Is Slavery Evil?

Last month I was sitting in a class about America’s culture heritage when upon hearing about the faith of the founding fathers a less than intelligent Black girl who calls herself a Christian proclaimed in an infuriated derogatory tone: ‘I don’t see how those men could have been true Christians because they owned slaves!’

The professor was either delusional or too cowardly to stand up to this accusation of racism from the loud mouthed girl because he admitted that our founding fathers must have been flawed or really were hypocrites because no one could follow the golden rule and still have slaves. The other Black girls in the class began to grunt and howl in approval becoming stimulated to animation by the drum beat of a fellow Black preaching the gospel of Negro righteousness at the hands of the White man.

The professor saw that he had to appease the now bellicose mob of African furor that had been whipped up on his watch. He proclaimed the White man’s guilt by challenging any of us to consider whether we would choose to be slaves, and if the answer was ‘no’ than slavery was surely a sin. All I could think was ‘If you asked anyone whether they would choose to be a king or a serf they certainly wouldn’t choose to be serf but that doesn’t mean the King is disobeying the Golden Rule by enforcing his authority over the serf.’

Of course 90% of Blacks would not understand such an argument because they have no conception of complex government, maybe one in a thousand could deliver a good definition of a serf.

American slavery is held to be an abomination that no Christian could possibly endorse. However, most biblical scholars down through history have not taken this position. Consider the great restoration preacher Alexander Campbell who said: ‘There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral.’

Campbell had it right. The Bible only ever seeks to regulate slavery. God established slavery in the only society he ever explicitly designed: the Nation of Israel. Leviticus 25:44-46:

‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you [non-Israelites] and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.’

Notice that God allows Israelites to treat non-Hebrews differently than fellow Israelites simply based on what ethnicity they belong to.

Sure, it’s immoral to beat your slaves and starve them, the same as it’s immoral to beat and starve your best friend, but slavery is only a socio-economic institution and thus it cannot be wrong in and of itself. God had no problem outlawing all kinds of evil behaviors in ancient Israel, but he explicitly allowed for the Hebrews to own slaves. A person who says that slavery is inherently evil also states that God committed an evil act by instituting slavery. All the arrogant moderns these days may be perfectly content with condemning God for slavery, but personally I don’t want to be the one to reach the pearly gates and tell God he was a terrible racist for letting the Hebrews own slaves.

I can already hear the cries of protests: ‘God allowed it in the Old Testament, but in the Church he abolished it!’ Let’s just pretend for a second that this absurd last minute cop-out argument is legitimate.

Usually this argument is based, at least in part, on the verse where Jesus states that divorce and remarriage wasn’t what God wanted in the Old Testament, but he tolerated it. Thus the story goes that God tolerated slavery in the Old Testament, but didn’t want it. This line of thinking, however, is totally undermined by the fact that nowhere in the Old Testament does God look positively on divorce and remarriage. Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is the verse the Israelites were using to justify divorcing a wife, but that verse only gives a husband the right to divorce if there is somehow sexually defiled ( committed adultery or lied about being a virgin). The lesson, then, is that the Israelites had distorted God’s original teachings, which Jesus reestablishes. Even in the Old Testament divorce has always been seen as an abomination to God. With slavery, however, God actually established that institution among his chosen people and never expressed any distaste for it.

Consider that 1/3^rd or 33% (that’s a conservative estimate) of the entire population of the Roman Empire in the first century consisted of slaves. 1 out of every 3 people you laid eyes on walking down the sidewalk of Jerusalem on your average Sabbath was in bondage to some other person, and yet NEVER is slavery condemned in the New Testament!

In fact, not only is slavery never condemned some of the only times its ever mentioned are in a positive context. The apostle Paul opens the book of Romans by saying: ‘Paul, a bond-servant [literally slave in Greek] of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God…’ Jesus doesn’t hate slavery… he’s a slave holder!

While all that scriptural evidence is well and good most people are so indoctrinated by the anti-slavery propaganda that they refuse to accept that God could ever allow for slavery. So it’s utterly hilarious to bring up the book of Philemon and watch anti-slavery Christians trip over themselves in all kinds of bizarre antics to explain why Paul never tells Philemon to release Onesimus. The book of Philemon is about how the apostle Paul sends a runaway slave (Onesimus) back to his master (Philemon) because it was unacceptable for Onesimus to run away in the first place. Despite the entire topic of the book being slavery Paul never condemns the institution and never even condemns the idea of a Christian master owning a Christian slave. In characteristic fashion God through Paul seeks to regulate slavery by telling Philemon to treat Onesimus like his fellow Christian brother even though he is also his slave. The New Testament position on slavery correlates exactly the Old Testament position on it: slavery is just one more neutral human institution.

The old ‘lean-to’ argument for anti-slavery Christians goes something like this: ‘because slavery was such a pervasive institution in the 1^st century the Christians didn’t want to condemn it right off the bat for fear that the Romans would really come after them. So instead they left the issue alone even though they thought it was sinful.’ Allow me to rephrase this argument in clearer wording: ‘the Apostles were too cowardly to stand up for the truth, because they feared the government, so they let early Christians go on living in sin.’ Consider that almost 100% of all Romans were idolaters and the emperor was even revered as a type of god, yet the New Testament writer’s blast pagan religion as sinful across every page of the Bible. So let me get this straight… the apostles were too wussy to tell the truth about slavery, but they had no problem attacking the entire rest of the world and even the position of the emperor himself? Sounds like a totally legitimate argument [sarcasm].

Just like slavery, marriage was also instituted by God in scripture. Just like slavery marriage can be turned into an abusive arrangement. I’ve seen statistics that estimate 25% of all marriages are abusive, and yet no one but the lesbian butch feminists would ever suggest we just rid the entire world of marriage.

A bunch of multi-culturalist fanatics have spread the lie, through movies like Roots (which itself was a lie), that ‘every slave in the antebellum South was brutally whipped within an inch of his life, and was forced to undertake hard labor under scorching hot conditions until he fell down dead in the cotton field.’ In reality, slave holders treated their slaves relatively well because they were actually worth A LOT of money. I may own my car, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to smash the windshield every time it doesn’t start up on the first try.

I’m not suggesting that slave holders treated their slaves well just because they cost too much to damage, but I am suggesting that just looking at the situation from an economic stand point the myth of the commonly abused negro is totally absurd. In general, I think it can be said, that Southern plantation owners treated their slaves in a Christian manner.