Historically, slavery has been regulated, supported, or opposed on religious grounds.
In Judaism,
Hebrew slaves were given a range of treatments and protections. They
were to be treated as an extended family with certain protections, and
they could be freed. They were property but could also own material
goods.
Early Christian authors (except for Assyrian Christians who did not believe in slavery) maintained the spiritual equality of slaves and free persons while accepting slavery as an institution. Early modern papal decrees allowed the enslavement of the unbelievers, though popes denounced slavery from the fifteenth century onward. This denouncement of slavery did not discourage (for example) the
diocese of the Anglican church from having an indirect involvement with
the religious conversion of black slaves in Barbados, in which one of the main principles was the divine right of the master over the slave. In the eighteenth century, the abolition
movement took shape among Christians across the globe, but various
denominations did not prohibit slavery among their members into the
nineteenth century. Enslaved non-believers were sometimes converted to Christianity, but elements of their traditional beliefs merged with their Christian beliefs.
Early Islamic texts encourage kindness towards slaves and manumission
(legally freeing individual slaves), while recognizing slavery as an
institution and permitting enslavement of non-Muslims imprisoned or
bought beyond the borders of Islamic rule. Children born to slaves were
also considered legally as slaves.
The Genesis narrative about the Curse of Ham has often been held to be an aetiological story, giving a reason for the enslavement of the Canaanites. The word ham is very similar to the Hebrew word for hot, which is cognate with an Egyptian word (kem, which means black) and is used to refer to Egypt itself, in reference to the fertile black soil along the Nile valley. Although many scholars therefore view Ham as an eponym which is used to represent Egypt in the Table of Nations, a number of Christians throughout history, including Origen and the Cave of Treasures, have argued for the alternate proposition that Ham represents all black people, his name symbolising their dark skin colour; pro-slavery advocates, from Eutychius of Alexandria and John Philoponus, to American pro-slavery apologists, have therefore occasionally interpreted the narrative as a condemnation of all black people to slavery. A few Christians, like Jerome, even took up the racist notion that black people inherently had a soul as black as [their] body.
Slavery was customary in antiquity, and it is condoned by the Torah. The Bible uses the Hebrew term eved (עֶבֶד) to refer to slavery; however, eved has a much wider meaning than the English term slavery, and in several circumstances it is more accurately translated into English as servant. It was seen as legitimate to enslave captives obtained through warfare, but not through kidnapping. Children could also be sold into debt bondage, which was sometimes ordered by a court of law.
As with the Hittite Laws and the Code of Hammurabi, the Bible does set minimum rules for the conditions under which slaves
were to be kept. These are written as condition statements reflective of
bronze age law. A set of if/then parameters to account for specific
transgressions. Slaves were to be treated as part of an extended
family; they were allowed to celebrate the Sukkot festival, and expected to honour Shabbat. Israelite slaves could not be compelled to work with rigour, and debtors who sold themselves as slaves to their creditors had to be treated the same as a hired servant. If a master harmed a slave in one of the ways covered by the lex talionis, the slave was to be compensated by manumission; if the slave died within 24 to 48 hours, he or she was to be avenged (whether this refers to the death penalty or not is uncertain).
Israelite slaves were automatically manumitted after six years of work, and/or at the next Jubilee
(occurring either every 49 or every 50 years, depending on
interpretation), although the latter would not apply if the slave was
owned by an Israelite and was not in debt bondage. Slaves released automatically in their 7th year of service, which did not include female slaves, or did, were to be given livestock, grain, and wine, as a parting gift (possibly hung round their necks). This 7th-year manumission could be voluntarily renounced, which would be signified, as in other Ancient Near Eastern nations, by the slave gaining a ritual ear piercing; after such renunciation, the individual was enslaved forever (and not released at the Jubilee). Non-Israelite slaves were always to be enslaved forever, and treated as inheritable property.
In New Testament books, including the First Epistle of Peter, slaves are admonished to obey their masters, as to the Lord, and not to men; and the Epistle to Philemon was used by both pro-slavery advocates as well as by abolitionists; in the epistle, Paul returns Onesimus, a fugitive slave, back to his master.
More mainstream forms of first-century Judaism
did not exhibit such qualms about slavery, and ever since the
second-century expulsion of Jews from Judea, wealthy Jews have owned
non-Jewish slaves, wherever it was legal to do so; nevertheless, manumissions were approved by Jewish religious officials
on the slightest of pretexts, and court cases concerning manumission
were nearly always decided in favor of freedom, whenever there was
uncertainty towards the facts.
The Talmud, a document of great importance in Judaism, made many rulings that made manumission easier and more likely:
The costly and compulsory giving of gifts was restricted to the 7th-year manumission only.
The price of freedom was reduced to a proportion of the original
purchase price rather than the total fee of a hired servant and could be
reduced further if the slave had become weak or sickly (and therefore
less saleable).
Voluntary manumission became officially possible, with the introduction of the manumission deed (the shetar shihrur), which was counted as prima facie proof of manumission.
Verbal declarations of manumission could no longer be revoked.
Putting phylacteries
on the slave, or making him publicly read three or more verses from the
Torah, was counted as a declaration of the slave's manumission.
Extremely long term sickness, for up to four years in total, could
not count against the slave's right to manumission after six years of
enslavement.
Jewish participation in the slave trade itself was also regulated by the Talmud. Fear of apostasy lead to the Talmudic discouragement of the sale of Jewish slaves to non-Jews, although loans were allowed; similarly slave trade with Tyre was only to be for the purpose of removing slaves from non-Jewish religion. Other types of trade were also discouraged: men selling themselves to women, and post-pubescent daughters being sold into slavery by their fathers. Pre-pubescent slave girls sold by their fathers had to be freed-then-married by their new owner, or his son, when she startedpuberty; slaves could not be allowed to marry free Jews, although masters were often granted access to the services of the wives of any of their slaves.
According to the Talmudic law, killing a slave is punishable in
the same way as killing a freeman, even if it was committed by the
owner. While slaves are considered the owner's property, they may not
work on Sabbath and holidays; they may acquire and hold property of the
owner.
Several prominent Jewish writers of the Middle Ages took offense at the idea that Jews might be enslaved; Joseph Caro and Maimonides both argue that calling a Jew slave was so offensive that it should be punished by ex-communication. However, they did not condemn enslavement of non-Jews. Indeed, they
argued that the biblical rule, that slaves should be freed for certain
injuries, should actually only apply to slaves who had converted to
Judaism; additionally, Maimonides argued that this manumission was real
punishment of the owner, and therefore it could only be imposed by a
court, and required evidence from witnesses. Unlike the biblical law protecting fugitive slaves, Maimonides argued
that such slaves should be compelled to buy their freedom
At the same time, Maimonides and other halachic
authorities forbade or strongly discouraged any unethical treatment of
slaves. According to the traditional Jewish law, a slave is more like an
indentured servant, who has rights and should be treated almost like a
member of the owner's family. Maimonides wrote that, regardless of
whether a slave is Jewish or not, "The way of the pious and the wise is
to be compassionate and to pursue justice, not to overburden or oppress a
slave, and to provide them from every dish and every drink. The early
sages would give their slaves from every dish on their table. They would
feed their servants before sitting to their own meals... Slaves may not
be maltreated of offended—the law destined them for service, not for
humiliation. Do not shout at them or be angry with them, but hear them
out." In another context, Maimonides wrote that all the laws of slavery
are "mercy, compassion and forbearance".
Different forms of slavery existed for over 18 centuries within Christianity. Although in the early years of Christianity, freeing slaves was regarded as an act of charity, and the Christian view that all people were equal including slaves was a novel idea within the Roman Empire, the institution of slavery was rarely criticised. David Brion Davis
writes that the "variations in early Christian opinion on servitude fit
comfortably within a framework of thought that would exclude any
attempt to abolish slavery as an institution". Indeed, in 340, the local Synod of Gangra condemned the Manicheans for urging that slaves should liberate themselves; with one of the 20 canons of the Synod declaring:
3) If anyone shall teach a slave, under the pretext of piety,
to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve
his own master with good-will and all honor, let him be anathema.
A variation of the Canon would be adopted as Orthodox Catholic Law, during the 451 AD, Council of Chalcedon, as:
4) ... Every monk must be subject to his bishop, and must not
leave his house except at his suggestion. A slave, however, can not
enter the monastic life without the consent of his master.
Augustine of Hippo, who renounced his former Manicheanism, argued that slavery was part of the mechanism to preserve the natural order of things; John Chrysostom, who is regarded as a saint by Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, argued that slaves should be resigned to their fate, because by "obeying his master he is obeying God". but he also stated that "Slavery is the fruit of covetousness, of
extravagance, of insatiable greediness" in his Epist. ad Ephes. As the Apostle Paul admonished the early Christians; "There is neither
Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor
female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus". And in fact, even some of
the first popes were once slaves themselves. Pope Gelasius I, in 492 AD, sanctioned heathens in Gaul could be enslaved, imported and sold by Jews, in Rome. Though in the following centuries Roman popes would ban the ownership
of Christian slaves by Jews, Muslims, heathens, and other Christians,
while the Catholic Council of London in 1102, issued a local blanket decree, though not a Church canon: "Let no one dare hereafter to engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals."
In 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas,
which granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens,
pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery. The approval of
slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his
Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. (This papal bull was issued in response
to the wars which were triggered by the Fall of Constantinople in 1453) In 1488 Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gift of 100 slaves from Ferdinand II of Aragon and distributed those slaves to his cardinals and the Roman nobility. Also, in 1639 Pope Urban VIII purchased slaves for himself from the Knights of Malta.
In the 15th and 16th centuries other popes denounced slavery as a great crime, including Pius II, Paul III, and Eugene IV. In 1639, Pope Urban VIII forbade slavery, as did Benedict XIV in 1741.
In 1815, pope Pius VII demanded that the Congress of Vienna suppress the
slave trade, and Gregory XVI condemned it again in 1839.
In addition, the Dominican friars who arrived in the Spanish
settlement of Santo Domingo in 1510 strongly denounced the enslavement
of the local Indians. Along with other priests, they opposed the
mistreatment of the Indians and denounced it as unjust and illegal in an
audience with the Spanish king as well as in the subsequent royal
commission. As a response to this position, the Spanish monarchy's subsequent Requerimiento
provided a religious justification for the enslavement of the local
populations, on the pretext that they refused to convert to Roman
Catholicism and therefore denied the authority of the pope.
Various interpretations of Christianity were also used to justify slavery. For example, some people believed that slavery was a punishment that was reserved for sinners. Some other Christian organizations were slaveholders. The eighteenth-century high-church Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts owned the Codrington Plantation, in Barbados, which contained several hundred slaves, who were branded on their chests with the word Society. George Whitefield, who is famed for his sparking of the so-called Great Awakening of American evangelicalism, overturned a province-wide ban against slavery, and went on to own several hundred slaves himself. Yet Whitefield is remembered as one of the first evangelists who preached to the enslaved.
At other times, Christian groups worked against slavery. The seventh-century Saint Eloi used his vast wealth to purchase British and Saxon slaves in groups of 50 to 100 in order to set them free. The Quakers in particular were early leaders of abolitionism, and in keeping with this tradition they denounced slavery at least as early as 1688. In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, and 9 of its 12 founding members were Quakers; William Wilberforce, an early supporter of the society, went on to push through the 1807 Slave Trade Act, striking a major blow against the Atlantic slave trade. Leaders of Methodism and Presbyterianism also vehemently denounced human bondage, convincing their congregations to do likewise; Methodists and Presbyterians subsequently made the repudiation of slavery a condition of membership.
