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Woolman, Benezet, Cooper, Elliott, and other Christian antislavery leaders viewed people of African descent as human beings worthy of value and applied the Golden Rule universally to the circumstances of slaves in order to help their readers imagine themselves in the position of the enslaved. This was a radical appeal at a time when ideas of white superiority and other forms of social hierarchy dominated the American social order.

(See Box 3.4.) Biblical scholar Allen Callahan notes that nothing was more troublesome for proslavery ideologues than the Golden Rule. Some believed it simply was wrong. Other prominent proslavery advocates, such as Richard Furman, minimized its meaning.¹⁰ An influential South Carolinian whose organizational ideas ultimately helped create the organizational structures of the SBC, Furman endorsed slavery as part of divine law. He argued that the Golden Rule was never meant to go against the “order of things, which the Divine government has established.”¹¹ Furman believed that if slavery was legal and in accordance with the Bible, then a slave master was not obligated to do any more than what he or she as a slave would wish to be done to them.¹² Furman’s views represented a stance taken consistently by proslavery advocates. The Golden Rule only applied in a limited way, and social status determined how an individual or class of people should be treated. This was especially so because slavery was in accord with divine law.