3 Lessons Learned from Lottie Moon: A Slaveholder’s Daughter Turned Missionary to China

I was shocked to learn that Lottie Moon’s family owned enslaved people.

Many of us were told the squeaky-clean versions of stories about great heroes. In history class and Sunday school, we gathered up examples of women and men to emulate. But when we grow up and learn something unsavory or just plain horrifying about those heroes, what do we do?

When I learned that Lottie Moon grew up on a plantation where 52 Black people were enslaved, cognitive dissonance shook my brain. My heart plunged in betrayal.

How could she? She was a Christian—a famous missionary who brought the gospel of salvation in Jesus, freedom from sin and abundant life, to countless Chinese people. Should I not celebrate her anymore? Should I get rid of my Lottie biographies?

No. I chose to lean in and ask hard questions in prayer and in historical research.

I cracked open those biographies (and plenty of other books too!). I visited libraries, loaded microfilm machines, and opened dusty boxes of 200-year-old documents. I interviewed historians and traveled to some of the places where Lottie Moon once walked and worshiped, trying to understand.

How did otherwise faithful Christians who read and revered the Bible attempt to reconcile the gospel with owning enslaved people? And how was I to think of Lottie Moon now that I know she wasn’t a perfect hero?

My first instinct was to label Lottie as a slaveholder’s daughter and write her off completely. I’m glad I didn’t. Here are three things I learned about Lottie Moon while researching and writing Becoming Lottie Moon, a historical fiction novel about her growing up years in 1847-1873.

1. Listen to Faithful Christians in Other Cultural Contexts

Anti-slavery advocates who attacked slavery with the gospel:

Christians in the North were preaching and pleading for abolition throughout the States and territories. And they held up the Bible as their defense, particularly:

Genesis 17:12; Exodus 21:16; Exodus 21:27; Deuteronomy 23:15-16; and the gospel.

James M. Pendleton was a Kentucky Baptist and “a hard-nosed defender of the Bible’s inerrancy” (Noll, 46). While pro-slavery Christians said that even Abraham in the Bible owned slaves, Pendleton pointed out that Abraham’s relationship with enslaved people was completely different than that of master and enslaved in America.

Francis Wayland, a Rhode Island Baptist, also cited several key differences between how the Law of Moses regulated slavery and how Southerners practiced it. One example related to America’s Fugitive Slave Law. God’s people were forbidden from returning an escaped slave and were compelled to allow that person to live wherever they liked (Deuteronomy 23:16). “This, I think, clearly shows that Moses intended to abolish slavery.” (Domestic Slavery, 59).

A group of 60 Baptist preachers in Rhode Island refused to return escaped slaves as the Fugitive Slave Law required. (The Liberator, Oct. 18, 1850.)

Tayler Lewis, a biblical scholar from New York, and Samuel Hopkins and George Bourne, Northern Congregationalists, advocated that slavery was completely against the gospel and the work of Christ.

Pro-slavery Christians who propped up slavery with Bible verses:

Pro-slavery Christians in the South held up their Bibles too and pointed to select verses in defense of their way of life:

Genesis 17:12; Deuteronomy 20:10-11; 1 Corinthians 7:21; Colossians 3:22, 4:1; 1 Timothy 6:1-2.

Richard Fuller, a Southern Baptist, took issue with the claim that the gospel inherently condemned slavery because “neither the Saviour [‘the Author of the gospel’] nor his apostles commanded masters to emancipate their slaves.” Therefore, “the Bible did authorize some sort of slavery.” (Domestic Slavery, 10). With this reasoning in mind, Fuller saw abolitionists who condemned slavery as rejecting the authority of Scripture.

Moses Stuart, a Congregationalist from Connecticut, also saw abolitionists as rejecting biblical inerrancy because the New Testament didn’t explicitly condemn slavery. He wrote in his Conscience and the Constitution that abolitionists “must give up the New Testament authority or abandon the fiery course which they are pursuing.”

Most Christians in the South followed Fuller’s way of thinking and rejected anti-slavery Christians in the North as elites who were trying to take over the country.

In his article for The Gospel Coalition, Aaron Menikoff pointed out serious flaws in how Richard Fuller and other pro-slavery Christians read and preached the Bible. They “failed to distinguish regulation of slavery from approval of slavery [in the Bible]. True, no prooftext dismantled Roman slavery with a single blow. Yet taken as a whole, the Bible decimated slavery with a thousand hits. The New Testament laid the groundwork for slavery’s funeral.”

Seeking God in Christian Community

This was the environment in which Lottie Moon grew up. She had the benefit of having an older sister, Orianna, who had attended a boarding school in New York that was famous for graduating radical feminists like Elizabeth Cady Standton and abolitionists. Surely, as I fictionalize in Becoming Lottie Moon, Orianna was influenced by these ideas and shared them with her sister. But still, at times, Lottie seemed to be more influenced by her culture than the Bible.

In a letter to a friend during the Civil War, which began when Lottie was 20 years old, she expressed her disdain for the North, seemingly blind to the tyranny of slavery.