In the Southern United States, however, support for slavery was strong; anti-slavery
literature was prevented from passing through the postal system, and
even the transcripts of sermons, by the famed English preacher Charles Spurgeon, were burned due to their censure of slavery. When the American Civil War broke out, slavery became one of the issues which would be decided by its outcome; the southern defeat led to a constitutional ban on slavery. Despite the general emancipation of slaves, members of fringe white groups like the Christian Identity movement, and the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist group) see the enslavement of Africans as a positive aspect of American history.
America
In the United States, Christianity not only held views about slavery but also on how slaves practiced their own form of Christianity. Prior to the work of Melville Herskovits in 1941, it was widely believed that all elements of African culture
were destroyed by the enslavement experience. Since his work,
scholarship has found that "Slave Christianity" existed as a patchwork
of African and Christian religious traditions. The slaves brought a wide variety of religious traditions with them including African traditional religions and Islam.
During the early eighteenth century, Anglican missionaries who attempted to bring Christianity to slaves in the Southern Colonies
often found themselves butting up against uncooperative masters and
resistant slaves. An unquestionable obstacle to the acceptance of
Christianity among slaves was their desire to continue to adhere to the
religious beliefs and rituals of their African ancestors as much as
possible. Missionaries who worked in the South were especially
displeased with the slaves' retention of African practices such as polygamy
and what they called idolatrous dancing. In fact, even black people who
embraced Christianity in America did not completely abandon the
religions of Africa. Instead, they engaged in syncretism, blending
Christian influences with traditional African rites and beliefs. Symbols
and objects, such as crosses, were conflated with charms which were
carried by Africans in order to ward off evil spirits. Christ was
interpreted as a healer, similar to the priests of Africa. In the New
World, fusions of African spirituality and Christianity led to
distinctly new practices within slave populations, including Louisiana Voodoo or Vodun in Haiti.
Although African religious influences were also important among
Northern blacks, the exposure to African religions was more intense in
the South, where the percentage of the black population was higher.
There were, however, some commonalities across the majority of
tribal traditions. Perhaps the primary understanding of tribal
traditions was the commonly held belief that there was no separation of
the sacred and the secular. All life was sacred and the supernatural was present in every facet and
focus of life. Most tribal traditions highlighted this experience of
the supernatural in ecstatic experiences of the supernatural which were
brought on by ritual song and dance. Repetitious music and dancing were
often used to bring on these experiences through the use of drums and
chanting. These experiences were realized in the "possession" of a
worshipper in which one is not only taken over by the divine but
actually becomes one with the divine.
Echoes of African tribal traditions can be seen in the
Christianity that was practiced by slaves in the Americas. The songs,
dances, and ecstatic experiences of traditional tribal religions were
Christianized and practiced by slaves in what is called the "Ring
Shout." This practice was a major mark of African American Christianity during the slavery period.
Christianity came to the slaves of North America more slowly.
Many colonial slaveholders feared that baptizing slaves would lead to
emancipation because of vague laws that concerned the slave status of
Christians under British colonial rule. Even after 1706, by which time
many states had passed laws that stated that baptism would not alter a
slave's status, slaveholders continued to believe that the catechization
of slaves would not be a wise economic choice. Slaves usually had one
day off each week, usually Sunday. They used that time to grow their own
crops, dance and sing (doing such things on the Sabbath was frowned
upon by most preachers), so there was little time for slaves to receive
religious instruction.
During the antebellum period,
slave preachers—enslaved or formerly enslaved evangelists—became
instrumental in shaping slave Christianity. They preached a gospel that
was radically different from the gospel that was preached by white
preachers, who often used Christianity in an attempt to make slaves more
complacent with their enslaved status. Instead of focusing on
obedience, slave preachers placed a greater emphasis on the Old Testament, especially on the Book of Exodus.
They likened the plight of the American slaves to the plight of the
enslaved Hebrews of the Bible, instilling hope into the hearts of those
who were enslaved. Slave preachers were instrumental in shaping the
religious landscape of African Americans for decades to come.
According to Bernard Lewis,
slavery has been a part of Islam's history from its beginning. The
Quran like the Old and the New Testaments, states Lewis, "assumes the
existence of slavery". It attempts to regulate slavery and thereby implicitly accepts it. Muhammad and his Companions owned slaves, and some of them acquired slaves through conquests. However, some argure that Muhammad never owned slaves himself. He also advised people to free slaves.An example of this is Zayd ibn Haritha, who was a slave Muhammad freed and adopted as a son.
During the beginnings of Islam, Classic slavery was not forbidden, but the latter (Islam) encourages the emancipation of slaves. In various verses, Quran refers to slaves as "necks" (raqabah) or "those whom your right hand possesses" (Ma malakat aymanukum). In addition to these terms for slaves, the Quran and early Islamic literature uses 'Abd (male) and Amah
(female) term for an enslaved and servile possession, as well as other
terms. According to Brockopp, seven separate terms for slaves appear in
the Quran, in at least twenty nine Quranic verses.
The Quran assigns the same spiritual value to a slave as to a free man, and a believing slave is regarded as superior to a free pagan or idolator. The manumission of slaves is regarded as a meritorious act in the
Quran, and is recommended either as an act of charity or as expiation
for sins. While the spiritual value of a slave was the same as the freeman,
states Forough Jahanbakhsh, in regards to earthly matters, a slave was
not an equal to the freeman and relegated to an inferior status. In the Quran and for its many commentators, states Ennaji, there is a
fundamental distinction between free Muslims and slaves, a basic
constituent of its social organization, an irreparable dichotomy
introduced by the existence of believers and infidels.
The corpus of hadith attributed to Muhammad or his Companions contains a large store of reports enjoining kindness toward slaves. Chouki El Hamel has argued that the Quran recommends gradual abolition of slavery, and that some hadith are consistent with that message while others contradict it. Muhammad forbade torturing slaves and advised their masters to treat them well.He also forbade their masters to refer to them as "slaves" but refer to them as "my young man".
According to Dror Ze'evi, early Islamic dogma set out to improve
conditions of human bondage. It forbade enslavement of free members of
Islamic society, including non-Muslims (dhimmis)
residing under Islamic rule. Islam also allowed the acquisition of
lawful non-Muslim slaves who were imprisoned, slaves purchased from
lands outside the Islamic state, as well as considered the boys or girls
born to slaves as slaves. Islamic law treats a free man and a slave unequally in sentencing for an equivalent crime. For example, traditional Sunni jurisprudence, with the exception of
Hanafi law, objects to putting a free man to death for killing a slave. A slave who commits a crime may receive the same punishment as a free
man, a punishment half as severe, or the master may be responsible for
paying the damages, depending on the crime. According to Ze'evi, Islam considered the master to own the slave's
labor, a slave to be his master's property to be sold or bought at will,
and that the master was entitled to women slave's sexual submission.
The Islamic law (sharia) allows the taking of non-Muslims as slaves, during religious wars or jihad. In the early Islamic communities, according to Kecia Ali, "both life and law were saturated with slaves and slavery". War, tribute from vassal states, purchase and children who inherited
their parent's slavery were the sources of slaves in Islam. In Islam, according to Paul Lovejoy,
"the religious requirement that new slaves be pagans and need for
continued imports to maintain slave population made Africa an important
source of slaves for the Islamic world." Slavery of non-Muslims, followed by the structured process of
converting them to Islam then encouraging the freeing of the converted
slave, states Lovejoy helped the growth of Islam after its conquests.
According to Mohammed Ennaji, the ownership gave the master a right "to punish one's slave". In Islam, a child inherited slavery if he or she was born to a slave mother and slave father. However, if the child was born to a slave mother and her owner master,
then the child was free. Slaves could be given as property (dower)
during marriage. The text encourages Muslim men to take slave women as sexual partners (concubines), or marry them. Islam, states Lewis, did not permit Dhimmis
(non-Muslims) "to own Muslim slaves; and if a slave owned by a dhimmi
embraced Islam, his owner was legally obliged to free or sell him".
There was also a gradation in the status on the slave, and his
descendants, after the slave converted to Islam.
Under Islamic law, in "what might be called civil matters", a
slave was "a chattel with no legal powers or rights whatsoever", states
Lewis. A slave could not own or inherit property or enter into a
contract. However, he was better off in terms of rights than Greek or
Roman slaves. According to Chirag Ali, the early Muslims misinterpreted the Quran as
sanctioning "polygamy, arbitrary divorce, slavery, concubinage and
religious wars", and he states that the Quranic injunctions are against
all this. According to Ron Shaham and other scholars, the various jurisprudence systems on Sharia such as Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi'i, Hanbali and others differ in their interpretation of the Islamic law on slaves.
Slaves were particularly numerous in Muslim armies. Slave armies
were deployed by Sultans and Caliphs at various medieval era war fronts
across the Islamic Empires, playing an important role in the expansion of Islam in Africa and elsewhere. Slavery of men and women in Islamic states such as the Ottoman Empire, states Ze'evi, continued through the early twentieth century.
In the seventeenth century Celebes Island, a policy that prohibiting slavery of Muslims who are not hereditary slaves was issued by the Sultan of Bone, La Maddaremmeng.
According to him, all Muslims are free men. However, it did not
liberate the enslaved Muslims who are hereditary slaves. Nonetheless, La
Maddaremmeng mandated that these slaves be treated with the same
humanity as one would treat their own family.
Islamic Puritanism
was allegedly the motivation behind La Maddaremeng's policy towards the
Muslim slavery. Apart from freeing slaves, La Maddaremeng also destroyed Idols and prohibited traditional ancestral beliefs that contradicted the teaching of Islam.
His puritanical activities faced opposition coming from the people, the
aristocrats, the neighboring kings, and even his own mother, We Tenrisoloreng Datu Pattiro. The Invasion of Bone by The Gowa Sultanate led him into his capture and deposition.
Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Baháʼí Faith, commended Queen Victoria for abolishing the slave trade in a letter written to Her Majesty between 1868 and 1872. Bahá'u'lláh also forbids slavery in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas written around 1873 considered by Baháʼís to be the holiest book
revealed by Bahá'u'lláh in which he states, "It is forbidden you to
trade in slaves, be they men or women."
Both the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh owned slaves of African descent
before the writing of the Kitab-i-Aqdas. While the Báb purchased
several slaves, Bahá'u'lláh acquired his through inheritance and freed
them. Bahá'u'lláh officially condemned slavery in 1874. Twenty-first
century scholarship has found that the Báb credited one of the slaves of
his elders as having raised him and compares him favorably with his own
father. Work has continued on other recent finds in archives such as a very
early document of Bahá'u'lláh's explaining his emancipating his slave
because as all humans are symbolically slaves of God none can be owned
by another saying "How, then, can this thrall claim for himself ownership of any other human being? Nay,...."
Hinduism
Vedic period
The term "dasa" (dāsa) in the Vedas is loosely translated as "slave." However, the meaning of the term varied over time. R. S. Sharma, in his 1958 book, for example, states that the only word which could possibly mean slave in Rigveda is dāsa, and this sense of use is traceable to four later verses in Rigveda. The term dāsa in the Rigveda, has been also been translated as a
servant or enemy, and the identity of this term remains unclear and
disputed among scholars.
