'Historically...both in the early nineteenth century, and again in the 1960s, the force of the shame directed at slave-holders and segregationists was religious. Realistically, it is unlikely that the propagation of Enlightenment views of humanity would have swayed millions of nineteenth-century white Americans against slavery. After all, such moral principles convinced Jefferson and Patrick Henry of the infamy of the institution, but still failed to move them to liberate their own slaves, so what hope was there of persuading less high-minded southerners to make sacrifice of their property, or what Henry described as "inconveniencing" himself? Both in the 1830s and 1840s, and then again in the 1960s, it was the determination of the Rankins and Finneys, and Fannie Lou Hamers, to cross the line between religion and politics and appeal to the country's Christian conscience that brought white Americans into brotherhood with persecuted blacks. For secular humanists (like this writer) this is an awkward historical truth to acknowledge, accustomed as we are to equating evangelical fervour with illiberal reaction. The abolitionist argument that some enormities were so vicious that they had to be made accountable to the principles of the gospel, even if that meant breaching the establishment clause of the First Amendment in the interests of a higher good, is not altogether different from the way Right to Life evangelicals argue today. History sets such snares to make us think harder.'
Simon Schama, The American Future: A History, p.182.
