Should a person be able to own another person? Today Christians
uniformly say no, and many would like to believe that has always been
the case. But history tells a different story, one in which Christians
have struggled to give a clear answer when confronted with questions
about human trafficking and human rights. Had the Bible been edited
differently, Christendom might have achieved moral clarity on this issue
sooner. As is, the Bible contains very mixed messages, which means that
biblical authority could be invoked on either side of the question,
leaving Christian beliefs about slavery vulnerable for centuries to
prevailing cultural, political, and economic currents.
The
Bible first endorses slavery in the book of Genesis, in the story of
Noah the ark builder. After the flood, Noah’s son Ham sees his father
drunk and naked, and for reasons that have long been debated, is cursed.
One recurring theme in Genesis is that guilt can be transferred from a
guilty person to an innocent person (think of Adam and Eve’s fruit
consumption, which taints us all), and in this case the curse is put on
Ham’s son, Canaan.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his
youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of
slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the Lord
my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for
Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his
slave.” Genesis 9:24-27 NRSV
Most likely, this story was intended
originally to justify the Israelite subjugation of Canaanite peoples,
who, in other stories about the conquest of the Promised Land are
slaughtered or enslaved. Later though, Christians and Muslims would use
the story to explain why some people have dark skin, and “Ham’s curse”
became a justification for enslaving Native Americans and Africans.
Throughout
the Hebrew Old Testament, slavery is endorsed in a variety of ways.
Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob both have sex with female slaves, and the
unions are blessed with male offspring. Captives are counted among the
booties of war, with explicit instructions given for purifying virgin
war captives before “knowing them.” The wisest man of all time, Solomon,
keeps hundreds of concubines, meaning sexual slaves, along with his
many wives.
The books of the Law provide explicit rules for the treatment of Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves.
- You
may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live
among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident
foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may
treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a
permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the
people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.
(Leviticus 25:44-46)
When punishing slaves, owners are given latitude that falls just short of on-the-spot murder:
- When
a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the
slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave
survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is
his own property. (Exodus 21:20-21)
That said, the book of
Deuteronomy explicitly forbids returning an escaped slave to his master,
in a passage that was a favorite of abolitionists:
- Slaves
who have escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to
them. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they
choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not
oppress them. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16)
Most Christians
believe that Mosaic Law is no longer binding, and that the life of Jesus
ushered in a new period of grace and forgiveness, but that hasn’t
stopped Old Testament endorsements of slavery from shaping the course of
Christian history. They are, after all, still in the Bible. Fourth
century Catholic councils endorsed the Hebrew Scriptures as a package,
permanently binding them together with the Christian writings that
became the New Testament.
New Testament Encourages Kindness from Master, Obedience from Slave
Equally
regrettable, from the standpoint of moral clarity, is the fact that New
Testament writers fail to condemn Old Testament slavery. In fact, the
Jesus of Matthew says that he has come not to abolish the Law but to
fulfill it: “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is
accomplished” (Matthew 5:18).
Slavery comes up regularly in New
Testament texts; but rather than repudiating the practice, the writers
simply encourage good behavior on the part of both slaves and masters.
Slaves are clearly property of the owners, as are their families. In one
parable Jesus compares God to a king who has slaves. When one slave
refuses to forgive the debt of a peer, the righteous king treats him in
kind, “and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold,
together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment
to be made” (Matthew 18:25).
While in prison, the Apostle Paul encounters an escaped slave, Onesimus, and sends a
letter to
his Christian owner, Philemon, tacitly endorsing Philemon’s authority
in the matter. The messages are mixed. Paul sends Onesimus back to
Philemon “not as a slave but as a brother”—but he does send him back.
Several letters attributed to Paul express the sentiment that in Christ all people are one:
- For
in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks,
slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1
Corinthians 12:13)
- There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no
longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of
you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
Then again, he tells slaves to submit to their masters, even as he exhorts masters to treat slaves well.
- Slaves,
obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of
heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to
please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the
heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and
women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again
from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same
to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the
same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (Ephesians
6:5-9)
- Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their
masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching
may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters must not be
disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church;
rather they must serve them all the more, since those who benefit by
their service are believers and beloved. (1 Timothy 6:1-3)
The mixed messages of the New Testament provided the basis for later Christian arguments on both sides of the slavery question.
Church Fathers Disagree but Pro-Slavery Faction Dominates for 1300 Years
For some early Christians, the message of equality trumped endorsements of slavery. John Fletcher (
Lessons on Slavery, 1852) wrote
that early sects in Asia Minor “decried the lawfulness of it, denounced
slaveholding as a sin, a violation of the law of nature and religion.
They gave fugitive slaves asylum, and openly offered them protection.”
We are
told that
the Emperor Constantine gave bishops permission to manumit slaves,
which would have offered a powerful incentive for conversion to
Christianity.
