Chapter Ten

Guess what?

Slavery was first officially banned in Christian Europe.

Pagan Greece and Rome were built almost entirely by slave labor.

Anti-Christian writers of the Enlightenment categorized slavery as a necessary price to be paid for civilization.

The Old Testament is unquestionably antislavery.

Of the many lies told about the Bible and Christianity, perhaps the most egregious concerns the global institution of slavery. Some pretend that slavery was virtually mandated in the Bible or was a creation of the Christian Church. Others insist that the Christian churches, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, gave their blessing to the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and it was only the pagan “freethinkers” of the French Enlightenment who led the abolitionist cause.

Still others, such as Ninth Circuit justice John Noonan, claim that the Roman popes only condemned slavery very late, in the 1890s, long after secular society had denounced it; and therefore, since the Catholic Church allegedly “changed” its teaching on slavery, it can and perhaps should change its teaching on other controversial issues, such as contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce. All of these contentions are demonstrably false and don’t even pass the “desk reference test”—meaning anyone willing to open a one-volume desk reference can discover their falsity.

The truth is that the savage cruelty of slavery has existed on a massive scale all over the world for most of human history—and still exists today in parts of the Islamic world and Asia—and yet it was first officially banned, by force of law, only in Christian Europe. No culture on earth questioned the morality of slavery until Christians did the questioning.

The golden age of ancient Greece and Rome, celebrated by the “enlightened” pagans of the eighteenth century, was built almost entirely by slave labor: By some estimates, fully one-third of Roman society was made up of slaves who could be killed at will by Roman householders.

Socrates and Plato could sit around in symposia, drinking wine and discussing the essence of justice, largely because their civilization was maintained by an unimaginable number of slaves.

When the tyrant Demetrius Phalereus ordered a census of Attica, circa 317 BC, he found that there were 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics (resident aliens) and 400,000 slaves. That means there were nineteen slaves supporting every philosophizing Greek citizen in Attica. Herodotus, writing 150 years earlier, estimated that helots (Spartan slaves) outnumbered citizens in Sparta by seven to one.¹

Far from condemning such cruelty, many of the anti-Christian writers of the Enlightenment, such as Edward Gibbon (c. 1737–1794) and David Hume (c. 1711–1776), justified it as a regrettable but necessary price to be paid for civilization.

Slavery was, Gibbon said, “almost justified by the great law of self-preservation.” According to the atheist hero David Hume, “the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) [are] naturally inferior to the whites”²—a sentiment that the Enlightenment’s great moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant, cited approvingly.

“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling,” Kant declared, in his 1764 essay, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. “Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries . . . not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.... So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.”³

Today, secular liberals continue to lie to themselves that it was the atheist “free thinkers” of the Enlightenment who created the abolitionist movement, but better-informed historians know the truth: That while a few Enlightenment writers like Rousseau and Thomas Paine wrote abolitionist pamphlets, the people who actually risked life and limb to end slavery were almost all, without exception, devout Christians. They included Dr. Beilby Porteus (the Anglican bishop of London), classicist and biblical scholar Granville Sharp, deacon Thomas Clarkson, and Tory member of Parliament William Wilberforce, Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell, and the U.S. Baptist journalist William Lloyd Garrison.

Scripture Says

“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 7:21

Compare what David Hume and Kant said about black slaves to what prominent Christians in this period said:

The Catholic Abbé (Guillaume Thomas François) Raynal (1713–1796): “He who supports slavery is the enemy of the human race.”

Quaker leader George Fox (1624–1691): “Consider with yourselves, if you were in the same condition as the poor Africans are, who came strangers to you, and were sold to you as slaves; I say, if this should be the condition of you or yours, you would think it a hard measure; yea, and very great bondage and cruelty.”

Founder of Methodism John Wesley (1703–1791), who witnessed slavery firsthand in the West Indies: “Slavery is the sum of all villainies and the vilest that ever saw the sun.”

