How did Christianity and other religions excuse the horrors of slavery?

Question

I'm sorry I used the wrong choice of words. The word justify should replace the word excuse in my question.

Answer 1

Because the prevailing thought during the last slave era was that those who were enslaved were not as human as whites.

How does anyone put up with an abomination happening in front of them? How can you stand to let thousands of children to have terrible diseases b/c they have no health care so infections and problems weren't caught early? It may not be as bad as Racial Slavery was but we Know better... We rationalize it away. Their parents don't work, they are probably not going to live long anyway... etc.

Humans love to rationalize away our problems and societal norms that rub us the wrong way. BTW, the bible says nothing against slavery... but those slave owners in the 1600-1800s didn't follow those rules on how to treat slaves. (obviously).

Answer 2

Probably the same way most ancient religions in Babylon,Egypt,Samaria,Greece, Rome, China, Israel,
Aztecs,Mayans,and many Tribes around the globe
did and according to the United Nations human trafficking
is a major problem in many developing countries still even today. Christians took a stand against slavery as well ,arm in arm with other Faiths that value human life and eventually started eradicting it in the 1800s,but even the US Government used Eskimos as Slaves during WW2 and later in Alaska. as late as the 1950s, the same decade of the Civil Rights Movement, remember Dr. King was a Christian preacher also...lets face it most of human history had barbarians for political and religous leaders lets hope the 21st century can leap forward from all that nonsense.

Answer 3

Jesus actually endorsed it!He incorporated it into his teachings as if it were the most natural order (which it was for the biblical writers who didn't know any better). Why doesn't the bible--supposedly inspired by an all-loving deity--ever hint that there is something wrong with such a brutal social institution? If it were not for the influence of the bible (see answer 'd' below), the appalling American slave trade might have been curtailed, along with the bloody Civil War.

"And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." (Luke 12:47-48) The entire context (Luke 12:41-48) shows that this is not part of a parable--it is the explanation of a parable, after Peter asked a question. But even if it were a parable, it would carry the same weight as a teaching of Jesus.

The word "servant" above is doulos, which means "slave" in Greek, and is correctly rendered "slave" by the NRSV, NAS, Scholar's Version, and others. "Shall" meant "should," as Jesus adds: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." (Luke 12:48)

Answer 4

Excuse it? Some Christians found biblical justification for it! There is no biblical injuction against slavery, but there are biblical rules for how to treat a slave.

Other religions I do not know enough about, but my conjecture is that the rationalization is not much different since most sacred texts were written when slavery was an accepted and legal institution world wide.

Answer 5

Human beings are the Kings of rationalizing and justifying acts which are in contradiction of their alleged moral and ethical beliefs.

In the case of the Abrahamic Religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there were three basic manifest offshoots of rationaliztion. 1) Persons of certain backgrounds were not true people and therefore were property like cattle and goats.
2) Certain intrepretations of various religious texts allowed or condoned slavery. 3) Some slavery was, from a certain perspective, was entered into voluntarily or of free will. Think here of indentured servants, vassalage, manorilism.
4) Spoils of War - Persons who did not share the exact same religious beliefs somehow where rationalized to not deserve the same consideration nor have the same rights of someone who did believe in similar or the exact same religious beliefs. (Romans vs Christians or Christians vs Moslems or Roman Catholic vs Eastern Orthodoxy - This last example division deriving from a disagreement over the "nature" of Jesus Christ)

Answer 6

Don't you just love the apologist "if a christian does a bad thing its because they are not a real christian like me".

The truth is that historically christians did condone slavery, and had good biblical grounds to do so. Heres a couple of examples from the US:

"There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral." Rev. Alexander Campbell
"The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example." Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina

The bible was never a basis for defining a morality against slavery, and christians had to be fought tooth and nail to get slavery abolished. An apology from the Catholic church for its part came only in the last decade.

This is shameful, but there are plenty of ways in which modern christian do precisely the same thing. For instance, attitudes to the role of women in chruch and the place of people born gay.

The basic problem is that christians are immoral flawed people, like us all, but that they have convinced themselves they are perfect and just. This is a fatal disease.

Answer 7

These are all "created" explanations. When on one hand you call God as father of all, you need to treat all others as brothers. Slavery is out of questions but the derivation of meanings has created such a big mesh that it appears true.
Hence I personally go for spirituality rather than religion.

