thought of the day.168

The Bible and Slavery

Much in the Bible is unclear and contradictory. However, God’s attitude about humans owning other humans as work animals is not one of them. God regulated slavery, commanded it, condoned it and never condemned it. He told his people they could buy and sell foreign men, women and children as slaves. He said a father could sell his own daughters into lifelong slavery. He had his people attack city after city and enslave those not slaughtered. He said a slave owner could beat his slave to death with a rod without punishment as long as the slave suffered a day or two before dying.

Jesus spoke often of masters and their slaves — of slaves being “heavily whipped”, “beaten”, “killed”, “stoned” and “cut into pieces” but not once does Jesus suggest it’s immoral to sell your daughters or beat your slaves to death. Never does he encourage others to speak out against the evil of slavery. Never does he encourage the oppressed to work for freedom and justice. Neither do his followers. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Peter and Paul instruct slaves to obey and fear their masters, even the cruel and unjust. And Jesus speaks of people owning slaves until the end of time.

Professor Morton Smith notes that "With all these clear passages, there is no reasonable doubt that the New Testament, like the Old, not only tolerated chattel slavery but helped to perpetuate it by making the slaves' obedience to their masters a religious duty. This biblical morality was one of the great handicaps that the emancipation movement in the United States had to overcome. The opponents of abolition had clear biblical evidence on their side...as one said in 1857:"Slavery is of God". (What the Bible Says 1989 p145/146).

Historian Larry Hise notes in his book “Pro-Slavery” that ministers “wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America” listing 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that it was God’s will for white people to own black people.

In “The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century”, forrest G. Woods writes, “In the year before the schism, 25,000 communicants owned 208,000 slaves—over 9 percent of the total slave population—and 1,200 Methodist clergymen were themselves slaveholders. If anyone needed a barometer to measure the southern Methodist’s official commitment to bondage he had only to consider the fact that every minister elevated to the rank of bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, between 1846 and the Civil War was a slaveholder.

Charles Bradlaugh said, “...The heretic Cordorcet pleaded powerfully for freedom whilst Christian France was still slave-holding. For many centuries Christian Spain and Christian Portugal held slaves....It was a Christian King...and a Christian friar who founded in Spanish America the slave trade between the Old World and the New. For some 1800 years Christians kept slaves, bought slaves, sold slaves, bred slaves, stole slaves. Pious Bristol and Godly Liverpool less than 100 years ago openly grew rich on the traffic. During the ninth century Greek Christians sold slaves to the Saracens. In the eleventh century prostitutes were publicly sold as slaves in Rome, and the profit went to the Church.”

Professor Carl Lofmark in his book “What is the Bible?” writes: “Christians accepted slavery....the Church itself soon became the biggest slave-owner in the Roman Empire. Slavery was approved of by the Church’s teachers, such as St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and many others....The slave trade flourished with the approval of the Church .... Slaves have been bought and sold by the popes and they continued to keep slaves until the late 18th century. Opponents of slavery including Wilberforce and Paine.... were savagely attacked by the churches for presuming to know better than the Bible, and the anti-slavery attitude of the Quakers made them unpopular with orthodox Christians.…”

And mark Twain writes, “In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. … There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; [the Church] was right, she was doing in this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do.…

“Christian England supported slavery and encouraged it for two hundred and fifty years, and her church's consecrated ministers looked on, sometimes taking an active hand, the rest of the time indifferent. England's interest in the business may be called a Christian interest, a Christian industry. She had her full share in its revival after a long period of inactivity, and his revival was a Christian monopoly; that is to say, it was in the hands of Christian countries exclusively. English parliaments aided the slave traffic and protected it; two English kings held stock in slave-catching companies. The first regular English slave hunter -- John Hawkins, of still revered memory -- made such successful havoc, on his second voyage, in the matter of surprising and burning villages, and maiming, slaughtering, capturing, and selling their unoffending inhabitants, that his delighted queen conferred the chivalric honor of knighthood on him -- a rank which had acquired its chief esteem and distinction in other and earlier fields of Christian effort. The new knight, with characteristic English frankness and brusque simplicity, chose as his device the figure of a negro slave, kneeling and in chains. Sir John's work was the invention of Christians, was to remain a bloody and awful monopoly in the hands of Christians for a quarter of a millennium, was to destroy homes, separate families, enslave friendless men and women, and break a myriad of human hearts, to the end that Christian nations might be prosperous and comfortable, Christian churches be built, and the gospel of the meek and merciful Redeemer be spread abroad in the earth; and so in the name of his ship, unsuspected but eloquent and clear, lay hidden prophecy. She was called The Jesus.…

“Our own conversion came at last. We began to stir against slavery. Hearts grew soft, here, there, and yonder. There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one -- the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession -- at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text remained; the practice changed, that was all.”