American Quakers such as Levi Coffin risked their lives and those of their children running the Underground Railroad that helped more than 100,000 slaves escape their plight. When asked why he did it, Coffin replied, “The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book.”

Another abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor,” the Methodist minister Calvin Fairbank, was caught helping slaves escape and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, which included numerous floggings.

“Secular elites of our day, or for that matter their counterparts of a century or two centuries ago, like to think that all human progress is due to secular reason,” is how political writer Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report sums up the politically correct delusions of the academy vis à vis slavery, commenting on David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. “But Christian belief in the moral equality of every person played a key role in inspiring the Britons and then the Americans who led the fight to abolish the slave trade and then slavery.”

Who Said It?

“To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself that, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ and to preach therefrom that, ‘in the sweat of other man’s faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind, can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.”

Abraham Lincoln

Slavery in the Hebrew Bible

Ironically enough, modern atheist critics who would indict the Bible as supporting or tolerating slavery actually make common cause with Southern racists who tried to do the same thing—and were easily and roundly refuted by nineteenth century biblical scholars and theologians.

As noted above, what we today call slavery was practiced on a massive scale throughout most of human history—including during the periods in which the Old and New Testaments were written. The word “slave,” however—meaning a person who is considered to be the personal property of another human being, without any legal rights—can be understood in a variety of ways.

For example, we talk about “wage slaves” today without really meaning that a salaried employee of a large corporation is a true slave. Most modern people think of slavery in terms of the African slave trade, in which innocent people were essentially kidnapped and sold as servants or field workers. This is slavery in the true meaning of the word.

But in the ancient world, the most common source of slaves was prisoners of war or criminals. Slavery was actually seen as a more humane way to treat conquered populations or criminals than the popular alternative—which was wholesale slaughter.

One of the reasons Rome evolved into a slave society was because of its conquests. Many slaves were prisoners of war. Others were criminals for whom slavery was an alternative to harsh, debilitating, or even fatal punishment.

It was also common for poor people to sell themselves into slavery as a way to survive starvation, to pay off a debt, or even, in New Testament times, to advance their careers. To become a slave of a prominent person, in the late Roman Empire, was more a kind of apprenticeship than what we think of today as slavery.

Those who blame the Bible for all of society’s ills like to say that the Old Testament law’s regulation of servitude (whether voluntary or involuntary) was tantamount to approving it. But just as the Mosaic Law’s regulation of divorce did not signify the Bible’s overall approval of the practice—“‘I hate divorce’, says the Lord, the God of Israel” (Mal 2:16)—so, too, the biblical law’s regulation of various forms of servitude did not signify approval but merely the recognition of slavery as a worldly reality.

Just as Jesus proclaimed that it was due to “the hardness of their hearts” that Moses permitted divorce, so, too, the Mosaic Law on servitude can been seen as a concession to the hardness of human hearts in the brutal world of the ancient Near East.

Many societies, rightly or wrongly, attempt to regulate commonly perceived evils, from prostitution to drug abuse, without thereby endorsing or approving what is regulated. The biblical law regulates what should happen when two Israelites fight and one is injured but does not die (Ex 21:18–19)—without thereby approving of, or giving sanction to, assault and battery. It merely recognizes that, when people fight, as they do, certain legal sanctions and consequences should apply.

In actual fact, the biblical law’s treatment of involuntary servitude (or slavery) was almost always to moderate it—and differs substantially from other Near Eastern law codes. In the ancient Near East, as in Rome and Greece, slaves had few, if any, rights. A master could buy or sell his slave at will. He could maltreat, beat, or even kill him.

If the slave was a woman, girl, or young boy, the master could use the slave for his sexual pleasure at will—and if a slave girl became pregnant, the master could kill her child without giving her a second thought.

In the Bible, however, such cruelty was not tolerated.

For example, while in the Code of Hammurabi anyone who harbors a runaway slave is to be put to death (16), the Old Testament law actually commands that such slaves be given refuge: “You shall not turn over a slave [who has escaped] to his master. He shall dwell with you in your midst . . . you must not ill-treat him” (Dt 23:16–17).