R. S. Sharma writes that the word dāsi is found in Rigveda and Atharvaveda, and that it represented "a small servile class of women slaves". Slavery in the Vedic period, according to him, was mostly confined to women employed as domestic workers. He translates dāsi in a Vedic era Upanishads as "maid-servant". Male slaves are rarely mentioned in the Vedic texts. The word dāsa occurs in the Hindu Śruti texts Aitareya and Gopatha Brahmana, but not in the sense of a slave.
Classical Hinduism
Towards the end of the Vedic period (600 BCE), a new system of varnas had appeared, with people called shudras replacing the erstwhile dasas. Some of the shudras were employed as labouring masses on farm land, much like "helots of Sparta", even though they were not treated with the same degree of coercion and contempt. The term dasa was now employed to designate such enslaved people. Slavery arose out of debt, sale by parents or oneself (due to famines),
judicial decree or fear. While this could happen to a person of any varna, shudras were much more likely to be reduced to slavery.
The Smriti contain classifications of slaves, and the slaves were differentiated by origin and different disabilities and rules for manumission applied.
Hindu Smritis are critical of slavery. Slaves could be given away as gifts along with the land, which came in for criticism from the religious texts Āśvalāyana and Kātyāyana Srautasūtra. According to many Dharmasastras, release from slavery is an act of piety. Slavery was considered as a sign of backwardness by the Arthashastra author Kauṭilya,
who provided slaves the right to property and abolished hereditary
slavery, prohibited the sale and pledge of children as slaves. The Arthashastra laid down norms for the state to resettle shudra cultivators into new villages and providing them with land, grain, cattle and money.[169] It also stated that aryas could not be subject to slavery and that the selling or mortgaging of a shudra was punishable unless he was a born slave.
Bhakti movements
from the early centuries of common era, encouraged personal devotion to
one divine being. They welcomed members from all backgrounds, and thus
criticizing slavery by implication.
British Raj
In the territories controlled by the East India Company, in South Asia, an adaptation of a Dharmaśāstra named Manusmriti, and specifically an interpretation of verse 8.415 of the Manusmriti, was used to regulate the practice in Hindu communities, via what became known as the Hindu law.
Buddhism
Slavery existed in ancient India and, according to Scott Levi, it was likely an established institution that was "widespread by the lifetime of the Buddha and perhaps even as far back as the Vedic period."[176]
The topic of slavery and mention of slaves, therefore, can be found in
Buddhist history and texts. From a Buddhist perspective, according to Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, the laity and monastics of his following were advised to not partake in the slave trade:
These five trades, O monks, should not be taken up by a lay follower:
trading with weapons, trading in living beings, trading in meat,
trading in intoxicants, trading in poison.
In Pali language Buddhist texts, Amaya-dasa has been translated by Davids and Stede in 1925, as a "slave by birth", Kila-dasa translated as a "bought slave", and Amata-dasa as "one who sees Amata (Sanskrit: Amrita, nectar of immortality) or Nibbana". However, dasa in ancient texts can also mean "servant". Words related to dasa are found in early Buddhist texts, such as dāso na pabbājetabbo, which Davids and Stede translate as "the slave cannot become a Bhikkhu". This restriction on who could become a Buddhist monk is found in Vinaya Pitakam i.93, Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikāya, Tibetan Bhiksukarmavakya and Upasampadajnapti. Schopen states that this translation of dasa as slave is disputed by scholars.
The term dāsa and dāsyu in Vedic and other ancient Indian literature has been interpreted by as "servant" or "slave", but others have contested such meaning. The term dāsa
in the Rigveda, has been also been translated as an enemy, but overall
the identity of this term remains unclear and disputed among scholars.
Early Buddhist texts in Pali, according to R. S. Sharma, mention dāsa and kammakaras,
and they show that those who failed to pay their debts were enslaved,
and Buddhism did not allow debtors and slaves to join their monasteries.
The 3rd century BCE Edicts of Ashoka identify obligations to slaves (Greek: δούλοις) and hired workers (Greek: μισθωτοῖς), and later prohibited the trading of slaves within the Maurya Empire.
Guru Nanak, first Guru of Sikhs, preached against slavery. He not only advocated human equality, by rejecting class inequalities and caste hierarchy, but also practically promoted it through the institution of Pangat and Sangat. Baba Farid also protested against slavery.
Pain tolerance is the maximum level of pain that a person is able to tolerate. Pain tolerance is distinct from pain threshold (the point at which pain begins to be felt). The perception
of pain that goes in to pain tolerance has two major components. First
is the biological component—the headache or skin prickling that
activates pain receptors. Second is the brain's perception of pain—how
much focus is spent paying attention to or ignoring the pain. The brain's perception of pain is a response to signals from pain receptors that sensed the pain in the first place.
Factors
Sex
Clinical studies by the journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
found that "men had higher pain thresholds and tolerances and lower
pain ratings than women" when they are exposed to cold pressor pain. The study asked participants to submerge their hands in ice water (the cold pressor pain procedure) and told members of the experimental group (as opposed to the control group) that they would be compensated financially for keeping their hand submerged. Suggested explanations for this difference include, "men are more
motivated to tolerate and suppress expressions of pain because of the
masculine gender role, whereas the feminine gender role encourages pain
expression and produces lower motivation to tolerate pain among women."
Passive or active support
A similar study published in the same books focused on the effects of
having individuals perform the ice water procedure if they are
accompanied by another participant. Their results revealed,
"Participants in the active support and passive support conditions
reported less pain than participants in the alone and interaction
conditions, regardless of whether they were paired with a friend or
stranger. These data suggest that the presence of an individual who
provides passive or active support reduces experimental pain."
Age
Age and pain tolerance are relevant especially in the elderly because
if their pain is detected too late, they run the risk of greater injury
or delayed treatment of disease. However, current knowledge shows that
pain tolerance does not show substantial change with age. Only pain threshold shows an effect: it increases with age.
Ethnicity
Although it is inconclusive whether pain tolerance differs by
ethnicity, some studies have shown that non-Hispanic whites possess
higher heat and cold pain tolerance when compared to African Americans
and Hispanics.
Psychological factors
Patients with chronic mood disorders
show an increased sensitivity to pain. This is not surprising because
many of the brain pathways involved in depression are also involved in
pain. These disorders weaken the cognitive aspect of pain and thus lower
pain tolerance. These effects are worse in unipolar compared to bipolar disorders,
although both perceive pain significantly worse than people without a
mood disorder. The lowest pain tolerance was seen in participants that
were currently experiencing a major depressive episode. Lower pain tolerance associated with depressive symptoms can increase thoughts of suicide.
Hand dominancy, or handedness
One way to measure pain is to have participants place their hand in
ice cold water. Their pain tolerance can then be measured based on how
long they are able to keep their hand submerged before taking it out.
One study used this technique to compare pain tolerance in dominant and
non-dominant hands. One finding was that dominant hands showed a higher
pain tolerance than non-dominant hands. Right-handers could withstand
pain longer in their right hand than their left hand while the opposite
was true for left-handers.
Neonatal injury
Nociceptive
pathways are pathways in the brain that send and receive pain signals
and are responsible for how we perceive pain. They develop before a baby
is born and continue to develop during the critical period
of development. It was once thought that because infants' nociceptive
pathways in the brain were still developing, they could not feel pain.
However, infants can feel pain and infant surgeries providing
early pain experiences can alter the brain's tolerance for pain later so
by increasing number of A fibers and C fibers—two
types of pain receptors—located in the area where injury occurred and
by reducing pain tolerance in the areas where incision has occurred.
This reduction in pain tolerance is seen in male rats even when they are
adolescents. In those rats, the area of their brain where an incision
was made as an infant remains hypersensitive to pain thereafter. This
effect was not seen as prominently in female rats.
Association and disassociation
Association and disassociation are two cognitive strategies have been found to increase pain tolerance.
Bias in Pain Tolerance
Bias in pain tolerance is widespread in clinical practice and leads to underestimation and undertreatment of pain, especially in women and racial minorities. Oftentimes, these biases
are rooted in biological misconceptions, stereotypes, unconscious
beliefs, and errors in assessing pain. People tend to inaccurately
assess pain. One study using videos of people in pain as stimuli found
that observers disproportionately underestimated women of color's pain
compared to white women, white men, and men of color. In addition, studies have shown that in general, women experience
higher levels of post-operative pain, but receive less pain medication
compared to men. Furthermore, bias has been shown in medical students on pain tolerance
in a survey where many medical students were found to believe the false
statement: "black people's skin is thicker than white people's." These instances of bias in pain tolerance have broader implications in
healthcare including contributing to decreased trust in providers,
long-term undertreatment of pain, and worse health outcomes,
particularly for minorities groups.
Conditioning
It is widely believed that regular exposure to painful stimuli will
increase pain tolerance, increasing the ability of the individual to
handle pain by becoming more conditioned
to it. However, in some cases, there is evidence to support the theory
that greater exposure to pain will result in more painful future
exposures. Repeated exposure bombards pain synapses with repetitive
input, increasing their responsiveness to later stimuli, through a
process similar to learning. Therefore, although the individual may
learn cognitive methods of coping with pain, such methods may not be
sufficient to cope with the boosted response to future painful stimuli. A mouse model study on the role of protein kinase C gamma (PRKCG)
in pain sensitization found that mice lacking the protein also lacked
the neuropathic pain sensitization seen in normal animals.
Thus, trauma victims (or patients in pain) are given painkillers (such as morphine) as soon as possible to prevent pain sensitization.
Kalat suggests that morphine should be taken before surgery; "People who begin taking morphine before surgery need less of it afterward."
Although some Enlightenment
philosophers opposed slavery, it was Christian activists, attracted by
strong religious elements, who initiated and organized an abolitionist movement. Throughout Europe and the United States, Christians, usually from
"un-institutional" Christian faith movements, not directly connected
with traditional state churches, or "non-conformist" believers within established churches, were to be found at the forefront of the abolitionist movements.
Ancient times
In the milieu of the New Testament, both Roman administration and Judaic custom and law accepted various forms and degrees of slavery, and Paul, the author of several letters that became part of the New Testament, requests in his letter to Philemon the manumission of a slave named Onesimus, writing: "Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little
while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but
better than a slave, as a dear brother" (Philemon 1:15–16). In addition, the Book of Revelation
envisages the end of the slave trade (along with much of commerce),
suggesting that it involves the marketing of human souls and their
bodies as if they were cargo.Other views in Second-Temple Judaism also opposed slavery: according to Philo of Alexandria, the Essenes (a radical Jewish sect in Judaea who rejected much of the institutions of civilization) also rejected slavery, for violating the free equality of man.
In the fourth century, the bishop Gregory of Nyssa
articulated a fundamentally Christian conception of the world that
embedded a thorough rejection of the notion that one human could be
owned by another and a condemnation of the institution of slavery. The
historian Kyle Harper writes:
Humans were granted mastery over the animals by God. But
in practicing slavery, humans overstepped the boundaries of their
appointment. Gregory proceeded to attack slavery by questioning,
philosophically, the paradigmatic act of the slave system: the sale.
With penetrating insight, he asked how the human being, the rational
creation of God, could be given a "price." What, he asked, could have
the same market value as human nature? "How much does rationality cost?
