| |
; |
|
Slaves, submit yourselves to your
masters with all respect, not only to those who are
good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.
|
|
1 Peter 2:18 (NIV)
|
For many centuries slavery was perfectly acceptable to Christians.
Christians had no doubt that it was divinely sanctioned, and
they used a number of Old and New Testament quotations to prove
their case. Looking at the relevant passages it is clear that
the Bible does indeed endorse slavery. In the Old Testament
God approved the practice and laid down rules for buyers and
sellers (Exodus 21:1-11, Leviticus 25:44). Men are at liberty
to sell their own daughters (Exodus 21:7). Slaves can be inherited
(Leviticus 25:45-6). It is acceptable to beat slaves, since
they are property — a master who beats his slave to death
is not to be punished as long as the slave stays alive for a
day or two, as the loss of the master's property is punishment
enough:
And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod,
and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding,
if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for
he is his money. Exodus 21:20-21
If a slave is gored by a bull, it is the master, not the slave,
who is to be compensated (Exodus 21:32). Time and time again
the Old Testament confirms that slaves are property and their
lives are of little consequence. To prove the strength of Job's faith, God sends Satan to test him by visiting disasters upon
him. Amongst these disasters is the killing of Job's numerous
slaves (Job 1). Neither God, nor Satan, nor the story's narrator finds it at all odd that people should be killed just
to prove a point: they are only Job's property and their
destruction is naturally bracketed with the loss of his livestock
and vineyards.
The New Testament also regards slavery as acceptable. It instructs
slaves to accept their position with humility (Ephesians 6:5-8)
and to please their masters in everything (Titus 2:9, cf. Colossians
3:22). They are commanded to serve Christian slave owners better
than other masters (1 Timothy 6:1-2) "so that the name
of God and the teaching may not be defamed". Even oppressive
masters are to be obeyed according to 1 Peter 2:18. Jesus himself
mentioned slavery more than once according to the New Testament,
but never with the slightest hint of criticism of it. He even
glorified the master-slave relationship as a model of the relationship
between God and humankind (Matthew 18:23ff and 25:14ff). Christians
naturally interpreted this as not merely acceptance, but approval.
If Jesus had opposed slavery he would, they claimed, surely
have said so. Church Fathers instructed the faithful not to
let slaves get above themselves, and the Church endorsed St
Augustine's view that slavery was ordained by God as a
punishment for sin*. Augustine
called on the free to give thanks because Christ and his Church
did not make slaves free but rather made bad slaves into good
slaves.
In pre-Christian times and in non-Christian countries people
expressed doubts about slavery and sought to improve the lot
of slaves — the Stoic philosophers provide a notable example.
In pagan times slaves who escaped and sought sanctuary at a
holy temple would not be returned to their masters if they had
a justifiable complaint. When the Empire became Christian, escaped
slaves could seek refuge in a church, but they would always
be returned to their masters, whether they had a justifiable
complaint or not. When Christian slaves in the early Asian Church
suggested that community funds might be used to purchase their
freedom, they were soon disabused of their hopes, a line supported
by one of the greatest Church Fathers (Ignatius of Antioch.).
He declared that their ambition should be to become better slaves,
and they should not expect the Church to gain their liberty
for them*. His orthodox
approach followed the words of St Paul: "Each one should
remain in the situation which he was in when God called him.
Were you a slave when you were called? Don"t let it trouble
you — although if you can gain your freedom, do so."
(1 Corinthians 7:20-21 NIV).
Soon the Church would become the largest slave owner in the
Roman Empire. Bishops themselves owned slaves and accepted the
usual conventions. So did other churchmen. Slave collars dating
from around AD 400 have been found in Sardinia, stamped with
the sign of the cross and the name "Felix the Archdeacon"*.
Pagan slaves who wanted to become Christians required permission
from their masters. For many centuries, indeed right up to recent
times, servile birth was a bar to ordination , and the Church
confirmed the acceptability of slavery in many other ways. For
example, the Church Council of Châlons in 813 decreed
that slaves belonging to different owners could not marry without
their owners" consent. It had been common for pagan Greeks
and Romans to emancipate their slaves, but the emancipation
of the Church's slaves was declared impossible, on the
grounds that the slaves were owned not by the clergy but by
God himself, and only the slave owner could legally dispose
of his goods. Church slaves were thus inalienable property.