St. Gregory, the 4th-century bishop of Nyssa in what is now Turkey, made impassioned arguments against slavery.
Do
sheep and oxen beget men for you? Irrational beasts have only one kind
of servitude. Do these form a paltry sum for you? ‘He makes grass grow
for the cattle and green herbs for the service of men’ [Psalms 103.14].
But once you have freed yourself from servitude and bondage, you desire
to have others serve you. ‘I have obtained servants and maidens.’ What
value is this, I ask? What merit do you see in their nature? What small
worth have you bestowed upon them?
Regrettably, as the Church and
Roman state became more tightly allied, politics trumped idealism. In
the mid-4th century, Manichaean Christians, who were considered heretics
by the Church of Rome, were encouraging slaves to take their freedom
into their own hands. The Church convened the Council of Gangra, and
issued a formal proclamation aligning with the Roman authorities against
the Manichaean slave rebels. “If anyone, on the pretext of religion,
teaches another man’s slave to despise his master and to withdraw from
his service, and not serve his master with good will and all respect,
let him be anathema.”
This became the official Church position for
the next 1300 years. Although some writers, including Augustine, voiced
opposition, the Vatican
repeatedly endorsed slavery
from the 5th through 17th centuries. To help enforce priestly celibacy,
the 9th Council of Toledo even declared that all children of clergy
would be slaves.
Colonial Powers Invoke the Bible; Mennonites and Quakers Raise Opposition
As
the countries of Europe colonized the world during the 17th century,
the moral authority of Bible and Church offered little protection for
subject people in the Americas and Africa. The Dominican Fray Bartolome
de las Casas, argued against enslavement of Native Americans, but was
ignored. The Catholic Church required only that slaves be non-Christians
and captured in a “just war.” Near the close of the 17th century,
Catholic theologian Leander
invoked both common sense and the Bible in support of Church doctrine:
“It
is certainly a matter of faith that this sort of slavery in which a man
serves his master as his slave, is altogether lawful. This is proved
from Holy Scripture…It is also proved from reason for it is not
unreasonable that just as things which are captured in a just war pass
into the power and ownership of the victors, so persons captured in war
pass into the ownership of the captors… All theologians are unanimous on
this.”
Catholic defenders of slavery were not alone. In England,
the Anglican Church spent half a century debating whether slaves should
taught the core tenets of Christian belief. Opposition came from owners
who feared that if slaves became Christians they might be entitled to
liberty. In North America Protestants first passed laws requiring that
slaves be sold with spouse and/or children to protect the family unit,
and then decided that these laws infringed the rights of slaveholders.
Many sincere Christians believed that primitive heathens were better off
as slaves, which allowed them a chance to replace their demonic tribal
lifestyle with civilization and possibly salvation.
But as the
17th century came to a close with broad Protestant and Catholic support
for slavery, two minority sects, Mennonites and Quakers began formally
converging around an anti-slavery stance. Their opposition to injustice,
rooted in their own understanding of the Christian faith, would become
the kernel of an abolitionist movement that ultimately leveraged the
organizing power and moral authority of Christianity to help end both
church and state sanction for human trafficking.
Protestant Support for Slavery Fractures and Turns
The
18th century marked a pivot point in Christian thinking about slavery,
much as the 4th century had, but in the opposite direction. At the start
of the century, British Quakers forbade slaveholding among their
members, and American Quakers even relocated communities from the South
to Ohio and Indiana to distance from the practice. But then as now,
Quakers were a small sect, the leading edge in their ethical thinking
perhaps, but only the leading edge.
It took John Wesley, founder
of the Methodist denomination, to bring abolitionism into the Christian
main current. A son of the Enlightenment as well as the Christian
tradition Wesley drew on both secular and religious tools to make his
case.
His writings lay
out in careful detail the history of the Atlantic slave trade as it was
known to him. He cites laws that prescribe mutilation and worse for
slaves who offend. He makes the argument in clear secular ethical terms
for abolition. He also plumbs the language and passions of faith:
If
therefore you have any regard to justice, (to say nothing of mercy, nor
of the revealed law of GOD) render unto all their due. Give liberty to
whom liberty is due, that is to every child of man, to every partaker of
human nature. Let none serve you but by his own act and deed, by his
own voluntary choice.–Away with all whips, all chains, all compulsion!
Be gentle towards men. And see that you invariably do unto every one, as
you would he should do unto you. p. 56
Wesley is keenly aware
that the book of Genesis has long been invoked in defense of slavery,
and rather than deny the Bible’s dark legacy he invokes it, calling on
God himself to free the oppressed from both slavery and sin:
The servile progeny of Ham
Seize as the purchase of thy blood!
Let all the heathen know thy name:
From idols to the living GOD
The dark Americans convert,
And shine in every pagan heart! p. 57
I
cite Wesley not because he gets sole or even majority credit for the
sea change in Christian thinking during the 18th century, but because he
embodies the many currents that came together to create that change.
