is universal. Original sin still exists, but now an individual is given control to escape this sin by embracing God's love. At the heart of the theology and the resultant morality that Tom and Eva evince, is a warm, knowable God, who is knowable through love, and the heart.
Christianity has always been a very big part of Stowe’s life. “Her father, a leading Calvanist congregational minister, abolitionist, and founder of the American Bible Society, often expressed his abolitionist views through his Sunday sermons from the pulpit.” (Largen) Besides growing up in a very religious family, Stowe was living at the time when Christianity became a big part of everybody’s live and their views. During the 1820s and 1830s, a Second Great Awakening took over American culture. “It democratized American Christianity, making it a truly mass enterprise. Americans combine the nations of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other”. (Foner, 358) Th...
...atest need of positive and active role models. In only portraying Northern women who were ultimately able to act (and with Stowe's praise), she ends up perpetuating beliefs that Southern women were naturally unsuited to engage in the abolitionist cause.
Stowe’s character Miss Ophelia is the opinion of such Christians, as she believes that God will atone her sins solely because she is a Christian. Miss Ophelia uses religion in order to avoid addressing her bigoted opinion of African Americans: "I 've always had a prejudice against Negros […] and it 's a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but, I didn 't think she knew it" (246) Miss Ophelia 's aversion toward African Americans shows that, like any human, she is flawed, but instead of trying to improve her flaw she assumes it will be forgiven. Ophelia’s beliefs enable these actions and allow her hate to grow as her only prerequisite for Heaven is for being a Christian rather than be a good Christian. Miss Ophelia is the embodiment of many white Americans of the period who believed that their maltreatment of African Americans was accepted by God, and easily forgiven without any change in their treatment of these
This essay will analyze the themes of religion, slavery, and democracy in the book Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. By exploring these themes that lie behind the book’s veneer, we can understand Twain’s objective for writing this book.
In the midst of his already successful career, Sigmund Freud decided to finally dedicate a book of his to religion, referring to the subject as a phenomena faced by the scientific community. This new work, Totem and Taboo, blew society off its feet, ultimately expanding the reaches of debates and intellectual studies. From the beginning, Freud argues that there exists a parallel between the archaic man and the contemporary compulsive. Both these types of people, he argues, exhibit neurotic behavior, and so the parallel between the two is sound. Freud argues that we should be able to determine the cause of religion the same way we determine the cause of neurosis. He believes, since all neuroses stem from childhood experiences, that the origins of this compulsive behavior we call religion should also be attributed to some childhood experiences of the human race, too. Freudian thought has been dominant since he became well known. In Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, religion becomes entirely evident as a major part of the novel, but the role it specifically plays is what we should question. Therefore, I argue that Freud’s approach to an inborn sense of religion and the role it plays exists in The Last of the Mohicans, in that the role religion plays in the wilderness manifests itself in the form of an untouchable truth, an innate sense of being, and most importantly, something that cannot and should not be tampered with.
This book causes the reader to learn more about an otherwise relatively unknown woman in history, and the tenacity she showed in order to obtain rights that many Americans so often take for granted. Not only did Rebecca gain her freedom from slavery, rise in the religious ranks of the Moravian church, and achieve monumental religious status, as she was among the first women to be ordained as a deaconess, be administered Communion, and become ordained in western Christianity, she was also willing to face the consequences of sharing her beliefs knowing full well the extent of her decision. Sensbach also shares information about how the Protestant church developed as a result of Christianity being blended with African American religions and cultures. Although Sensbach does not make a direct connection between Rebecca and the development of the first black church, through Rebecca’s trials one is able to get a glimpse at what African Americans may have faced as a result of their faith. Additionally, her efforts and willingness to risk her freedom helps to show just how far people were willing to go for their religious liberty. Lastly, Rebecca set a precedent not only for African American women, but for African Americans and women in general as her efforts helped to inspire others and change the way that African Americans and women were viewed in the religious
William Booth once said that “God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.” This quote expresses the range and extent of religious faith through the strength of passion and love. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with relation to this kind of religious faith. Her novel repeatedly highlights the faith in God through the main character, Uncle Tom. Stowe ridicules northern abolitionists and southern slave owners who think of Christianity as legalistic. She asserts that Christian faith is a strong love.
...e that chattel slavery was a cruel, perverse institution that no human should ever have to endure. Most people realize today how hypocritical it was to call oneself a Christian, while treating slaves so horribly. Throughout her book, Harriet Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, revealed Americans everywhere that slave owners were hypocrites, and calling themselves Christians was perhaps the greatest sin of all.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has had a tremendous impact on American culture, both then and now. It is still considered a controversial novel, and many secondary schools have banned it from their libraries. What makes it such a controversial novel? One reason would have been that the novel is full of melodrama, and many people considered it a caricature of the truth. Others said that she did not show the horror of slavery enough, that she showed the softer side of it throughout most of her novel. Regardless of the varying opinions of its readers, it is obvious that its impact was large.
When a person follows a religion, they have religious beliefs. For example, one of the beliefs of Christianity is to not steal. The concept applies to the recent readings of American literature. To explain, John Winthrop preached a sermon called “A Model of Christian Charity” and in this sermon, he spoke about different “rules” and ideologies that a true Christian should follow. For example, one of the demands was that “…the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against their superiors and shake off their yoke” (Winthrop 91) Winthrop is saying that everyone should be seen as equal but not try to disturb the peace of the different social classes. Religion has affected the way of living for people in the early years. Winthrop believed that if one were to not follow these rules then they would go to hell and suffer. Religion was a particularly serious concept for these people because it was so heavily enforced. The fact that Winthrop wrote an entire sermon about the way a person should think and live based on religious factors can prove that religion has definitely influenced their mindsets and