Answer 8

I really can't speak for other religions - like, for instance, the pagan religions practiced by those in Africa who captured members of other tribes to sell them into slavery. A lot of Christians excused it by pointing to verses in the Bible giving instructions for how to treat slaves. The claim was that those verses meant that God condoned and even encouraged slavery. They were wrong, of course, but it was a prevailing attitude at the time.

Answer 9

they pointed to the Bible, where there were verses to support it, but don't be too hard on Christians when it comes to slavery

Christians did not start slavery, and Jesus certainly never advised anyone to enslave others, but Christians *did* end it, at least in Europe and America. The Abolitionists were militant Christians.

Answer 10

you are right that the bible does talk about slavery. it also talks about freeing the slaves, both in physical and spiritual way. as Bob Dylan said you have to serve someone, and if you serve sin then you become a slave to sin. but the Good News is Jesus can break the chains of sin. also it was Christians that ended slavery. here is from Chuck Colson.

Suspended License
By Chuck Colson
10/8/2007

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Hitchens's Distortion of Christian History


Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything. Everything is a big word, but I guess Hitchens means it. According to him, “religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do . . . the licenses for genocide, slavery, racism, are all right there in the holy text.”

By “holy text” he means the Bible, which raises a difficult question for people like Hitchens: If Christianity “licenses” slavery, then why was the abolition of slavery, both in antiquity and in modern times, driven by Christians?

As I write in my new book, The Faith, about to be published early next year, in the first-century Roman Empire, slavery was a fact of life—one which the writings of the New Testament reflect. But acknowledging social reality is not the same thing as “licensing” it.

When the Apostle Paul declared that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he planted the seeds that would, one day, lead to the demise of the institution of slavery. Likewise, Paul’s inclusion of “slave traders” among those he identified as “lawbreakers” made it clear what he thought about slavery.

Historian Rodney Stark writes about the Church’s embrace around about the third century of what he calls “a universalistic conception of humanity.” This conception “[liberated] social relations between the sexes and within the family” and “greatly modulated class differences . . . ” As Stark puts it, “more than rhetoric was involved when slave and noble greeted one another as brothers in Christ.”

Given this liberating ideal, it was only a matter of time before Christians sought to remove slavery from the Christian culture entirely. By the Middle Ages, it was agreed that “no man, no real Christian at any rate . . . could thereafter legitimately be held as the property of another.”

It is true that Christians have not always lived up to these teachings: The record of the Church is not without blemish. But it is also true that when Christians kept and traded slaves, they were going against the teachings of their own religion. The theological question had long been settled.

Thus, when Spanish and Portuguese traders brought slavery to the New World, successive popes condemned the practice and even threatened to excommunicate slave traders and slave holders. The fact that they could not force European monarchs to obey them should not be held against Christianity—especially not by those who complain about Christians trying to impose their religion on others.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the fight against slavery and the slave trade was led by Christians like William Wilberforce in Britain and William Garrison in America. Like their early Church counterparts, they were motivated by Christian teaching on human dignity and equality.

Hitchens’s assertion that economic factors and not Christian abolitionists did away with slavery is, to put it mildly, absurd. Wilberforce and company succeeded despite the economic interests, not because of them.

True, there are shameful episodes in Christian history. But what makes them shameful is the failure of Christians to live up to what Christianity requires—not what Hitchens imagines as its “licenses.”

How odd, then, that Hitchens and other militant atheists feel they have license to distort the facts when arguing against religion.

This is part one in a five-part series.

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For Further Reading and Information


Eugene McCarraher, “This Book Is Not Good,” review of God Is Not Great, Commonweal, 15 June 2007.

Upcoming Washington, D. C., event, October 11: “Poison or Cure?: Religious Belief in the Modern World”—a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath.

Allen Thornburgh, “The Hitch’s Inconvenient Brother,” The Point, 12 June 2007.

T. M. Moore, “On Dis(guising) Belief,” The Point, 4 September 2007.

Chuck Colson, “The New Chicken Littles,” BreakPoint WorldView, September 2007.

Gina Dalfonzo, “Acclimated to Atheism,” BreakPoint WorldView, September 2007.

BreakPoint Commentary No. 031205, “The First and Only Abolitionists: Christianity and Slavery.”

BreakPoint Commentary No. 061228, “The Victory of Reason: Christianity and Freedom.”