Frederick Douglass and Jesus Christ

Abolitionists described themselves as followers of Jesus, but they disagreed about what kind of person he was. Douglass’s ideas about Jesus took shape in dialogue with the Transcendentalists: his Jesus was fully human, but he spoke to his contemporaries with a special “authority.” Douglass followed Jesus by “assum[ing] to speak of Slavery with some authority,” and he derived that authority from his lived experience of enslavement.

Ryan Carr is a lecturer at Columbia, where he teaches classes in American studies, English, and the Core Curriculum. He is the author of Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast (Columbia, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Writings of Samson Occom (Oxford World's Classics, 2027). He is currently exploring the political thought of Frederick Douglass and his relationships with Transcendentalists and Christian liberals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker.

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