How many obols for the image of God? How many staters did you get for
selling the God-formed man?" Here Gregory offers a logic that was
entirely novel in the ancient world but would reverberate in later
centuries with tremendous consequence.
Christian abolitionism in the United Kingdom
In particular, the effects of the Second Great Awakening
resulted in many evangelicals working to see the theoretical Christian
view, that all people are essentially equal, made more of a practical
reality. Freedom of expression within the Western world also helped in
enabling opportunity to express their position. Prominent among these abolitionists was ParliamentarianWilliam Wilberforce
in England, who wrote in his diary when he was 28 that, "God Almighty
has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade
and Reformation of Morals." With others he labored, despite determined opposition, to finally abolish the British slave trade. English preacher Charles Spurgeon
had some of his sermons burned in America due to his censure of
slavery, calling it "the foulest blot" and which "may have to be washed
out in blood". Methodist founder John Wesley denounced human bondage as "the sum of all villainies", and detailed its abuses. In Georgia, primitive Methodists united with brethren elsewhere in condemning slavery.
In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, with 9 of the 12 founder members being Quakers. During the same year, William Wilberforce
was persuaded to take up their cause; as an MP, Wilberforce was able to
introduce a bill to abolish the slave trade. Wilberforce first
attempted to abolish the trade in 1791, but could only muster half the
necessary votes; however, after transferring his support to the Whigs,
it became an election issue. Abolitionist pressure had changed popular
opinion, and in the 1806 election enough abolitionists entered
parliament for Wilberforce to be able to see the passing of the Slave Trade Act 1807. The Royal Navy subsequently declared that the slave trade was equal to piracy, the West Africa Squadron
choosing to seize ships involved in the transfer of slaves and liberate
the slaves on board, effectively crippling the transatlantic trade.
Through abolitionist efforts, popular opinion continued to mount against
slavery, and in 1833 slavery itself was outlawed throughout the British Empire – at that time containing roughly one-sixth of the world's population (rising to a quarter towards the end of the century).
Quaker abolitionists
Quakers in particular were early leaders in abolitionism. In 1688 Dutch Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, sent an antislavery petition to the Monthly Meeting of Quakers. By 1727 British Quakers had expressed their official disapproval of the slave trade. Three Quaker abolitionists, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony
Benezet, devoted their lives to the abolitionist effort from the 1730s
to the 1760s, with Lay founding the Negro School in 1770, which would
serve more than 250 pupils. In June 1783, a petition from the London Yearly Meeting and signed by
over 300 Quakers was presented to Parliament protesting the slave trade.
Christian abolitionism in the United States
In the United States, the abolition movement faced much opposition. Bertram Wyatt-Brown
notes that the appearance of the Christian abolitionist movement "with
its religious ideology alarmed newsmen, politicians, and ordinary
citizens. They angrily predicted the endangerment of secular democracy,
the mongrelization, as it was called, of white society, and the
destruction of the federal union. Speakers at huge rallies and editors
of conservative papers in the North denounced these newcomers to radical
reform as the same old “church-and-state” zealots, who tried to shut
down post offices, taverns, carriage companies, shops, and other public
places on Sundays. Mob violence sometimes ensued."
A postal campaign in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) – founded by African-American Presbyterian clergyman Theodore S. Wright
– sent bundles of tracts and newspapers (over 100,000) to prominent
clerical, legal, and political figures throughout the whole country, and
culminated in massive demonstrations throughout the North and South. In attempting to stop these mailings, New York Postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur
unsuccessfully requested the AA-SS to cease sending it to the South. He
therefore decided that he would “aid in preserving the public peace” by
refusing to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South
himself, with the new Postmaster GeneralAmos Kendall affirming, even though he admitted he had no legal authority to do so. This resulted in the AA-SS resorting to other and clandestine means of dissemination.
Many evangelical leaders in the United States such as PresbyterianCharles Finney and Theodore Weld, and women such as Harriet Beecher Stowe (daughter of abolitionist Lyman Beecher) and Sojourner Truth motivated hearers to support abolition.
Finney preached that slavery was a moral sin, and so supported its
elimination. "I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was
exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject. In my
prayers and preaching, I so often alluded to slavery, and denounced it. Repentance from slavery was required of souls, once enlightened of the
subject, while continued support of the system incurred "the greatest
guilt" upon them. Finney clearly stated, "If I do not baptize slavery by some soft and
Christian name, if I call it SIN, both consistency and conscience
conduct to the inevitable conclusion, that while the sin is persevered
in, its perpetrators cannot be fit subjects for Christian communion and
fellowship." Finney also conscientiously believed that "the time is not
far distant when the churches will be united in this expression of
abhorrence against this sin."
Despite such determined opposition, many Methodist, Baptist,
Adventist, and Presbyterian members freed their slaves and sponsored
black congregations, in which many black ministers encouraged slaves to
believe that freedom could be gained during their lifetime. After a
great revival occurred in 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, American Methodists made anti-slavery sentiments a condition of church membership. Abolitionist writings, such as "A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument" (1845) by George Bourne, and "God Against Slavery" (1857) by George B. Cheever, used the Bible, logic and reason extensively in contending against the
institution of slavery, and in particular the chattel form of it as seen
in the South. In Cheever's speech entitled, "The Fire and Hammer of
God’s Word Against the Sin of Slavery", his desire for eliminating the
crime of slaveholding is clear, as he goes so far as to address it to
the President.
Other Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening
initially opposed slavery in the South, but by the early decades of the
19th century, many Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had
come to an accommodation with it in order to evangelize the farmers and
workers. Disagreements between the newer way of thinking and the old
often created schisms within denominations at the time. Differences in
views toward slavery resulted in the Baptist and Methodist churches
dividing into regional associations by the beginning of the Civil War.
Catholic abolitionism
Roman Catholic statements against slavery also grew increasingly vocal during this era. In 1741, Pope Benedict XIV condemned slavery generally. In 1815, Pope Pius VII demanded the Congress of Vienna to suppress the slave trade. In the Bull of Canonization of Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pope Pius IX branded the "supreme villainy" (summum nefas) of the slave traders;
Roman Catholic efforts extended to the Americas. The Roman Catholic leader of the Irish in Ireland, Daniel O'Connell, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in America. With the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew,
he organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the
United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United
States for abolition.
Preceding such, and while not explicitly expressing an abolitionist point of view, the Portuguese DominicanGaspar da Cruz
in 1569 strongly criticized the Portuguese traffic in Chinese slaves,
explaining that any arguments by the slave traders that they "legally"
purchased already-enslaved children were bogus.
In 1917, the Roman Catholic Church's canon law was officially expanded to specify that "selling a human being into slavery or for any other evil purpose" is a crime
Christian views on slavery are varied regionally, historically
and spiritually. Slavery in various forms has been a part of the social
environment for much of Christianity's history, spanning well over
eighteen centuries. Saint Augustine described slavery as being against God's intention and resulting from sin. The earliest elaboration of abolition that survives from antiquity is
Gregory of Nyssa's sermon on owning slaves and pride (380 AD),
anticipating the moral groundwork of the abolitionist movement by nearly
1,500 years. In the eighteenth century the abolition movement took shape among Christians across the globe.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century debates concerning abolition, passages in the Bible were used by both pro-slavery advocates and abolitionists to support their respective views.
In modern times, various Christian organizations reject the permissibility of slavery.
The Bible uses the Hebrew term eved (עבד) and the Greek term doulos (δοῦλος) to refer to slaves. Eved has a much wider meaning than the English term slave, and in many circumstances it is more accurately translated into English as servant or hired worker. Doulos is more specific, but is also used in more general senses as well: of the Hebrew prophets (Revelation 10:7), of the attitude of Christian leaders toward those they lead (Matthew 20:27), of Christians towards God (1 Peter 2:16), and of Jesus himself (Philippians 2:7).
Old Testament
Historically, slavery was not just an Israelite phenomenon, as slavery was practiced in other ancient societies, such as Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and Rome. Slavery was an integral part of ancient commerce, taxation, and temple religion.
In the book of Genesis, Noah condemns Canaan (son of Ham) to perpetual servitude: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers" (Genesis 9:25). T. David Curp notes that this episode has been used to justify racialized slavery, since "Christians and even some Muslims eventually identified Ham's descendants as black Africans". This is widely regarded as a misinterpretation today. Anthony Pagden argued that "This reading of the Book of Genesis merged
easily into a medieval iconographic tradition in which devils were
always depicted as black. Later pseudo-scientific theories would be
built around African skull shapes, dental structure, and body postures,
in an attempt to find an unassailable argument - rooted in whatever the
most persuasive contemporary idiom happened to be: law, theology,
genealogy, or natural science - why one part of the human race should
live in perpetual indebtedness to another."
The Canaanites settled in Canaan, rather than Africa,
where Ham's other sons, Cush and Put, are considered to have most
likely settled by those who believe that they were real historical
figures. Noah's curse only applied to Canaan, and according to biblical
commentator, Gleason L. Archer, this curse was fulfilled when Joshua
conquered Canaan in 1400 BC. Although there is considerable doubt about the nature and extent of the
conquest described in the early chapters of the book of Joshua, the
post-Flood story did supply a rationale for the subjugation of the
Canaanites. It is possible that the naming of 'Canaan' in the post-Flood
story is itself a reflection of the situation of warfare between
peoples in the time when the written form of the story took shape. Due
to Canaanites being identified as Ethiopian, it was presumed that this
curse was towards all Africans.
Some forms of servitude, customary in ancient times, were condoned by the Torah. Hebrew legislation maintained kinship rights (Exodus 21:3, 9, Leviticus
25:41, 47–49, 54, providing for Hebrew indentured servants), marriage
rights (Exodus 21:4, 10–11, providing for a Hebrew daughter contracted
into a marriage), personal legal rights relating to physical protection
and protection from breach of conduct (Exodus 21:8, providing for a
Hebrew daughter contracted into a marriage, Exodus 21:20–21, 26–27,
providing for Hebrew or foreign servants of any kind, and Leviticus
25:39–41, providing for Hebrew indentured servants), freedom of
movement, and access to liberty.
Hebrews would be punished if they beat a slave causing death within a day or two, and would have to let a slave go free if they were to destroy a slave's eye or tooth, force a slave to work on the Sabbath, return an escaped slave of another people who had taken refuge among the Israelites, or to slander a slave. It was common for a person to voluntarily sell oneself into slavery for
a fixed period of time either to pay off debts or to get food and
shelter. It was seen as legitimate to enslave captives obtained through warfare, but not through kidnapping for the purpose of enslaving them. Children could also be sold into debt bondage, which was sometimes ordered by a court of law.
The Bible does set minimum rules for the conditions under which
slaves were to be kept. Slaves were to be treated as part of an extended
family; they were allowed to celebrate the Sukkot festival, and expected to honor Shabbat. Israelite slaves could not be compelled to work with rigor, and debtors who sold themselves as slaves to their creditors had to be treated the same as a hired servant. If a master harmed a slave in one of the ways covered by the lex talionis, the slave was to be compensated by manumission; if the slave died within 24 to 48 hours, it was to be avenged (whether this refers to the death penalty or not is uncertain).