The European Enlightenment prompted lines of ethical philosophy and
political analysis that are fundamentally at odds with slave trafficking
and forced labor. America’s deist founding fathers documented their own
conflicted feelings on the topic. Christians including Puritans,
Quakers, Methodists, Anglicans and Baptists wrestled publically with the
issue.
The first and second Great Awakenings spawned revival
meetings across the country that drew slaves and former slaves into
Christianity. And emancipation began making political inroads, though
not without opponents. Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777, and by the end
of the century, Upper Canada—now Ontario—had implemented a law that
would phase out the practice. By contrast, the Catholic Church placed
anti-slavery tracts on a list of forbidden books, and Virginia forbade
Blacks from gathering after dark, even for worship services.
Christians in the American South Hold Out
By
the start of the 19th century, the fight was far from over, but without
Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, legal slavery in
Christian-dominant countries might well have ended with a whimper
instead of a war. The economic value of slavery was in decline
throughout Europe’s empires, and in the American North a transition to
grain production had made slavery all but obsolete in some regions.
Where slaves cost more to feed than they could produce, owners set them
free.
But as
cotton production soared in
the South, thanks to Whitney’s invention, so did the demand for slave
labor. By the start of the Civil War, the South was producing over 4
million bales of cotton annually, up from a few thousand in 1790.
Between 1790 and 1808, when an act of Congress banned the Atlantic slave
trade, cotton producing states imported 80,000 additional slaves from
Africa to meet growing demand.
Northerners could think about
slavery in abstract humanitarian terms but for Southerners, slavery was
prosperity, and many Southern Christians behaved like owners of oil
wells might today: they hunkered down and defended their revenue stream
by engaging in the kind of “motivated reasoning” that allows us to find
virtue in what benefits us. Under pressure, prominent Christian leaders
turn to the Bible to defend the South’s way of life:
- [Slavery]
was established by decree of Almighty God…it is sanctioned in the
Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation…it has existed in
all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization,
and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts. — Jefferson
Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.
- There is
not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it.
It is not then, we conclude, immoral. — Rev. Alexander Campbell
- The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.– Rev. Richard Furman, prominent Baptist and namesake of Furman University
- The
doom of Ham has been branded on the form and features of his African
descendants. The hand of fate has united his color and destiny. Man
cannot separate what God hath joined.—U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond.
The
doom of Ham. Whether Ham’s curse is “branded on the form and features
of his African descendants,” as Hammond believed, the story of that
curse has been branded on the form and features of Christian history,
down to the present.
Modern Christians Struggle to Disentangle Biblical Authority from Bigotry
On Friday, Dec. 6, 2013, the LDS Mormon Church
officially renounced the
doctrine that brown skin is a punishment from God. The announcement
acknowledged that racism was a part of LDS teaching for generations, as
indeed it was, officially, until external pressures including the
American civil rights movement and the desire to proselytize in Brazil
made segregation impossible. LDS leaders have come a long ways from the
thinking of Brigham Young, who wrote, “Shall I tell you the law of God
in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the
chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under
the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so” (Journal
of Discourses, vol. 10).
“This will always be so,” said Young, but
modern Mormons believe he was wrong. Similarly, most modern Protestants
and Catholics believe their spiritual forefathers were wrong to endorse
slavery — or practice it — or preach it from the pulpit. But thanks in
part to words penciled by our Iron Age ancestors and decisions made by
4th-century councils, this moral clarity has been painfully difficult to
achieve. How much sooner might Christians have come to this
understanding if the Church had not treated those ancient words from
Genesis and Leviticus and Ephesians as if they were God-breathed?
It
is easy to look back on slavery from the vantage of our modern moral
consensus—that treating people as property is wrong, regardless of what
our ancestors believed. But the very same Bible that provided Furman and
Jefferson Davis with a defense of slavery also teaches that
nonbelievers are evildoers,
women are for breeding,
children need beating, and
marriage can take almost any form but queer.
This
month, aspiring presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was asked to
comment on marriage equality and said, “This is not just a political
issue. It is a biblical issue. And as a biblical issue, unless I get a
new version of the scriptures, it’s really not my place to say, ‘Okay,
I’m just going to evolve.’” I’m guessing that the generations of
Christians who fought slavery, biblical texts and Church tradition
notwithstanding, would beg to differ.
(Credit: Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)
Should a person be able to own another person? Today Christians
uniformly say no, and many would like to believe that has always been
the case. But history tells a different story, one in which Christians
have struggled to give a clear answer when confronted with questions
about human trafficking and human rights. Had the Bible been edited
differently, Christendom might have achieved moral clarity on this issue
sooner. As is, the Bible contains very mixed messages, which means that
biblical authority could be invoked on either side of the question,
leaving Christian beliefs about slavery vulnerable for centuries to
prevailing cultural, political, and economic currents.
(Credit: Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)
No comments:
Post a Comment