“Far better all perish than bow the neck to the tyrant’s yoke!” (Allen, 48).

I learned from these Christians of the past that I bring my cultural values and perspectives when I read the Bible. The Holy Spirit helps me understand Scripture (2 Corinthians 2:12), but God still wants His Word to be read communally (Nehemiah 8:8; Acts 13:14-15; 1 Timothy 4:13).

When we have a difference of opinion with other Christians who are arguing in good faith, it’s worth humbly asking ourselves if our understanding of a Scripture passage is rooted more in our culture or in God’s revealed character absolute truth. Are we confident in and arguing for the infallibility of Scripture or our own interpretation of it?

Next time a faithful Bible-believing Christian from a different cultural context than me expresses a view of Scripture that’s different from mine, I pray I will make an effort to listen—as in, trying to understand their perspective, not simply forming a response in my head while waiting for them to stop talking or typing. We can know God better when we open our Bibles together.

“This is what God’s people have always done when we enter into new or uncertain times,” explained in this Bible Project video. “They remember their story and who they are through the public reading of Scripture.”

2. God Graciously Uses (and Refines) Flawed People for His Glory

In Becoming Lottie Moon, I explore the conundrum of how Lottie might have thought about slavery as a child and then as a young adult and a new Christian. I based these explorations on Lottie’s character and actions as revealed in her personal letters and as detailed in her biographies.

Lottie wrote a lot of letters. While she wrote about the “tyrant’s yoke” of Union forces, after the Confederacy lost the Civil War, she never wrote about the “Lost Cause” of the South or expressed any longings for the old system of slavery.

Still, white supremacy infused the culture she grew up in. It was painfully evident in her early writings from China, but her later writings reveal a hint of refreshing change.

Culture Shock Revealing White Supremacy

When Lottie Moon arrived in China in 1873, the term “culture shock” hadn’t been coined yet. But even a committed missionary adventurer like Lottie, no doubt, experienced it, especially when she saw how Chinese women were treated. Lottie particularly fumed at the Chinese tradition of footbinding, where the feet of little girls were repeatedly broken and bound into distortion, all for the sake of perceived beauty as well as for the sake of advancing the family’s economic and social status.

Lottie mentioned her horror at foodbinding in one of her first letters from the field on November 1, 1873.

“Their deformed feet and tottering walk but are a type of their narrow minds and degraded morals.”

The Chinese, she had believed at the time, were an “inferior race” to Caucasians, as she wrote in a March 13, 1875 letter.

But God didn’t leave her there to wallow in white supremacy for the rest of her life.

Following God to Inner China

She spent her first 12 years in China, teaching children in Tengchow and taking evangelism trips out to the countryside with other missionaries and Chinese believers. During these trips, God drew Lottie’s heart to inner China, where villages of people had never heard the name of Jesus.

“... The most glorious triumphs of the gospel in this Province have been in the interior. … I have seen nothing comparable to it in my whole missionary experience. Such eager drinking-in of the truth, such teachableness, I have never seen before.” (November 17, 1885.)

By 1885, Lottie had moved to Pingtu, a wealthy yet remote town in the interior, where few foreigners ventured. She completely set aside her cultural preferences to clear any barriers between the Chinese and the gospel message she wanted to share with them. Lottie dressed, ate, and lived like the Chinese did. She saw them more as God saw them, and she loved them.

“I always leave Pingtu with regret & go back to it with joy. The affectionate kindness of the people awakens a grateful affection for them in my own heart.” (July 19, 1887, when she accepted the mission board’s invitation to return to America for a break.)

Lottie also changed her vocabulary when she learned they didn’t care to be called “heathens.” In  May 1893, the Foreign Mission Journal published another of Lottie’s articles. In this one, she described the racism that Caucasians and Chinese expressed toward each other. Caucasians called Chinese “heathens.” The Chinese had their own insults, calling Caucasians (including Lottie Moon, herself) “foreign devils.”

Ever the scholar, Lottie detailed the original meanings of the word heathen, which she claimed wasn’t used derogatorily. But because the new meaning of heathen is spoken with such contempt, “[i]t is, therefore, time that the followers of Jesus revise their language and learn to speak respectfully of non Christian peoples. If the term [heathen] gives pain to one human being, no Christian should ever again allow it to pass his lips.”

In the article, she turned the term around, using its original meaning—a non-Christian people.

“When our own heathen ancestors were skulking around the forests of Northern Europe, the Chinese already had a respectable civilization. A thousand years ago, China was the most civilized country on the globe. Much remains in [China] that deserves our profound respect.”

Challenging Cultural Norms and Embracing Gospel Transformation

Lottie Moon didn’t push Western customs and values onto Chinese people like other Victorian-era missionaries did. She focused on the gospel, but not in a way that avoided sinful systems in Chinese culture like footbinding.

In 1878, Lottie wrote about an argument with the future father-in-law of one of her students who insisted that the girl’s feet should be bound.