Israelite slaves were automatically manumitted after six years of work, and/or at the next Jubilee
(occurring either every 49 or every 50 years, depending on
interpretation), although the latter would not apply if the slave was
owned by an Israelite and was not in debt bondage. Slaves released automatically in their 7th year of service. This
provision did not include females sold into concubinage by impoverished
parents; instead their rights over against another wife were protected. In other texts male and female slaves are both to be released after the sixth year of service. Liberated slaves were to be given livestock, grain, and wine as a parting gift. This 7th-year manumission could be voluntarily renounced. If a male
slave had been given another slave in marriage, and they had a family,
the wife and children remained the property of the master. However, if
the slave was happy with his master, and wished to stay with a wife that
his owner gave to him, he could renounce manumission, an act which
would be signified, as in other Ancient Near Eastern nations, by the slave gaining a ritual ear piercing. After such renunciation, the individual became his master's slave forever (and was therefore not released at the Jubilee). It is important to note that these are provisions for slavery/service
among Israelites. Non-Israelite slaves could be enslaved indefinitely
and were to be treated as inheritable property.
New Testament
Early Christians reputedly regarded slaves who converted to Christianity as spiritually free men, brothers in Christ, receiving the same portion of Christ's kingdom inheritance. These slaves were also told to obey their masters "with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ." (Ephesians 6:5 KJV)Paul the Apostle
applied the same guidelines to masters in Ephesians 6:9: "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." Nevertheless, verses like Ephesians 6:5 were still used by defenders of
slavery prior to the American Civil War. Slaves were encouraged by Paul
in the first Corinthian Epistle to seek or purchase their freedom
whenever possible (1 Corinthians 7:21).
Avery Robert Dulles
said that "Jesus, though he repeatedly denounced sin as a kind of moral
slavery, said not a word against slavery as a social institution", and
believes that the writers of the New Testament did not oppose slavery
either. In a paper published in Evangelical Quarterly,
Kevin Giles notes that, while he often encountered the claim, "not one
word of criticism did the Lord utter against slavery"; moreover a number
of his stories are set in a slave/master situation, and involve slaves
as key characters. Giles notes that these circumstances were used by
pro-slavery apologists in the 19th century to suggest that Jesus
approved of slavery.
It is clear from all the New Testament material that slavery was a
basic part of the social and economic environment. Many of the early
Christians were slaves. In several Pauline epistles, and the First Epistle of Peter, slaves are admonished to obey their masters. Masters were also told to serve their slaves in obedience to God by
"giving up threatening". The basic principle was "you have the same
Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality." The author of 1 Peter
was aware that there were masters that were gentle and masters that
were harsh; slaves in the latter situation were to make sure that their
behaviour was beyond reproach, and if punished for doing right, to
endure the suffering as Christ also endured it. The key theological text is Paul's declaration in Epistle to the Galatians (Galatians 3:28): "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus", suggesting that Christians take off these titles because they are now clothed in Christ.
Paul's Epistle to Philemon was an important text for both pro-slavery advocates and abolitionists. This short letter, reputedly written to be delivered by the hand of Onesimus,
a fugitive slave, whom Paul is sending back to his master Philemon.
Paul entreats Philemon to regard Onesimus as a beloved brother in
Christ. Cardinal Dulles points out that, "while discreetly suggesting that he
manumit Onesimus, [Paul] does not say that Philemon is morally obliged
to free Onesimus and any other slaves he may have had." He does, however, encourage Philemon to welcome Onesimus "not as a slave, but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother".
The instructions to slaves in the Epistle to Titus,
as is the case in Ephesians, appear among a list of instructions for
people in a range of life situations. The usefulness to the 19th century
pro-slavery apologists of the epistle's contents is obvious: "Tell
slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in
every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show
complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an
ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior."
Paul advises that "each man must remain in that condition in
which he was called." For slaves, however, he specifically adds this:
"Were you called while a slave? Do not be concerned about it. But if you
are able to gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity." And
then follows a wider principle: "For whoever was called in the Lord as a
slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free
when called is a slave of Christ."
The First Epistle to Timothy—in some translations—reveals a disdain for the slave trade, proclaiming it to be contrary to sound doctrine. The author explains to Timothy that those who live a life based on love do not have to fear the law of God; that (NIV
version) "the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless
and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and
profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers,
fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever
else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the gospel
concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me."
Slavery was the bedrock of the Roman and world economy. Some estimate
that the slave population in the 1st century constituted approximately
one third of the total population. An estimated one million slaves were owned by the richest five per cent
of Roman citizens. Most slaves were employed in domestic service in
households and likely had an easier life than slaves working the land,
or in mines or on ships. Slavery could be very cruel in the Roman Empire, and revolts severely
punished, and professional slave-catchers were hired to hunt down
runaways, with advertisements containing precise descriptions of
fugitives being publicly posted and offering rewards.
The Book of Acts refers to a synagogue of Libertines (Λιβερτίνων), in Jerusalem. As a Latin term this would refer to freedmen, and it is therefore occasionally suggested that the Jews captured by Pompey, in 63 BC, gathered into a distinct group after their individual manumissions. However, the Book of Acts was written in Greek,
and the name appears in a list of five synagogues, the other four being
named after cities or countries; for these reasons, its now more often
suggested that this biblical reference is a typographical error for Libystines (Λιβυστίνων), in reference to Libya (in other words, referring to Libyans).
Christianity's view
Early Christian thought exhibited some signs of kindness towards slaves. Christianity recognised marriage of sorts among slaves, and freeing slaves could be an act of charity.
The earliest elaboration of abolition that survives from
antiquity is Gregory of Nyssa's sermon on owning slaves and pride (380
AD), anticipating the moral groundwork of the abolitionist movement by
nearly 1,500 years.
Though the Jewish Pentateuch gave protection to fugitive slaves, the Roman church often condemned slaves who fled from their masters, and refused them communion.
Since the Middle Ages, the Christian understanding of slavery has
seen significant internal conflict and endured dramatic change. One
notable example where church mission activities in the Caribbean were
directly supported by the proceeds of slave ownership was under the
terms of a charitable bequest in 1710 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The Codrington Plantations in Barbados were granted to the Society to fund the establishment of Codrington College.
In the first decade of ownership, several hundred slaves at the
plantation estates were branded on their chests, using the traditional
red hot iron, with the word Society, to signify their ownership
by the Christian organisation. Slave ownership at the Codrington
Plantations only finally came to an end in 1833, when slavery was abolished in Barbados.
The Church of England has since apologised for the "sinfulness of our
predecessors" with the history of these plantation estates highlighted
as example of the church's inconsistent approach to slavery.
Patristic era
In 340 the Synod of Gangra (in present-day Turkey) condemned certain Manicheans for a list of twenty practices including forbidding marriage, not eating meat, urging that slaves should liberate themselves, abandoning their families, asceticism and reviling married priests. The later Council of Chalcedon declared that the canons of the Synod of Gangra were ecumenical (in other words, they were viewed as conclusively representative of the wider church).
Saint Augustine described slavery as being against God's intention and resulting from sin.
Theodore of Mopsuestia In Commentary on Philemon 2.264.10–14,
he comments that some Christian ecclesiastics of his day 'would write
with great authority that a slave who joined us in the faith and
hastened to the true religion of his own free will should be freed from
slavery. For there are many such people today, who want to be seen to be
wary of imposing onerous commands on others.
John Chrysostom
described slavery as 'the fruit of covetousness, of degradation, of
savagery ... the fruit of sin, [and] of [human] rebellion against ...
our true Father' in his Homilies on Ephesians. Moreover, quoting partly from Paul the
Apostle, Chrysostom opposed unfair and unjust forms of slavery by giving
these instructions to those who owned slaves: " 'And ye masters', he
continues, 'do the same things unto them'. The same things. What are
these? 'With good-will do service' ... and 'with fear and trembling' ...
toward God, fearing lest He one day accuse you for your negligence
toward your slaves ... 'And forbear threatening;' be not irritating, he
means, nor oppressive ... [and masters are to obey] the law of the
common Lord and Master of all ... doing good to all alike ... dispensing
the same rights to all". In his Homilies on Philemon, Chrysostom opposes unfair and unjust forms
of slavery by stating that those who own slaves are to love their
slaves with the Love of Christ:
"this ... is the glory of a Master, to have grateful slaves. And this
is the glory of a Master, that He should thus love His slaves ... Let us
therefore be stricken with awe at this so great love of Christ. Let us
be inflamed with this love-potion. Though a man be low and mean, yet if
we hear that he loves us, we are above all things warmed with love
towards him, and honor him exceedingly. And do we then love? And when
our Master loves us so much, we are not excited?"
By the early 4th century, the manumission in the church, a form
of emancipation, was added in the Roman law. Slaves could be freed by a
ritual in a church, performed by a Christian bishop or priest. It is not
known if baptism was required before this ritual. Subsequent laws, as
the Novella 142 of Justinian, gave to the bishops the power to free slaves.
The Zoninus collar, a late Roman slave collar (4th–5th century CE) with an inscription identifying the wearer as a runaway slave and offering a reward for his return (Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano)
Several early figures, while not openly advocating abolition, did
make sacrifices to emancipate or free slaves seeing liberation of slaves
as a worthy goal. These include Saint Patrick (415–493), Acacius of Amida (400–425), and Ambrose (337–397 AD).
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394) went even further and stated opposition to all slavery as a practice. Gregory of Nyssa's sermon on owning slaves and pride (380 AD),
anticipated the moral groundwork of the abolitionist movement by nearly
1,500 years and is the earliest elaboration of abolition that surivies
from antiquity. He would tell masters that they and their slaves shared the same
origin, the same life, the same sufferings, breathed the same air, saw
the same sun, ate the same food, and their two bodies became one dust
after death.
Later Saint Eligius (588–650) used his vast wealth to purchase British and Saxon slaves in groups of 50 and 100 in order to set them free.
Saint Pelagia is depicted by James the Deacon as having freed her slaves, male and female, "taking their golden torcs off with her own hands". This is described as a highly virtuous and praiseworthy act, an
important part of Pelagia's ending her sinful life as a courtesan and
embarking on a virtuous Christian life, eventually achieving sainthood.
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine law "Ecloga" (Εκλογή) of 726 for the first time introduced the method of emancipation by baptism,
whereby a master or a member of his family "received the slave after
baptism by immersion". This measure opened the way to war-captives to be
incorporated in the Byzantine society, in both the public and private
sector.
A shift in the view of slavery in the Byzantine Empire
is noticed, which by the 10th century transformed gradually a
slave-object into a slave-subject. The Christian captive or slave is
perceived not as a private property but "as an individual endowed with
his own thoughts and words". Thus, the Christian perception of slavery
weakened the submission of slave to his earthly master by strengthening
the ties of man to his God.
In the 6th century, the Vatican promulgated the very first law
against slavery, forbidding Jews from owning Christian slaves. Between
the 7th and the 8th century France, the Vatican and the Carolingian
Empire promulgated laws outlawing the enslavement of Christians and
freeing Christian slaves across their territories. This process culminated in 873 AD with Pope John VIII declaring the enslavement of Christians a sin and commanding their release to every Christian country.
In the 10th century Venice, a Christian nation, forbade slave
trade in its entirety; a century later the Christian England followed by
abolishing not only the slave trade but also serfdom. In the early 13th
century, the Sachsenspiegel code of the Holy Roman Empire
harshly condemns slavery as "a violation of man's likeness to God",
giving legal form to the Christian vision of human rights that was
already part of the German culture.
