SLAVERY AND THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH (4/5)
This is the fourth installment of a series of posts addressing the claim that Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color. Two reasons are often given in support of this claim:
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because Christianity’s book, the Bible, condones slavery.
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because many white American Christians possessed slaves in the antebellum South and used the Bible to justify it.
In the past two posts, I sought to address the first claim by looking at how slavery was handled by Old and New Testament writers in their historical contexts. The conclusion there was that the biblical writers permitted a mitigated and regulated form of slavery but never defended it as an ideal. Today, we will look at how slavery was understood and treated by the church throughout its history.
SLAVERY IN THE OLD WORLD
Before the Edict of Milan in A.D. 313, free and enslaved Christians not only shared in one baptism and one common meal commemorating the sacrifice of Jesus; but also Roman persecution, making them fellow sufferers.[1] These bonds of unity, led others to mock the early church for treating members of every social rank as equals.[2] Many in the early church recognized their purpose as an outpost of God’s in-breaking Kingdom where the values of God were put on display in the equitable treatment of all people.
After the Roman Empire became more tolerant of Christianity in the fourth century, Imperial legislation followed the lead of these Christian ideals by mitigating some of the most grievous aspects of slavery.[3] During this time, Gregory of Nyssa, spoke out vehemently against the institution. In his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, Gregory points out the irrationality of buying slaves who as fellow image-bearers of God were of inestimable worth. At one point in his sermon, Gregory asks, “...if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God?”[4] While Gregory’s sentiments against slavery may not have gained the traction he hoped for, his brother, Basil of Caesarea, followed his lead by helping pioneer Imperial legislation against the sexual exploitation of slaves.[5]
After Rome fell in 410, slavery began to slowly dissolve across Europe. By the 13th century, the influential theologian, Thomas Aquinas, had convinced many that slavery was a sin.[6] Before the Renaissance began in the 14th century, slavery had largely disappeared in most of Europe.[7] Slavery was explicitly prohibited for Roman Catholics by Pope Paul III in 1537; and over time, slavery in Europe transformed into the milder institution of serfdom, which itself began to disappear during the time of the Renaissance.[8]
SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD
Even with its decline in the middle ages, slavery would soon rear its ugly head again. Despite opposition from Roman Catholic missionaries and Popes, settlers from Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands began to enslave natives and import slaves from Africa after the Americas were discovered.[9] Scrivener notes that over “12 million African slaves were captured, bought, and sold to mainly white Christian slave owners” between the 16th and 19th centuries.[10] For many, this awakened craving for slaves arose out of the fires of greed stoked by the financial opportunities the New World presented, especially in the areas of mining and plantations. Unlike the slavery of the Old World, New World slavery was largely race-based and had lasting effects on people of color long after it was officially abolished.[11]
By the end of the 18th century, the Southern States had a plantation economy that ran almost exclusively on the sweat of African slaves and lined the pockets of white slaveowners. Though Roman Catholic opposition existed early on, Mennonites and Quakers began to voice their concerns about the inhumanity of slavery around this time. [12] In 19th century England, the evangelical Anglican and Parliament member, William Wilberforce, led a successful campaign against slavery that eventually resulted in the criminalization of the slave trade in 1808 and the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 with The Act of Emancipation.[13] The abolishment of slavery came at such a financial cost to Britain that it was labeled voluntary “econocide” by historian Seymour Drescher.[14]
The abolitionist voices of Britain were joined by the likes of former slave and American statesman, Fredrick Douglass in the later half of the 19th century. Douglass echoed Gregory of Nyssa from centuries prior when he declared: “There can no more be a law for the enslavement of man, made in the image of God, than for the enslavement of God himself.” Douglass’ influence is in part responsible for the constitutional amendment that declared the end of slavery in the United States in 1865.[15]
CONCLUSION
It has been claimed that:
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because Christianity’s book, the Bible, condones slavery.
Christianity has contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color because many white American Christians possessed slaves in the antebellum South and used the Bible to justify it.
It is true that throughout the history of the church there have been Christian slaves and Christian slaveowners. However, though the OT and NT do not directly address the morality of slavery as an institution, the seeds of abolition planted there eventually flowered within the history of the church as Christians began to recognize slavery as incompatible with certain foundational Christian concepts. Ideas like:
Both slave and free are created in the image of God (Gen 1:26; Jas 3:9)
Both slave and free are one in Christ (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12:13; Col 3:11)
The Golden Rule (Matt 7:12)
Jesus’ proclamation of liberty to the captive and oppressed (Lk 4:16–21; cf. Isa 61:1f)
The condemnation of enslavers (Exod 21:6; and 1 Tim 1:10)
These conceptual tributaries flow into each other so as to make a mighty river of freedom washing away the sin of bondage.
Were there white Christians in the American South who used the Bible to justify the enslavement of Africans? Yes, even some notable ones. My heart always sinks when I remember that James P. Boyce, one of the founders and the first president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (the seminary I now attend), once described himself as “an ultra pro-slavery man.” He and others used the Bible to defend his position.[16] Did Boyce and other Christians contribute to the problem of racism and oppression of people of color? Sadly, yes. For example, racism continued to play a role in the life of the Southern Baptist Convention and at Southern Seminary well into the 1900s.[17].
Is it proper to equate the grave moral failures of these Christians with Christianity itself? No. Our study of slavery in the OT and NT have shown that their pro-slavery arguments were unwarranted and that the arguments of the Christian abolitionists were more in line with the heart of God as reflected in the Bible. There may have been self proclaimed Christians who contributed to racism and the oppression of people of color; but they did so in contradiction to Christ and Christianity.
__________
[1] F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., "Slavery," in Dictionary of the Christian Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 1509.
[2] Jamaal E. Williams and Timothy Paul Jones, In Church As It Is In Heaven: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2023), 38–39.
[3] Cross and Livingstone, “Slavery,” 1509.
[4] Wickham, Lionel, "7 Homily 4" In Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the Seventh International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (St Andrews, 5-10 September 1990) edited by Stuart G. Hall, 177-184. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 1993.
[5] Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 184–185.
[6] McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity, 185.
[7] Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality (Epsom, UK: The Good Book Company, 2022), 161.
[8] McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity, 185. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1500, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 558.
[9] Cross and Livingstone, “Slavery,” 1509.
[10] Scrivener, The Air We Breathe, 143.
[11] Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, vol. 2, Reformation to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 694.
[12] Latourette, A History of Christianity, 2:962.
[13] Cross and Livingstone, “Slavery,” 1509.
[14] Cited in Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 351–352.
[15] Quoted in Scrivener, The Air We Breathe, 156.
[16] John A. Broadus, Memoir of James Petigru Boyce (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1893), 185. Frederick Douglass once wrote that the church of America had “shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible, to the whole slave system…and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off to the world for christianity.” Frederick Douglas, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, edited by John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2016), 213.
[17] Kelly Nall, “Pioneer for Racial Justice in America’s Largest Denomination,” The Gospel Coalition, May 17, 2017, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/pioneer-for-racial-justice-in-americas-largest-denomination/.