“I gave him a talk in no measured terms about the wickedness of the practice [of footbinding]. I told him I should fight it all my life, that it was utterly inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus. I was determined that no such suffering should be inflicted [on] a girl under my roof & that I would not be a witness of such suffering.”

Lottie recognized that the gospel could radically change not only individual lives, but also social systems. If Lottie didn’t believe it already, I wonder if this experience of fighting against footbinding was a bridge that God used to show her how slavery was also an evil system that degraded God’s image bearers, was “utterly inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus,” and should be abolished despite economic consequences.

Lottie had flaws as she followed God. Along the way, God lifted her into a life that was more consistent with the gospel. He can do this for Christians today too.

3. Flawed People Can Still Have Admirable Qualities Worth Gleaning From

While writing Becoming Lottie Moon, here are two things I learned and loved most about Lottie and the God she served.

Lottie never settled for cultural Christianity. 

Even before Lottie became a Christian at 18 years old, it would have been easy for her to blend into the culture of Christianity around her.

She could have sat quietly in church, walked up to the altar one day, and let the preacher dunk her in the river. She could have attended prayer meetings with other girls at school, married a wealthy Baptist man like her father, and ran a plantation home like her mother.

Instead, Lottie pulled pranks throughout her childhood to get out of going to church. She refused to go to revival meetings or prayer times with her friends, and she horrified them by insisting her middle initial stood for Devil, rather than Diggs. When she wasn’t Christian, she didn’t pretend to be. She was honest about who she was.

Lottie still didn’t settle for cultural Christianity, even when she finally decided to follow Jesus after a church revival in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When Lottie’s fiercely independent spirit submitted to God’s Holy Spirit and her hard working hands held tight onto Jesus’ nail-pierced ones, she became an even more authentic version of the unique woman God made her to be.

She finished her studies with a new vigor to honor the Lord. She turned down marriage proposals and accepted teaching positions across the South. And in 1873, she went to the mission field in China as a single woman.

God’s dreams for Lottie were bigger and better than her own.

Becoming Lottie Moon shows Lottie striving to advance her education, dreaming to leverage a career as a teacher to achieve freedom from a future she fears—the boring life of a good Baptist girl in antebellum Virginia. When she reached a high point in her career in America, she thought she had achieved her dreams. But God had more in mind. He awakened her long-suppressed dream to be a missionary. He used her teaching skills and set her on the adventure of a lifetime, following Him and becoming one of the most famous missionaries in history.

Indeed, God accomplished “immeasurably more” than Lottie asked or imagined (Ephesians 3:20).

How Should We Remember Lottie Moon?

My journey of writing Becoming Lottie Moon started in shock, and it ended in humility. It will always be true that before Lottie became a famous missionary to China, she grew up in a home where 52 Black people were enslaved.

If those 52 people wanted to attend church and learn the truth about God, they were allowed to go only by the whim of their master. Records show that a group of enslaved people did attend church with Lottie’s family and even became baptized members. But they did not have the constitutional right to exercise religion or to peaceably assemble. They certainly didn’t have the personal agency over their days or their bodies to follow God’s dream for their lives as freely as other Americans could. Still, many enslaved people did learn the gospel, trust in God, and live a faithful and fruitful life, despite the constraints placed on them by other Christians.

- George Liele was freed by his master and went to Jamaica as a Baptist missionary in 1782.

- Sojourner Truth escaped enslavement in 1826 and “travel[ed] the country sharing the gospel and her testimony,” according to this Christiany.com article.

- Harriet Tubman escaped enslavement in 1849 and helped about 70 other enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad.

But until General Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865 and Major General Gordon Granger marched through Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, most Black people in America endured the horror of chattel slavery, day in and day out.

As we remember Lottie Moon’s life and share her story, let it be the story of a real, flawed woman who followed hard after the Lord and, by His grace, became an “imitator of God” (Ephesians 5:1). That’s more hopeful and inspiring than a squeaky-clean Christian idol on a pedestal anyway.

Do you want to learn more about Lottie Moon’s transformation in a captivating coming-of-age story? Get your copy of Becoming Lottie Moon today!

Sources

Fuller, Richard. Wayland, Francis. Domestic slavery considered as a Scriptural institution : in a correspondence between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I. / Rev. and cor. by the authors. 1845.

Harper, Keith. Send the Light: Lottie Moon’s Letters and Other Writings. 2002.

Menikoff, Aaron. “How and Why Did Some Christians Defend Slavery?” The Gospel Coalition. February 24, 2017.

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. 2010.

Photo credit: Public Domain Image

Emily Hall writes stories with nuance and grace about everyday people who have become extraordinary legends. She is fueled by cookie dough, kickboxing, and library visits. Whether it’s the Library of Virginia, historical society libraries, or story time with her little one, Emily loves spending time in libraries. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family. Visit Emily online and sign up for her newsletter at EmilyHallBooks.com to get a FREE short story prequel to her novel, Becoming Lottie Moon.