The Depth that Changes Everything
This Friday, right before the fireworks and the flags, I want to hand you a different kind of Independence Day story. Something protected in our founding documents that changes everything.
Before I get there, a quick word. If you're new here, welcome to Wanderings, the Friday piece where I try to walk you somewhere unexpected. If this one lands for you, subscribe and pass it along to someone who'd want to think about it too. Paid subscribers get a monthly spiritual formation practice tool, a short teaching video, and a live conversation with me, and this month's tool leans right into what we're talking about today.
Here's an instinct I want to celebrate tomorrow. A few decades before the United States became an independent nation, a saint lived among us. Some call John Woolman the American saint, and once you sit with his story, it's hard to argue otherwise. His soulful life is worth thinking about this week, not as a history lesson, but as a picture of what the freedom of soul this country would eventually protect actually looks like when someone lives all the way inside it.
A bill of sale he couldn't stop thinking about
John Woolman was twenty-two years old, working as a clerk, when his employer handed him a routine task. Write up a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. Woolman did it. He needed the job, and it was, by every legal and social measure of 1742, an unremarkable piece of paperwork.
But he couldn't let it go. Right there, before his employer, he said out loud that he believed slaveholding was inconsistent with Christianity. That's it. No political platform. No committee. Just a young man whose conscience had been rubbed raw by something everyone else considered normal.
He didn't shake it off. The next Sunday that followed the sale, he sat in the stillness of Quaker worship and something broke open in him. It was the Presence of God making plain to him what he'd taken part in by writing that bill of sale, a great evil, and he was undone by it. That's the detail I don't want you to miss. Woolman's story isn't a story about a guy who talked himself into a moral stance. It isn’t a story of political action movement. It's a religious story, start to finish, or it isn't his story at all.
That whole arc turned into a life. The next year, 1743, he began traveling in ministry among Quaker gatherings and communities. In 1746 he walked and rode nearly fifteen hundred miles through Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina watching plantation life up close, eating at the tables of slaveholders, and quietly insisting on paying the enslaved people who served him, because he refused to receive their labor as a free gift he hadn't earned.
He kept at it, and in 1754, at a large Quaker fathering, a gathering that John Greenleaf Whittier called the most important conference in American history, he stood and argued that no human being could own another and still call himself a follower of Christ. Slowlynthe thinking aboutbskavery among Quakers negan to change. And by 1758, years before a single word of the Declaration of Independence was drafted, the Quakers around Philadelphia had already barred its members from buying or selling slaves, largely because one tailor kept showing up at meeting after meeting, refusing to shout, refusing to legislate, just refusing to let the subject drop.
Woolman died in 1772, and four years later, in 1776, the very year the colonies declared their independence, Quakers took the final step and began disowning members who wouldn't free the people they held in bondage.
Read that again. The Quakers were done with slavery the same year Jefferson was still writing about liberty. Woolman never read a Bill of Rights. There wasn't one. He never waited for the Constitution to catch up to his conscience. He didn't kick the can down the road for a future generation, a future court, a future amendment. He went to work with what he had, which was a stubborn, patient, decades-long obedience to something given him by deep communion with the Presexe of God, something he accepted as Truth.
What he actually saw
Here's what strikes me every time I come back to this story. Woolman wasn't a political revolutionary. He didn't organize a resistance movement or draft a manifesto. What he had was a theological conviction, a spiritual experience, and a worshiping community that ran deeper than any of that: every person carries the image of God, not because of their skin, their education, their status, or their usefulness to someone else, but simply because God made them. That conviction did something no political argument of his era could do. It let him see clearly, a full century before Appomattox, what his whole culture had trained itself not to see.
And he saw something else too, something I think we still haven't fully reckoned with. Woolman understood that the sin of slavery wasn't only what it did to the enslaved. It was also what it did to the soul of the one who held the whip, or signed the bill of sale, or simply enjoyed a life of ease built on someone else's back. So he didn't stop at freeing people. He worked just as hard to free slaveholders, gently, relentlessly, one uncomfortable dinner table conversation at a time, because he believed their souls were also in danger. That's a theology of human nature most modern reform movements don't have room for. We tend to sort people into oppressors and oppressed and stop there. We now work to uphold the oppressed and throw out the oppressor. Woolman l’s theology, experiemce, and worship was deeper than comvenient political rant snd he looked at the oppressor and saw a person who also needed rescuing.
The argument I actually want to make
There's a strand of thought running through a lot of our current cultural conversation that treats religion as the problem. Not one expression of it, not a corrupted version of it, but the thing itself. Antonio Gramsci, writing from an Italian prison in the 1930s, argued that institutions like the church exist mainly to support people already with power. Clearly Gramsci had never met a John Woolman and saw what his experience of church and the Presemce of God could do to transform society. So Gramsci said groups like churches have to be replaced if society will be changed and his arguments have gotten inside universities and political movements today, dressed up in newer language. Religion gets called oppressive by definition. Spiritual formation gets waved off as a distraction from the real work, which is political or structural, or in its more radical forms, revolutionary.
I want to push back on that, hard, using Woolman as my exhibit A.
If that instinct had won a century earlier, if American religious life had been dismissed and dismantled as nothing but a tool of the powerful, there is no Woolman. There's no tailor with a troubled conscience walking fifteen hundred miles to sit at slaveholders' tables. There's no decades-long, meeting by meeting erosion of an institution's tolerance for owning human beings. What you get instead, when you strip out the interior life and hand all your hope to political or structural power, is a different kind of trouble. You get a movement that believes it can eradicate evil by seizing the right levers, and that belief runs straight into the same flaw Woolman diagnosed in the slaveholder: the human tendency to acquire power and use it badly. Trading one hegemony for another isn't liberation. It's just a change of ownership.
That's the piece the purely political imagination keeps missing. Woolman's theology assumed something the secular reformer often doesn't, that the defect isn't only in the system, it's in us, in every one of us, and no redistribution of power fixes that on its own. You need something that can work on the human heart before it ever reaches a courtroom or a constitution. That's not a naive add-on to justice work. Woolman's story is proof it's the engine of it.
I've lived outside this country long enough, in Canada, and also worked inside Nigeria for a decade, to have some perspective on what's genuinely rare about the American experiment. It isn't that we got everything right. We plainly didn't, and Woolman's own century is exhibit A for that too. What's rare is that the very documents this country eventually wrote down protected the kind of interior, God-answerable conscience that had already proven, in Woolman's life, that it could move a culture toward its better self faster than politics could. The Bill of Rights didn't create that kind of courage. It arrived later and made room for it to keep happening.
So here's where I land, walking into another Fourth of July. I'm interested in celebrating that the culture didn’t decide religion is the enemy and handing everything over to political power instead. Instead, it protected freedom of religious conviction and expression of theological ideas because it knew culture, to reach its lofty ideals, required people whose depth with God ran deeper than their appetite for control, who could see what their whole culture had been trained not to see, and who went to work without waiting for permission.
That's the freedom I'm grateful for this week. The freedom, still protected, still available to any of us, to let a deeper life with God be the rudder before it's ever forced to be the rebellion.
Hopefully,
— Gene