(This principle would be enshrined in canon law in respect of
monastic slaves under the Decretum gratiani c.1140.)
The Church found new reasons to take people into slavery. The
Third Synod of Toledo in 589 decreed that women found in the
houses of a clergyman in suspicious circumstances should be
sold into slavery by the clergyman's bishop*.
Another synod of 655 declared that priests" children should
be treated as slaves — an idea ratified in 1022 at Pavia
and around 1140 by the Decretum gratiani. In attempting
to enforce clerical celibacy popes revived the idea of taking
the wives and concubines of churchmen into slavery*.
Leo IX (Pope 1049-1054) had priests" wives taken into slavery
for service at the Lateran Palace*.
Urban II tried the idea against subdeacons" wives in 1089*.
In 1095 wives of priests were sold into slavery — presumably
the Lateran now had a full complement of female slaves. Saints,
popes and Church officials approved the practice of slavery
for centuries. The Church's greatest scholastic authorities,
such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus concurred.
As Aquinas explained, a slave was merely an "inspired tool
of his master" and a "non-member of society"
, just like any other beast of burden. Slaves were classified
in inventories under "Church property".
Popes sentenced countless thousands to slavery, although the
sentences could not always be carried out. Anyone who opposed
the papacy was condemned to slavery at the Third Lateran Council
in 1179. The citizens of Venice were condemned to it in 1309,
1482, and again in 1506. The same thing happened to the whole
of England in 1508. Papal galleys went on slave-hunting expeditions
along the coast of Africa.
Slavery was a major trade in Christendom. Until the early tenth
century the main Venetian export was slaves from central Europe.
During the Crusades the whole Mediterranean slave trade was
concentrated in Christian hands — the hands of the military
monks and men like Pelius, the papal legate. Later the Genoese
developed another major Mediterranean slave trade*.
In Spain a single inquisitor, Torquemada, had 97,371 people
condemned to slavery. In the New World Christians introduced
the practice. Pope Nicholas V, in his bull Romanus pontifex
of 1455, gave his blessing to the enslavement of conquered native
peoples. Like other bishops, the popes themselves owned slaves
— Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gift of numerous slaves
from Malaga, given by the exceptionally devout Queen Isabella
of Castile in 1487. To clear up any doubt about who was entitled
to own slaves, Pope Paul III confirmed in 1548 that all Christian
men and all members of the clergy had the right to own slaves.
Slave owning continued for centuries despite criticism from
rationalists and freethinkers. The Jesuit College in the Congo
owned some 12,000 slaves in 1666. Popes continued to own slaves
until they lost control of the Papal States at the end of the
eighteenth century. Benedictine monks still owned slaves in
Brazil as late as 1864, the same date that clergymen in the
southern states of the USA were obliged to give up their slaves.
The record of the Anglican Church was no better than that of
the Roman Church. It was the universal opinion of churchmen
that God had ordained slavery, and clergymen had no qualms about
owning slaves themselves. Anglican slave traders were often
extremely devout, and widely respected by their fellow Christians.
It never occurred to them, or to their priests or ministers,
that slave trading might be immoral. The most famous English
slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, piously named his slave ships
Angel, Jesus and Grace of God. The
Reverend Richard Fuller summed up the Church's position
in 1845: “What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and
permitted in the New, cannot be a sin”*.
Since they were merely property, there could be no objection
to branding slaves just like any other animal. Neither was there
any obligation to treat them more humanely than animals in other
ways. Their prices depended on supply and demand like any other
commodity. Female breeders would be sold at premium prices after
the importation of African slaves to North America and the Caribbean
ceased. Sometimes slaves were hamstrung to stop them escaping.
If they had escaped before, they could have a leg amputated
to stop them doing so again. Once their working lives were over,
they were put down*.
Black slaves in the Caribbean and Americas received little education,
but what they were allowed was mainly religious. Preachers tended
to concentrate on biblical passages, such as those already quoted
that endorsed slavery and counselled passive acceptance of it.
Surviving texts show that among missionaries, the problem of
preventing slaves from enjoying themselves on the Sabbath was
more important than the question of slavery itself*.
Churchmen owned slaves and were not particularly notable as
good masters. Indeed some of the worst masters were clergymen.
In the court of St Ann's in Jamaica in 1829, the Rev. G. W.