During the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas
taught that, although the subjection of one person to another
(servitus) was not part of the primary intention of the natural law, it
was appropriate and socially useful in a world impaired by original sin. According to John Francis Maxwell:
Aquinas
... accepted the new Aristotelian view of slavery as well as the titles
of slave ownership derived from Roman civil law, and attempted -
without complete success - to reconcile them with Christian patristic
tradition. He takes the patristic theme ... that slavery exists as a
consequence of original sin and says that it exists according to the
"second intention" of nature; it would not have existed in the state of
original innocence according to the "first intention" of nature; in this
way he can explain the Aristotelian teaching that some people are
slaves "by nature" like inanimate instruments, because of their personal
sins; for since the slave cannot work for his own benefit[,] slavery is
necessarily a punishment. [Aquinas] accepts the symbiotic master-slave
relationship as being mutually beneficial. There should be no punishment
without some crime, so slavery as a penalty is a matter of positive
law. St Thomas' explanation continued to be expounded at least until the end of the 18th century.
Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P. asserts that Aquinas considered slavery to be a result of sin and was justifiable for that reason. Conversely, Rodney Stark,
a sociologist of religion, states that "Saint Thomas Aquinas deduced
that slavery was a sin, and a series of popes upheld his position,
beginning in 1435..."
Nevertheless, for several decades spanning the late 15th and
early 16th centuries, several popes explicitly endorsed the slavery of
non-Christians. In 1452, as the Ottoman Empire was besieging Constantinople, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI asked for help from Pope Nicholas V. In response, the pope authorized King Afonso V of Portugal to "attack, conquer, and subjugate Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ wherever they may be found...", in the bull Dum Diversas (18 June 1452). Rather than putting pressure on the Ottomans, however, the bull approved increased competition in West Africa, by Portuguese traders with Muslim-operated trans-Saharan trading caravans, including the highly profitable so-called Trans Saharan slave trade that had taken place for several centuries. In 1454, Castilians also became involved in trading in various goods in West Africa, and were attacked by Portuguese warships. Enrique IV of Castile
threatened war and Afonso V appealed to the Pope to support monopolies
on the part of any particular Christian state able to open trade with a
particular, non-Christian region or countries. A papal bull, Romanus Pontifex, issued on January 8, 1455, conferred upon Portugal exclusive trading rights to areas between Morocco and the East Indies, with the rights to conquer and convert the inhabitants. A significant concession given by Nicholas in a brief issued to Alfonso
V in 1454 extended the rights granted to existing territories to all
those that might be taken in the future. and sanctioned the purchase of slaves from "the infidel" (i.e. non-Christian): "many Guineamen
and other negroes, taken by force, and some by barter of unprohibited
articles, or by other lawful contract of purchase, have been ...
converted to the Catholic faith, and it is hoped ... that ... such
progress be continued ... [and] either those peoples will be converted
to the faith or at least the souls of many of them will be gained for
Christ." By dealing directly with local leaders and traders, the Portuguese
government sought to control trade with West Africa. In effect, the two
bulls issued by Nicholas V conceded to subjects of Christian countries
the religious authority to acquire as many slaves from non-Christians as
they wished, by force or trade. These concessions were confirmed by
bulls issued by Pope Callixtus III (Inter Caetera quae in 1456), Sixtus IV (Aeterni regis in 1481), and Leo X (1514). During the Reconquista of the late 15th century, many Muslims and Jews were enslaved in Iberia (especially after the Castilian-Aragonese victory in the Granada War of 1482–1492).
In 1537 - after denunciations of slavery by Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former colonist in the West Indies turned Dominican - Pope Paul III revoked the previous authority to enslave indigenous people of the Americas with the bulls Sublimus Dei (also known as Unigenitus and Veritas ipsa) and Altituda divini consolii, as well as a brief for the execution of Sublimus Dei - a document known as Pastorale officium. Sublimus Dei,
in particular, was described by Hans-Jürgen Prien as the "Magna Carta"
for the human rights of indigenous people in its declaration that "the
Indians were human beings and they were not to be robbed of their
freedom or possessions". In addition, Pastorale officium decreed a penalty of excommunication for anyone failing to abide by the bulls. Following a dispute between the papacy and the government of Spain, Pastorale officium was annulled the following year, in Non Indecens Videtur. However, the documents issued by Paul III continued to circulate and to be quoted by those opposed to slavery. According to James E. Falkowski, Sublimus Dei "had the effect of revoking" Inter Caetera, but left intact the "duty" of colonists, i.e. "converting the native people".
A series of bulls and encyclicals in 1435, 1537 and 1839 from several popes condemned both slavery and the slave trade.
The Quakers
were the first churchmen to openly oppose the English slave trade. They
were followed in 1766 by a senior Church of England figure, William Warburton, the Bishop of Gloucester and close friend of anti-slavery champion Lord Mansfield, who, in a "courageous" stand, publicly condemned the practices of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
whose possessions included 2 slave plantations in Barbados that they
had been bequeathed in 1710. Warburton argued that slavery was a
"violation of all things civil and sacred" because humankind was created
"free".
In his 1774 work Thoughts on Slavery, John Wesley, Church of England priest and pioneer of Methodism, wrote of the plight of slaves in the West Indies,
utterly condemning the slave trade saying it was not only contrary to
the Bible, but unreconcilable even with secular notions of justice or
mercy.
The grand plea is, "[Slavery is]
authorized by law." But can law, human law, change the nature of things?
Can it turn darkness into light, or evil into good? By no means...
right is right and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an
essential difference between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.
So that I still ask, who can reconcile this treatment of the negroes,
first and last, with either justice or mercy?
Although some abolitionists opposed slavery for purely philosophical
reasons, anti-slavery movements attracted strong religious elements.
Throughout Europe and the United States, Christians, usually from
'un-institutional' Christian faith movements, not directly connected
with traditional state churches, or "non-conformist" believers within established churches, were to be found at the forefront of the abolitionist movements. Among the earliest Christian abolitionist groups that predated the
Quakers and both British and American efforts to abolish slavery, the
Covenanters took a hard stand against slavery as an institution and
pushed for abolition because secular government protected slavery.
In particular, the effects of the Second Great Awakening
resulted in many evangelicals working to see the theoretical Christian
view, that all people are essentially equal, made more of a practical
reality. Freedom of expression within the Western world also helped in
enabling opportunity to express their position. Prominent among these abolitionists was ParliamentarianWilliam Wilberforce
in England, who wrote in his diary when he was 28 that, "God Almighty
has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade
and Reformation of Morals." With others he labored, despite determined opposition, to finally abolish the slave trade. Some sermons of the famous English preacher Charles Spurgeon
were burned in America due to his censure of slavery, calling it "the
foulest blot" and which "may have to be washed out in blood." Methodist founder John Wesley denounced human bondage as "the sum of all villainies", and detailed its abuses. In Georgia, primitive Methodists united with brethren elsewhere in
condemning slavery. Many evangelical leaders in the United States such
as PresbyterianCharles Finney and Theodore Weld, and women such as Harriet Beecher Stowe (daughter of abolitionist Lyman Beecher) and Sojourner Truth motivated hearers to support abolition.
Finney preached that slavery was a moral sin, and so supported its
elimination. "I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was
exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject. In my
prayers and preaching, I so often alluded to slavery, and denounced it. Repentance from slavery was required of souls, once enlightened of the
subject, while continued support of the system incurred "the greatest
guilt" upon them.
Quakers in particular were early leaders in abolitionism. In 1688 Dutch Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, sent an antislavery petition to the Monthly Meeting of Quakers. By 1727 British Quakers had expressed their official disapproval of the slave trade. Three Quaker abolitionists, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet,
devoted their lives to the abolitionist effort from the 1730s to the
1760s, with Lay founding the Negro School in 1770, which would serve
more than 250 pupils. In June 1783 a petition from the London Yearly Meeting and signed by
over 300 Quakers was presented to Parliament protesting the slave trade.
In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade
was formed, with 9 of the 12 founder members being Quakers. During the
same year, William Wilberforce was persuaded to take up their cause; as
an MP, Wilberforce was able to introduce a bill to abolish the slave
trade. Wilberforce first attempted to abolish the trade in 1791, but
could only muster half the necessary votes; however, after transferring
his support to the Whigs,
it became an election issue. Abolitionist pressure had changed popular
opinion, and in the 1806 election enough abolitionists entered
parliament for Wilberforce to be able to see the passing of the Slave Trade Act 1807. The Royal Navy subsequently declared that the slave trade was equal to piracy, the West Africa Squadron
choosing to seize ships involved in the transfer of slaves and liberate
the slaves on board, effectively crippling the transatlantic trade.
Through abolitionist efforts, popular opinion continued to mount against
slavery, and in 1833 slavery itself was outlawed throughout the British Empire
(with exceptions) - at that time containing roughly 1/6 of the world's
population (rising to 1/4 towards the end of the century).
In the United States, the abolition movement faced much opposition. Bertram Wyatt-Brown
notes that the appearance of the Christian abolitionist movement "with
its religious ideology alarmed newsmen, politicians, and ordinary
citizens. They angrily predicted the endangerment of secular democracy,
the mongrelization, as it was called, of white society, and the
destruction of the federal union. Speakers at huge rallies and editors
of conservative papers in the North denounced these newcomers to radical
reform as the same old 'church-and-state' zealots, who tried to shut
down post offices, taverns, carriage companies, shops, and other public
places on Sundays. Mob violence sometimes ensued."
A postal campaign in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) - founded by African-American Presbyterian clergyman Theodore S. Wright
- sent bundles of tracts and newspapers (over 100,000) to prominent
clerical, legal, and political figures throughout the whole country, and
culminated in massive demonstrations throughout the North and South. In attempting to stop these mailings, New York Postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur
unsuccessfully requested the AA-SS to cease sending it to the South. He
therefore decided that he would "aid in preserving the public peace" by
refusing to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South
himself, with the new Postmaster GeneralAmos Kendall affirming, even though he admitted he had no legal authority to do so. This resulted in the AA-SS resorting to other and clandestine means of dissemination.
Despite such determined opposition, many Methodist, Baptist, and
Presbyterian members freed their slaves and sponsored Black
congregations, in which many Black ministers encouraged slaves to
believe that freedom could be gained during their lifetime. After a
great revivaloccurred in 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, American Methodists made anti-slavery sentiments a condition of church membership. Abolitionist writings, such as "A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument" (1845) by George Bourne, and "God Against Slavery" (1857) by George B. Cheever, used the Bible, logic and reason extensively in contending against the
institution of slavery, and in particular the chattel form of it as seen
in the South.
Other Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening initially
opposed slavery in the South, but by the early decades of the 19th
century, many Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had come to
an accommodation with it in order to evangelize the farmers and workers.
Disagreements between the newer way of thinking and the old often
created schisms within denominations at the time. Differences in views
toward slavery resulted in the Baptist and Methodist churches dividing
into regional associations by the beginning of the Civil War.
Roman Catholic statements also became increasingly vehement against slavery during this era. In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV
condemned the enslavement of indigenous people, unsuccessfully
attempting to excommunicate Catholics who enslaved native Brazilians.
However, he did not address the enslavement of Black Africans. In 1815 Pope Pius VII demanded of the Congress of Vienna the suppression of the slave trade. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade in In supremo apostolatus. In the 1850 Bull of Canonization of Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pope Pius IX branded the "supreme villainy" (summum nefas) of the slave traders. And in 1888 Pope Leo XIII condemned slavery in In plurimis.
