An honest reckoning

Christianity and Slavery

For centuries many Christians defended, profited from, and gave religious justification for slavery, including the transatlantic slave trade that tore millions of Africans from their homes. That is a monstrous evil, and no honest telling can soften it. It is also true that Christians led the movement to abolish slavery, and that enslaved people themselves forged a faith of liberation and dignity. Both of these are real history, and Jesus' own teaching cuts against the slaveholder, not the slave.

What happened

From the 1500s onward, Christian nations and Christian people built and ran the transatlantic slave trade. Ships carried more than twelve million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Clergy owned slaves. Preachers cited Scripture, the household codes that tell servants to obey masters, and a twisted reading of the curse of Ham, to bless the whole system. In 1845 the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in part to defend the right of Christians to own slaves. This is not a footnote. It is a sustained, deliberate, centuries-long evil carried out by people who called themselves followers of Christ.

The complexity, honestly

The same faith produced the abolitionists. Quakers were among the first to condemn slaveholding outright. The evangelical William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect spent decades driving the abolition of the British slave trade (1807) and then slavery itself across the British Empire (1833). In America, the Black church became the heart of a freedom faith, and believers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth drew their courage straight from Scripture. Douglass drew the line himself: he loved what he called the Christianity of Christ, and utterly rejected the slaveholding religion that used the same name. Christians were on both sides. Telling only one side, in either direction, is a lie.

What Jesus taught

Slavery cannot be reconciled with the words of Jesus. He opened his ministry declaring liberty to captives, and his gospel dissolves the very hierarchy slavery depends on.

The abolitionists were not bending Scripture to a modern mood. They were reading it against the men who used it to chain their neighbours, and the enslaved knew which reading was true.

Frequently asked questions

Did Christianity support slavery or oppose it?

Both, at different times and by different people. For centuries many Christians defended and profited from slavery, including the transatlantic trade. Other Christians, from the Quakers to Wilberforce to the Black church, led the movement to abolish it. The honest answer holds both.

Does the Bible endorse slavery?

The Bible regulates the slavery of the ancient world and contains household codes telling servants to obey masters, which slaveholders exploited. But its deeper trajectory, from the Exodus to Jesus proclaiming liberty to captives to Paul's 'neither bond nor free,' is what the abolitionists rightly read as the condemnation of it.

Who were the Christian abolitionists?

They included the Quakers, the evangelical William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in Britain, and in America the Black church and figures like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, whose fight for freedom was rooted in Scripture.