Reason #9 The Spectacular and Single-Handed Abolition of Slavery by Christianity
The facts of history strongly indicate
that the Christian faith should receive credit for being the true impetus
behind the abolition of slavery around the world.
By a truly masterful act of misdirection,
the U.S., and Christians in particular, have somehow been blamed for the
practice of slavery on planet Earth. This may be the verdict of twenty-first
century anti-Christian bias, but it’s certainly not the verdict of history or truth.
The historical record
clearly indicates that cruel slave-trading was not the unique fault of any one
particular nation or race. Slavery was practiced from very ancient times on
every continent (except Antarctica), by even Native Americans against other
Native Americans, and Africans against other Africans. In fact,
African-American historian Thomas Sowell reports that “Africans retained more
slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.”
There was an unchallenged acceptance of
slavery in the ancient Roman Empire. It is even commonly estimated that an
astonishing one-third of all the people in Italy, the heartland of the Empire,
were slaves, mostly from European nations. Josephus estimated that 97,000
Jewish people were made slaves as a result of the Jewish Wars of his
generation, and that these slaves could be purchased for the price of a horse.
Arabs (Muslims) began their practice of
slave-trading in Africa in the 800s A.D.—a very long time before the Americas
were colonized. Tens of thousands of
African slaves were kidnapped every year by Arab slavers and sold to Arab
masters. Arab slave-trading continued until 1960, and legal slave ownership in
Arab lands continued until 1980. Even today, some Muslim Mauritanians in
northwestern Africa own slaves. In light of these realities, it is more than a
little ironic to see certain African-Americans choosing to take on Arab names
in an apparent protest against the history of white slave-trading.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., himself an
African-American, and a professor of African and African-American studies at
Harvard University estimates that far less than half a million Africans were
brought to North America as slaves between 1525 and 1866 (approximately
388,000), but more than 10 million went directly to other places in the world.
Brazil alone received almost 5 million African slaves.
We Americans must take full blame and
responsibility for our less-than-half-a-million kidnapped African slaves, but
someone else will have to take full blame and responsibility for the other
more-than-ten-million sufferers trafficked from Africa.
And we Christian Americans rightly hang
our heads in deep shame for our participation in this barbarous cruelty on any
level—and certainly for our heinous level of participation in slave trading—but
history clearly shows that America was nowhere near the first or the greatest
offender in this ancient crime against humanity.
What is truly remarkable in history,
however, is not the practice of global slavery from time immemorial, but the
recent abolishing of slavery. Again, as the black historian Thomas Sowell has
said, “While slavery was common to all civilizations…only one civilization
developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history—Western
civilization….Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected
slavery.” And this deep revulsion to slavery eventually led to the Civil War,
the bloodiest war in our nation’s history, a war that was fought for the
benefit of slaves, and fought mostly by concerned Caucasian people who had
never themselves been slaves.
And while the blame for slavery cannot be
fixed on any one particular party, the credit for abolition certainly can be. That credit belongs to the
Christian faith. In fact, as even atheists will admit, abolition was an
overwhelmingly Christian movement. The campaign against slavery was invented by
Christians, led by Christians, taught, funded, staffed, and populated by
Christians. Virtually all the nationwide chapters of the American Anti-Slavery
Society were affiliated with churches. And virtually all the well-known
abolitionists were Christians.
Evangelical pastor John Newton,
evangelical parliamentarian William Wilberforce, and evangelical activists
Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp successfully led the campaign against
slavery in Britain.
In the U.S., the Puritan magistrates in Massachusetts (1646) and Rhode
Island (1648), along with all Americans in the Quaker denomination, forbade
slavery.
William Garrison began publishing America’s most influential antislavery
newspaper in 1831 after reading a Presbyterian minister’s book on
abolition.
Charles Finney, America’s foremost Christian leader in the early 1800s,
established the New York Anti-Slavery Society in his own church in 1833. He
forbade slaveholders from being members of his church, and he established
Oberlin College in 1833, the first college to welcome African-American
students. In 1852, he said, “Christian men of the North are all agreed that
Slavery is a great sin.”
Abolition leader Theodore Weld, “the most
mobbed man in America,” was a convert of Finney.
Arthur and Lewis Tappan, leaders in the
Congregationalist denomination, used their wealth to campaign against slavery.
The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the wife of a
Christian seminary professor.
African-American abolitionist Frederick
Douglass was a licensed minister who required his own children to read the
Bible each day.
Harriet Tubman was famous for her devout
Christian faith. And the list goes
on.
The American Christian population, it is
true, was shamefully slow to follow their Founder’s commands to love their
neighbors and to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated. And
a very small fraction of Christians treat people of color unkindly even today.
For all of this, we who follow Jesus are deeply embarrassed and sorry.
Of course, the anti-Christian voices of
our day are very quick to remind us that most early American Christians were in
favor of slavery. What these same voices fail to acknowledge, however, is that
most Christians were no longer in favor of slavery by the time of the Civil
War, and neither were most Americans, and this is precisely because Christians,
almost single-handedly, pulled off the magnificent miracle of changing the
world by abolishing slavery.
The facts of history strongly indicate
that the Christian faith should receive credit for being the true impetus
behind the abolition of slavery around the world.
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