Roman Catholic efforts extended to the Americas. The Roman Catholic leader of the Irish in Ireland, Daniel O'Connell, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in America. With the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew,
he organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the
United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United
States for abolition.
Preceding such, and while not explicitly expressing an abolitionist point of view, the Portuguese DominicanGaspar da Cruz
in 1569 strongly criticized the Portuguese traffic in Chinese slaves,
explaining that any arguments by the slave traders that they "legally"
purchased already-enslaved children were bogus.
In 1917, the Roman Catholic Church's Canon Law was officially
expanded to specify that "selling a human being into slavery or for any
other evil purpose" is a crime.
Pope Francis
was one of the prominent religious leaders who came together in the
Vatican, 2 December 2014, with the aim of eliminating modern slavery and
human trafficking. During a ceremony held in the seat of the Pontifical
Academy for Sciences in the Vatican they signed a Declaration of
Religious Leaders against Slavery. Joining Pope Francis were eminent
Orthodox, Anglican, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu representatives.
In his address Pope Francis said:
...Inspired by our confessions of
faith, we are gathered here today for an historical initiative and to
take concrete action: to declare that we will work together to eradicate
the terrible scourge of modern slavery in all its forms. The physical,
economic, sexual and psychological exploitation of men, women and
children that is currently inflicted on tens of millions of people
constitutes a form of dehumanization and humiliation. Every human being,
man women, boy and girl, is made in God's image. God is the love and
freedom that is given in interpersonal relationships, and every human
being is a free person destined to live for the good of others in
equality and fraternity. Every person, and all people, are equal and
must be accorded the same freedom and the same dignity. Any
discriminatory relationship that does not respect the fundamental
conviction that others are equal is a crime, and frequently an aberrant
crime. Therefore, we declare on each and every one of our creeds that
modern slavery, in terms of human trafficking, forced labor and
prostitution, and organ trafficking, is a crime against humanity...
Opposition to abolitionism
Passages in the Bible on the use and regulation of slavery have been
used throughout history as justification for the keeping of slaves, and
for guidance in how it should be done. Therefore, when abolition was
proposed, some Christians spoke vociferously against it, citing the
Bible's acceptance of slavery as 'proof' that it was part of the normal
condition. George Whitefield, famed for his sparking of the Great Awakening of American evangelicalism, campaigned, in the Province of Georgia, for the legalisation of slavery, joining the ranks of the slave owners that he had denounced in his
earlier years, while contending they had souls and opposing mistreatment
and owners who resisted his evangelism of slaves. Slavery had been outlawed in Georgia, but it was legalised in 1751 due
in large part to Whitefield's efforts. He bought enslaved Africans to
work on his plantation and the orphanage he established in Georgia. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon inherited these slaves and kept them in bondage.
In both Europe and the United States some Christians went
further, arguing that slavery was actually justified by the words and
doctrines of the Bible.
[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.
Historian Claude Clegg writes that at the time of the Second Great Awakening,
there was a movement to create a narrative of a mutually beneficial
relationship between slaves and masters. This was increasingly tied to
the doctrine of the Church as a means of justifying the system of
slavery.
In 1837, southerners in the Presbyterian denomination joined forces with conservative northerners to drive the antislavery New School Presbyterians out of the denomination. In 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church split into northern and southern wings over the issue of slavery. In 1845, the Baptists in the South formed the Southern Baptist Convention due to disputes with Northern Baptists over slavery and missions.
Some members of fringe Christian groups like the Christian Identity movement, the Ku Klux Klan (an organization which is dedicated to the "empowerment of the white race"), and Aryan Nations still argue that slavery is justified by Christian doctrine.
Slavery in the Americas
In the Americas the justification switched from religion (the slaves are heathens) to race (Africans are the descendants of Ham); indeed, in 1667, the Virginian assembly enacted a bill declaring that baptism did not grant freedom to slaves. In 1680, the Spanish colonial government in Florida offered freedom to escaped slaves who made it into the colony and converted to Catholicism. This offer was repeated multiple times. The opposition to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century
was founded in part on the same religious ideas that had been used to
justify slavery in the 19th century.
Slavery was by no means relegated to the continental United
States, as in addition to vast numbers of Native Americans slaves, it is
estimated that for every slave who went to North America, South America
imported nearly twelve slaves, with the West Indies importing over ten. By 1570, 56,000 inhabitants were of African origin in the Caribbean.
The introduction of Catholic Spanish colonies to the Americas
resulted in, indentured servitude and even slavery to the indigenous
peoples. Some Portuguese and Spanish explorers were quick to enslave the
indigenous peoples encountered in the New World. The Papacy was firmly
against this practice. In 1435 Pope Eugene IV issued an attack against
slavery in the papal bull Sicut Dudum that included the excommunication
of all those who engage in the slave trade. Later In the bull Sublimus Dei (1537), Pope Paul III
forbade the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas
(called Indians of the West and the South) and all other people. Paul
characterized enslavers as allies of the devil and declared attempts to
justify such slavery "null and void".
...The exalted God loved the human race so much that He created man
in such a condition that he was not only a sharer in good as are other
creatures, but also that he would be able to reach and see face to face
the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good ... Seeing this and envying
it, the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that
the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by
which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the
nations. He (Satan) has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to
satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the
Indians ... be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the
pretext that they are lacking the Catholic faith. And they reduce them
to slavery, treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with
brute animals ... by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these
present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though
they are outside the faith—... should not be deprived of their liberty
... Rather they are to be able to use and enjoy this liberty and this
ownership of property freely and licitly, and are not to be reduced to
slavery ...
In 1810, Mexican Catholic Priest Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,
who is also the Father of the Mexican nation, declared slavery
abolished, but it was not official until the War of Independence
finished.
In 1888 Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish
slavery completely, although in 1871 it had ensured that eventual
result with the gradualist method of freeing in the womb. See Abolition of slavery timeline for other dates.
Indigenous African religions in the United States
In the 18th century, slaves came from various African societies,
cultures, and nations which existed on the West African coast, such as
the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba.
Slaves who were members of different ethnic groups displayed few
religious commonalities, despite the fact that they came from the same
continent; those Africans who were sold to American slavers shared
little of their traditional cultures and religions.
Igbo, Yoruba, and Ashanti religious practices did not survive in
slave communities in the United States. The institution of slavery, with
its high conversion rate, ultimately eliminated traditional African
religions in the country.
Christianity has existed in Africa for a very long time (most notably in Ethiopia) that some scholars consider it an "indigenous, traditional and African religion", nonetheless, it was a minority faith on the continent as a whole. Most
of the slaves who lived in the United States came from the West-African
coast, which was far less Christian. As a result, converting slaves to
Christianity was common but it remained controversial, with some slave
owners resisting conversion because they feared that "slaves seeing
themselves as spiritually equal" would spur an abolitionist movement. On
the other hand, other slave owners promoted conversion because they
thought that Christian slaves would make better workers. While many
Americans argued otherwise, an increasing number of citizens and slaves
argued that Christian religious principles directly conflicted with the
institution of slavery.
Even though these changes occurred in mainstream Christian
thinking, many argue that this fact does not imply innocence on the part
of Christian religious institutions: Harvard Divinity School'sJacob K. Olupona states that Christianity was "deeply culpable in the African slave trade, inasmuch as it consistently provided a moral cloak for the buying and selling of human beings".
In addition, some missionaries and clergymen wrote about the indifference of masters to their religious welfare. Even for Christian slaves, the actual ability to practice their
religion was often impeded: while some slave owners openly encouraged
their slaves to hold religious meetings, this was not a universal
position across the country. One former slave recalled, "When de niggers
go round singin' 'Steal Away to Jesus,' dat mean dere gwine be a
'ligious meetin' dat night. De masters ... didn't like dem 'ligious
meetin's so us natcherly slips off at night".
The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, when a Dutch slave trader bartered them for food. These Africans became indentured servants, possessing a legal position similar to many poor Englishmen. It was not until around the 1680s that the popular idea of a racial-based slave system became reality.
Additionally, "New World slavery was a unique conjunction of
features. Its use of slaves was strikingly specialized as unfree
labor-producing commodities, such as cotton and sugar, for a world
market." "By 1850 nearly two-thirds of the plantation slaves were engaged in the
production of cotton.... The South was totally transformed by the
presences of slavery.
For the most part, the Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts,
in 1620 had servants and not slaves, meaning that after turning 25 most
black servants were given their freedom, which was a contractual
arrangement similar to that of English apprenticeships.
The rise of abolitionism in 19th-century politics was mirrored in
religious debate; slavery among Christians was generally dependent on
the attitudes of the community they lived in. This was true in both
Protestant and Catholic churches. Religious integrity affected the white slave-holding Christian
population. Slaveholders, priests, and those tied to the Church
undermined the beliefs of the millions of African-American converts.
As abolitionism gained popularity in the Northern states, it
strained relations between Northern and Southern churches. Northern
clergy increasingly preached against slavery in the 1830s. In the 1840s,
slavery began to divide denominations. This, in turn, weakened social ties between the North and South,
allowing the nation to become even more polarized in the 1850s.
The issue of slavery in the United States came to an end with the American Civil War.
Although the war began as a political struggle over the preservation of
the nation, it took on religious overtones as southern preachers called
for a defense of their homeland and northern abolitionists preached the
good news of liberation for slaves. Gerrit Smith and William Lloyd
Garrison abandoned pacifism, and Garrison changed the motto of The Liberator to Leviticus 25:10, "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof." The YMCA joined with other societies to found the United States Christian Commission, with the goal of supporting Union soldiers, and churches collected $6 million for their cause.
Harriet Tubman, who was a liberator with the Underground Railroad, warned "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing" - i.e., emancipating the slaves. Popular songs such as John Brown's Body (later The Battle Hymn of the Republic) contained verses which painted the Northern war effort as a religious campaign to end slavery. US President Abraham Lincoln,
too, appealed to religious sentiments, suggesting in various speeches
that God had brought on the war as punishment for slavery, while acknowledging in his second Inaugural Address that both sides "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."
With the Union victory in the war and a slavery banned by constitutional amendment,
abolitionist Christians also declared a religious victory over their
slave-holding brethren in the South. Southern religious leaders who had
preached a message of divine protection were now left to reconsider
their theology.
Baptists
By the 1830s, tensions had begun to mount between northern and
southern Baptist churches. The support of Baptists in the South for
slavery can be ascribed to economic and social reasons, although this was never admitted. Instead, it was claimed that slavery
was beneficent, and endorsed in the Bible by God. However, Baptists in
the North disagreed strongly, claiming that God would not "condone treating one race as superior to another". Southerners, on the other hand, held that God intended the races to be
separate. Finally, around 1835, Southern states began complaining that
they were being slighted in the allocation of funds for missionary work.
The break occurred in 1844, when the Home Mission Society announced that a person could not be simultaneously both a missionary and a slaveowner. Faced with this challenge, the Baptists in the South assembled in May 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, and organized the Southern Baptist Convention, which was pro-slavery.
Throughout the remainder of the 19th century and throughout most of the
20th the Southern Baptist Convention continued to protect systemic
racism and opposed civil rights for African-Americans, only officially
and definitively renouncing slavery and "racial" discrimination with a
resolution in 1995.
William Knibb was an active campaigner against slavery in Jamaica, who suffered persecution, including the burning of his chapel at Falmouth, at the hands of agents of the colonial powers.
