Uncle Tom's Cabin

Finally, Stowe's Christianity may present a problem for some readers. The daughter, sister, and wife of Protestant clergymen and a committed Christian herself, the writer lived at a time when many Americans assumed that the United States was "a Christian country" — and a Protestant country at that. To educate a person, in Stowe's usage, was to make a Christian of him or her, and she does not apologize for her Protestant chauvinism. (At one point in the book, a character makes a slurring remark about "the Jews"; and one can almost feel the forbearance with which Stowe allows some of her New Orleans characters to be Roman Catholics, a sect about whose liturgy she obviously knows next to nothing.) One of the book's major themes is the culpability of Christian churches, North and South, in countenancing slavery, and an even more pronounced theme is that of Christianity itself. Uncle Tom, the central character, is above all a Christian. His trials and sufferings are not so much those of an African in America, nor of a slave, nor of a husband and father separated from his family, as they are of a man attempting to follow Christ's life and teachings; his victory is not a victory of nature but of grace. In our secular time, we tend to avoid the discussion of religion in ordinary "non-religious" circumstances. The separation of Church and State, however, meant something quite different to Stowe, and in reading her book, we will do well to accept, at least for that time, her religious premises and assumptions.