Every now and then I think back on the fact that the Wesleyan Methodist church that I grew up in was founded on the grounds of anti-slavery in the 19th century.

Orange Scott, one of the founders, said that he needed to seceed from the Methodist Episcopal Church because it was "not only a slave-holding, but a slavery-defending church". He and the other founders were willing to sever ecclesial ties and relationships built over decades.

But most of all, I think of the fact that the story of the origins of the denomination were hidden from sight. I knew nothing about them until I studied Wesleyan history as an undergrad.

Many Wesleyan and holiness folks gesture to Wesley's "Thoughts upon slavery" or the acts of historical figures like Scott as a way of defending their own stance with regard to race. "Someone did something good in the 19th century, so we can't be all bad."

What hasn't happened is the transmission of the theological and political arguments that enabled that stance in the first place. There are tricky natural law arguments applied here, which can easily be misapplied.

The key lesson, though, is that evangelical Christians leveraged natural law arguments against the apparent plain sense of scripture which was being used to defend the institution of slavery.

Rather than using natural law to defend the status quo, these arguments were used to upset civil and ecclesial order (the Wesleyan Methodists also criticised the structure of the Methodist episcopacy). It's a reminder that natural law arguments are not inherently conservative.

For these Wesleyans, slavery could be neither redeemed nor tolerated. Slavery undermined the concepts of society and civilisation themselves.

Undefended thesis: the Wesleyan view of social order becomes more conservative in the 20th century, as seen in the critiques of Azusa St.