Bridges was charged with maltreating a female slave. For a trivial
mistake he had stripped her, tied her by the hands to the ceiling
so that her toes hardly touched the ground, then flogged her
with a bamboo rod until she was a "mass of lacerated flesh
and gore" from her shoulders to her calves. As usual in
such cases he was acquitted. Important questions for the Church
were the extent of slave owners" rights to flog or burn
their human property, to split up their families, and to demand
sexual gratification from them*.
This last must have been a particular problem, since owners
could point to several biblical passages that take it for granted
that a slave girl is available for her master's sexual
desires. This was clearly difficult to square with the knowledge
that sex was sinful. The harm that was done to the slaves themselves
was not considered, although its effects were so severe that
they live on today. In the Americas it has left a legacy of
bitterness, hatred and social disruption*
that is likely to endure well into the third millennium.
Slavery was not confined to selected races or to members of
other religions: Christians routinely condemned their fellow
believers to slavery. John Knox for example spent 18 months
as a galley-slave under French Catholics. Cotton Mather, a Puritan
clergyman best known for his part in the infamous Salem Witch
Trials, plotted the enslavement of William Penn and his fellow
Quakers in 1682*. In
the late eighteenth century popes still held slaves, as did
Anglican clergymen. It was still beyond question that slavery
was ordained by God and therefore unimpeachable. In the second
part of The Age of Reason, published in 1795, Thomas
Paine noted that in the book of Numbers Moses had given instructions
as to how to treat Midianite captives. Essentially, everyone
was to be executed except virgins, whom the victors were allowed
to keep alive for themselves. God then gave instructions as
to how the booty, including 32,000 virgins, should be divided
up between the victors. Paine summarised the relevant passage:
"Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the
mothers, and debauch the daughters"*.
In response to this, Bishop Watson of Llandaff pointed out that
the virgins had not been spared for any immoral purpose, as
Paine had wickedly suggested. Rather, he said, they were spared
so that they could be taken into slavery. Obviously, there could
be no ethical objection to this, since slavery was divinely
sanctioned. The bishop's rebuttal was perfectly acceptable
to mainstream Christians, who found sex objectionable but slavery
not at all objectionable. According to the Churches, slavery
was not merely permitted, it was obligatory. Slavery was a God-given
institution. To oppose what God had sanctioned was positively
sinful.
In America opposition to slavery was first voiced by freethinkers
such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Initially a Quaker,
later a deist, Paine was widely condemned as an unbeliever.
He wrote an influential article against slavery in 1775 , and
when he drafted the American Declaration of Independence the
following year, he included a clause against slavery that was
later struck out*. Under
Quaker influence, slavery was made illegal in the state of Pennsylvania
in 1780. Other campaigners included the rationalist James Russell
Lowell, the sceptical ex-preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the
freethinker Wendell Phillips. Abolitionists such as William
Lloyd Garrison and John Brown had shifted away from traditional
Christianity after reading Thomas Paine.
While Thomas Paine opposed slavery in America, his fellow freethinkers
opposed it in his native country. Granville Sharp, a British
humanitarian lawyer, sought to bring cases before the courts,
arguing that throwing slaves overboard to drown was murder.
(The prevailing Christian view was that a ship's captain
was free to jettison them, just like any other property*.)
Within a few years, by 1787, a campaign to abolish the Atlantic
slave trade was started by a group of Quakers*.
It was supported by non-believers. As the movement grew, various
nonconformist groups and some evangelical Christians joined
it, but all traditional Churches and mainstream Christian sects
consistently opposed it. Tellingly, the pro-slavery Confederacy
adopted the motto “Deo Vindice”, (“God
On Our Side”).
William Wilberforce is usually accredited with abolition of
the slave trade in the British Empire, although he came many
years after the first abolitionist campaigners. He too was an
unbeliever when he espoused abolition. Later as an evangelical
he was able to sit in Parliament (which unbelievers were not).
There he stood out amongst his fellow Christians as an exception.
He noted that those who opposed slavery were nonconformists
and godless reformers, and that Church people were indifferent
to the cause of abolition, or else actively obstructed it. His
support came from Quakers, Utilitarians and assorted freethinkers.
Like the freethinkers who had started the movement, he was condemned
by the mainstream Churches as presuming to know better than
the Bible. His successor, Sir Thomas Buxton, was another maverick,
an evangelical with Quaker sympathies.
