“Fire From the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown

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Description

John Brown is on a regular basis remembered as a terrorist whose unbridled hatred of slavery drove him to the ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Tried and executed for seizing the arsenal and attempting to spur a liberation movement a number of the slaves, Brown used to be the ultimate cause celebre for a country getting ready to civil war.

“Fire from the Midst of You” situates Brown within the religious and social context of a nation steeped in racism, showing his roots in Puritan abolitionism. DeCaro explores Brown’s odd family heritage in addition to his business and personal losses, retracing his path to the Southern gallows. In contrast to the popular image of Brown as a violent fanatic, DeCaro contextualizes Brown’s actions, emphasizing the intensely religious nature of the antebellum U.S. in which he lived. He articulates the nature of Brown’s radical faith and shows that, when viewed in the context of his times, he used to be not the religious fanatic that many have understood him to be. DeCaro calls Brown a “Protestant saint”—a less than excellent believer seeking to realize his own perceived calling in divine providence.

In line with the post-millennial theology of his day, Brown understood God as working through mankind and the church to renew and revive sinful humanity. He read the Bible not only as God’s word, but as God’s word to John Brown. DeCaro traces Brown’s life and development to show how by forging faith as a radical weapon, Brown forced all the nation to some degree of crisis.

“Fire from the Midst of You” defies the usual narrative with a new reading of John Brown. Here is the man that the preeminent Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called a “mighty warning” and the one Malcolm X called “a real white liberal.”

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