A healthy Church kills error, and
tears evil in pieces! Not so very long ago our nation tolerated slavery
in our colonies. Philanthropists endeavored to destroy slavery, but when
was it utterly abolished? It was when Wilberforce roused the Church of God, and when the Church of God addressed herself to the conflict—then she tore the evil thing to pieces!
— C. H. Spurgeon, a prominent Baptist opponent of slavery, 'The Best Warcry'
Soldiers from the Irish Brigade attending a Catholic Union army chaplain at a Mass during the American Civil War
Catholic bishops in America were always ambivalent about slavery. Two slaveholding states, Maryland and Louisiana,
had large contingents of Catholic residents; however both states had
also the largest numbers of former slaves who were freed. Archbishop of
Baltimore, Maryland, John Carroll had two black servants - one free and the other a slave. The Society of Jesus
in Maryland owned slaves, who worked on their farms. The Jesuits began
selling off their slaves in 1837, and without these funds Georgetown University would not exist today; it "owes its existence" to this transaction. As Catholics only started to become a significant part of the US
population in the 1840s with the arrival of poor Irish and southern
Italian immigrants, who congregated in urban (non-farming) environments,
the overwhelming majority of slaveowners in the US were white
Protestants, the elite.
We prohibit and strictly forbid any
Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this
trade in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from
publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately,
opinions contrary to what We have set forth in these Apostolic
Letters....
[We]... admonish and adjure in the Lord all believers in Christ, of
whatsoever condition, that no one hereafter may dare unjustly to molest
Indians, Negroes, or other men of this sort; or to spoil them of their
goods; or to reduce them to slavery; or to extend help or favour to
others who perpetuate such things against them; or to excuse that
inhuman trade by which Negroes, as if they were not men, but mere
animals, howsoever reduced to slavery, are, without any distinction,
contrary to the laws of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and doomed
sometimes to the most severe and exhausting labours.
Bishop John England of Charleston wrote several letters to President Martin Van Buren's Secretary of State explaining that the Pope, in In supremo,
did not condemn slavery but only the slave trade, the buying and
selling of slaves, not the owning of them; no Pope had ever condemned
"domestic slavery" as it had existed in the United States. As a result
of this interpretation, no American bishop spoke out in favor of
abolition.
Daniel O'Connell, the lawyer fighting for Catholic Emancipation
in Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire
and in America. Garrison recruited him to the cause of American
abolitionism. O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew
organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the
United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United
States for abolition. The Bishop of New York denounced O'Connell's petition as a forgery, and if genuine, an unwarranted foreign interference. The Bishop of Charleston declared that, while Catholic tradition opposed slave trading, it had nothing against slavery.
One outspoken critic of slavery, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote:
When the slave power predominates,
religion is nominal. There is no life in it. It is the hard-working
laboring man who builds the church, the school house, the orphan asylum,
not the slaveholder, as a general rule. Religion flourishes in a slave
state only in proportion to its intimacy with a free state, or as it is
adjacent to it.
Between 1821 and 1836 when Mexico opened up its territory of Texas to
American settlers, many of the settlers had problems bringing slaves
into Catholic Mexico (which did not allow slavery).
During the Civil War, Bishop Patrick Neeson Lynch was named by Confederate President Jefferson Davis to be its delegate to the Holy See, which maintained diplomatic relations in the name of the Papal States. Pope Pius IX, as had his predecessors, condemned chattel slavery. Despite Bishop Lynch's mission, and an earlier mission by A. Dudley Mann, the Vatican never recognized the Confederacy, and the Pope received Bishop Lynch only in his ecclesiastical capacity.
Methodists believed that the institution of slavery contradicted their strict morality and abolitionist principles. Methodists were long at the forefront of slavery opposition movements.
The Christian denomination attempted to help slaves and subsequently
freed blacks through philanthropic agencies such as the American Colonization Society and the Mission to the Slaves.
It was during the 1780s that American Methodist preachers and religious
leaders formally denounced African-American slavery. The founder of
Methodism, the Anglican priest John Wesley, believed that "slavery was
one of the greatest evils that a Christian should fight". 18th-century and early 19th-century Methodists had anti-slavery
sentiments, as well as the moral responsibility to bring an end to
African-American Slavery. However, in the United States some members of
the Methodist Church owned slaves and the Methodist Church itself split
on the issue in 1850, with the Southern Methodist churches actively
supporting slavery until after the American Civil War. Pressure from US
Methodist churches in this period prevented some general condemnations
of slavery by the worldwide church.
Following Emancipation, African-Americans believed that true
freedom was to be found through the communal and nurturing aspects of
the Church. The Methodist Church was at the forefront of freed-slave
agency in the South. Denominations in the southern states included the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion
(AMEZ) churches. These institutions were led by blacks that explicitly
resisted white charity, believing it would have displayed white
supremacy to the black congregations. The AME, AMEZ, and
African-American churches throughout the South provided social services
such as ordained marriages, baptisms, funerals, communal support, and
educational services. Education was highly regarded. Methodists taught
former slaves how to read and write, consequently enriching a literate
African-American society. Blacks were instructed through Biblical
stories and passages. Church buildings became schoolhouses, and funds
were raised for teachers and students.
Quakers played a major role in the abolition movement against slavery in both the United Kingdom and in the United States. Quakers were among the first whites to denounce slavery in the American colonies and Europe, and the Society of Friends became the first organization to take a collective stand against both slavery and the slave trade, later spearheading the international and ecumenical campaigns against slavery.
During the 1740s and 1750s, antislavery sentiment took a firmer hold. A new generation of Quakers, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet,
protested against slavery, and demanded that Quaker society cut ties
with the slave trade. They were able to carry popular Quaker sentiment
with them and, in the 1750s, Pennsylvanian Quakers tightened their
rules, by 1758 making it effectively an act of misconduct to engage in
slave trading. The London Yearly Meeting
soon followed, issuing a "strong minute" against slave trading in 1761.
On paper at least, global politics would intervene. The American Revolution would divide Quakers across the Atlantic.
From 1755 to 1776, the Quakers worked at freeing slaves, and became the first Western organization to ban slaveholding.
In the United Kingdom, Quakers would be foremost in the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 which, with some setbacks, would be responsible for ensuring the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1833.
In the United States, Quakers would be less successful. In many
instances, it was easier for American Quakers to oppose the slave trade
and slave ownership in the abstract than to directly oppose the
institution of slavery itself, as it manifested itself in their local
communities. While many individual Quakers spoke out against slavery
after American independence,
local Quaker meetings were often divided on how to respond to slavery;
outspoken Quaker abolitionists were sometimes sharply criticized by
other Quakers.
Nevertheless, there were local successes for Quaker antislavery
in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century. For example, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society,
first founded in 1775, consisted primarily of Quakers; seven of the ten
original white members were Quakers and 17 of the 24 who attended the
four meetings held by the Society were Quakers. Throughout the
nineteenth century, Quakers increasingly became associated with
antislavery activism and antislavery literature: not least through the
work of abolitionist Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
As Quakers began to travel and spread (both geographically and
theologically), different groups and individuals came to have varied
ideas on slavery and how to act against it.
Quakers were also prominently involved with the Underground Railroad. For example, Levi Coffin started helping runaway slaves as a child in North Carolina. Later in his life, Coffin moved to the Ohio–Indiana area, where he became known as the President of the Underground Railroad. Elias Hicks penned the "Observations on the Slavery of the Africans"
in 1811 (2nd ed. 1814), urging the boycott of the products of slave
labor. Many families assisted slaves in their travels through the
Underground Railroad. Henry Stubbs and his sons helped runaway slaves
get across Indiana. The Bundy family operated a station that transported groups of slaves from Belmont to Salem, Ohio.
Quaker antislavery activism could come at some social cost. In
the nineteenth-century United States, some Quakers were persecuted by
slave owners and were forced to move to the west of the country in an
attempt to avoid persecution. Nevertheless, in the main, Quakers have
been noted and, very often, praised for their early and continued
antislavery activity.
Mormon scripture simultaneously denounces both slavery and
abolitionism in general, teaching that it is not right for men to be in
bondage to each other, but it also teaches that one should not interfere with the slaves of others. However, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, taught that the
enslavement of black Africans was required because he believed that they
were still under the Curse of Cain and the Curse of Ham and he also warned those who were trying to free the slaves that they were going against the decrees of God. While these justifications were common in America at the time Mormons canonized several scriptures giving credence to the pro-slavery interpretation of the Curse of Ham and received scriptures teaching against interfering with the slaves of others. While promoting the legality of slavery, the church consistently taught
against the abuse of slaves and advocated for laws that provided
protection, though critics said the definition of abuse was vague and difficult to enforce. A few slave owners joined the church, and took their slaves with them to Nauvoo.
In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith began expressing a more abolitionist sentiment. While he was running for the presidency of the United States, Smith wrote a political platform containing a plan to abolish slavery. After Smith's death, the church split. The largest contingent followed Brigham Young, who supported slavery but opposed abuse, and a smaller contingent followed Smith's son Joseph Smith III, who opposed slavery. Brigham Young led his contingent to Utah, where he led the efforts to legalize slavery in Utah. Brigham Young taught that slavery was ordained of God and taught that
the Republicans' efforts to abolish slavery went against the decrees of
God and would eventually fail.
While black slavery was never widespread among Mormons, there
were several prominent slave owners in the leadership of the LDS Church,
including Abraham O. Smoot and Apostle Charles C. Rich. The LDS Church also accepted slaves as tithing. The Mormon settlement of San Bernardino openly practiced slavery under the leadership of Apostles Charles C. Rich and Amasa M. Lyman,
despite being in the free state of California. They were freed by a
judge who determined that the slaves were kept ignorant of the laws and
their rights.
Brigham Young also encouraged members to participate in the
Indian slave trade. While visiting the members in Parowan, he encouraged
them to "buy up the Lamanite
children as fast as they could". He argued that by doing so, they could
educate them and teach them the gospel, and in a few generations the
Lamanites would become white and delightsome. Mormons often referred to Indians as Lamanites, reflecting their belief
that the Indians were descended from the Lamanites, who were a cursed
race discussed in the Book of Mormon. Chief Walkara, one of the main slave traders in the region, was baptized into the church, and he received talking papers from Apostle George A. Smith that wished him success in trading Piede children.
Mormons also enslaved Indian prisoners of war. As they began
expanding into Indian territory, they often became embroiled in
conflicts with the local residents. After expanding into Utah Valley, Young issued the extermination order against the Timpanogos, resulting in the Battle at Fort Utah, where many Timpanogos women and children were taken into slavery. Some were able to escape, but many died in slavery. After expanding into Parowan, Mormons attacked a group of Indians,
killing around 25 men and taking the women and children as slaves.
Spaniards considered it legitimate to enslave non-Christian captives
from wars and trade them legally in the past. This is because they did
not consider this as an uncivilized and unchristian act because they
believed that men were not created equal and the inferior men may be
ruled by the superior ones. Christians, however, were anticipated to
show sympathy to the people suffering and this made some masters free
their slaves. A lot of them apprenticed their slaves so they could still
work under their supervision once they were freed. There were two major
types of slaves: the esclavos negros who were Africans purchased from Portugal, and the esclavos blancos
who were Moros taken from wars. They were usually sold in public
auctions. People from both the middle and the upper classes bought them,
as well as the clergy.
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