The Church had enjoyed 1,500 years during which it had had
the power to ban slavery but had failed to do so, or even to
have expressed any desire to do so. ( the Anglican Church's
missionary organisation , the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel in Foreign Parts , was still branding its
slaves on the chest with the word SOCIETY to show who owned
them. Now that reform was in the air, the mainstream churches
opposed it with all their power. They vilified reformers (including
Wilberforce) and attacked them for daring to question the plain
word of God. Anglican clergymen still owned slaves and continued
to oppose abolition well into the nineteenth century. One of
their number was the most effective supporter of slavery during
the 1820s abolitionist campaign in Jamaica*.
All mainstream Churches agreed with the traditional view that
slavery was ordained by God. To practice slavery was therefore
meritorious, and to try to stop the practice was sinful. With
the exception of Quakers, all denominations agreed. When the
British parliament abolished slavery in the colonies in 1833,
the Bench of Bishops voted against — as they did on almost
all reform bills. To get the bill through Parliament voted to
compensate slave owners (There was no compensation for the slaves
themselves). The Anglican Church received £8,823 8s 9d,
for the loss of slave labour on its Codrington plantation in
Barbados. Individual Churchmen had to be compensated separately.
Henry Phillpotts , Bishop of Exeter, and three business associates
received nearly £13,000*.
Elsewhere Churches held out longer. In 1843 some 1,200 Methodist
ministers owned slaves in the USA.
Under popular pressure generated by secular thinkers, all of
the mainstream Churches (except the Baptists) performed a volte-face
during the nineteenth century. When enough of their members
had moved over to the abolitionist cause, the Churches followed.
God had always condoned, sanctioned and even demanded the practice
of slavery, but slavery was no longer acceptable. God must have
changed his mind. Priests, bishops and popes felt obliged to
cease owning slaves. Slavery was criticised for the first time
by a pope (Gregory XVI) in 1839, but it was not until the Berlin
Conference of 1884 that Roman Catholic countries fell into line
with Protestant ones on the question of slavery, agreeing that
it should be suppressed. The official U-turn came in 1888 when
Pope Leo XIII declared in In plurimis that the Church
was now opposed to it.
In the USA the pattern was similar: nineteenth century churchmen
advocated slavery, though secular forces opposed it. It was
a commonplace that "Slavery is of God". Christian
ministers wrote almost half of all defences of slavery published
in America. The Churches routinely produced such defences. Along
with these defences, Christian Churches circulated biblical
texts on the subject of Negro inferiority, and the need for
total unquestioning obedience. A civil war was fought before
the Christian South was forced to abandon slavery in 1863. Yet
the Southern Presbyterian Church could still resolve in 1864
that it was their peculiar mission to conserve the institution
of slavery, and to make it a blessing to both master and slave.
Black slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write,
since education was seen as a threat to God's natural order.
An American slave who adopted the name Frederick Douglas was
exceptional in that he learned to read and write in secret.
After he was granted his freedom he wrote this:
Were I to be again reduced to chains of slavery, next to
that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious
master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... [I]
hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-stripping, cradle plundering,
partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land*.
The Christianity he had in mind was not particularly American.
Nor is it yet dead. There are still Christians prepared to uphold
the traditional Christian line. In 1996 Charles Davidson, a
devout Christian Senator from Alabama, said that slavery had
been good for blacks, and pointed out that the practice had
biblical approval, citing the traditional prooftexts such as
Leviticus 25:44 and 1 Timothy 6:1*.
The story now propagated by some Churches — that they
were responsible for abolition — is simply false. The first
country to abolish slavery, was France, under an anticlerical
revolutionary government in the 1790s*.
Abolition came in Britain in the early nineteenth century, in
the teeth of fierce opposition from the Anglican Church, and
it was achieved through the efforts of an alliance of unbelievers,
freethinkers, utilitarians, Quakers and fringe Christians who
galvanised public opinion. In the USA it came in the second
half of the century, again in the face of intense opposition
from the Churches.
The abolitionists won largely because slavery was no longer
financially viable. The alliance of Church and slave owners
lost the battle in one country after another because of monetary
considerations. Following traditional teachings, and unrestrained
by Western economics or political correctness, Christians in
Ethiopia are still making captured prisoners into slaves well
into the twenty First century. The simple, if embarrassing,
truth is that no Christian society has ever abolished slavery
while the practice continued to be profitable.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Buy the Book from Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
Buy the Book from Amazon.co.uk
|
|
|
|