Not only that, but anyone who abducts someone and sells him or her into slavery—as the brothers of Joseph did in Genesis or the slave traders of the eighteenth century did—was to be put to death (Ex 21:16).

The Hebrew word commonly translated as slave, eved (plural: avadim), comes from the root avad, which means “to work.” Some Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible, therefore, prefer the term “bond-servant” or “bondsman” because, as we shall see, a Hebrew eved was not really a slave in the modern understanding of the term.

“Great confusion is made, and false impressions given, even by antislavery men, in calling the bond-service of the Mosaic economy slavery, when in reality it was something else,” wrote the abolitionist clergyman, the Reverend John Fee, in his 1851 classic The Anti-Slavery Manual. “It was simple bond-service, in which children were bound [apprenticed] by parents until they should be ‘of age,’ and in the case of adult servants, they bound themselves for a term of years, as we shall show. And if it is insisted that these servants were placed in the hands of the Jew without their wills being consulted, we shall show that the Jew might not hold the servant so—in involuntary servitude. Mere bond-service is not slavery.”

The anti-slavery clergy of the nineteenth century pointed out that, if any form of involuntary servitude can be justifiably called “slavery,” then almost every society on earth practices slavery—for a man conscripted into military service in a draft or forced to perform jury duty should be called a “slave.”

In fact, a Hebrew could become a bondsman or slave by order of a court (Ex 22:2) or as payment of a debt (Lv 25:29), but he or she must be freed at the end of six years (Dt 15:12) or at the Jubilee Year (Lv 25:40):

And if a countryman of yours becomes so poor with regard to you that he sells himself to you, you shall not subject him to a slave’s service. He shall be with you as a hired man, as if he were a sojourner; he shall serve with you until the year of jubilee. He shall then go out from you, he and his sons with him, and shall go back to his family, that he may return to the property of his forefathers. For they are My servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt; they are not to be sold in a slave sale. You shall not rule over him with severity, but are to revere your God (Lv 25:39–42).

What’s more, when a Hebrew “slave” was freed, the Bible says, “you shall not send him away empty-handed, but shall weight him down with gifts from your flock and threshing floor and wine press, in proportion to the blessings the Lord, your God, has bestowed upon you. For remember that you too were once slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord, your God, ransomed you” (Dt 15:13–15).

You have to have a real ax to grind against the Bible to think that the Old Testament takes a benign view of slavery.

Alien slaves—almost certainly prisoners of war—were indeed slaves for life as were their children (Lv 25:46)—although they, too, had the option of purchasing their freedom or being redeemed by a relative at any time before Jubilee (Lv 25:47–55). However, the Mosaic Law makes clear that, while such slaves were the personal property of their masters, they were regarded as human beings, not mere chattels, and were not to be mistreated.

For one thing, the punishment for killing a slave was the same as that for killing a free person—death (Ex 21:20). This differed dramatically from the practice throughout the ancient world.

In the Hebrew Bible slaves were also expected to participate in all the religious duties of a master’s household, including observing the Sabbath rest (Ex 20:10) and all holy days (Dt 11:16). Fee, the author of The AntiSlavery Manual, calculated that this meant Hebrew “slaves” had fully one-third of all their time free—far more than a modern worker!

Not only that, but a slave could inherit a master’s entire estate if there was no heir, as Abraham lamented in Genesis 15: 3; could buy his or her own freedom (Lv 25:29); and could own property (2 Sm 9:10). In 1 Chronicles 2:34, the Hebrew Sheshan, in order to continue his family line, married his daughter to his Egyptian slave Jarha.

There are special regulations in the Mosaic Law for female slaves. Whereas sex slaves were common throughout the ancient Near East and in the Islamic world—with all the degradation and cruelty that this implies—this was forbidden under the Mosaic Law.

If an Israelite saw a beautiful woman among captive prisoners of war, he was permitted to take her into his home. She was to be given at least a full month to mourn for her lost family, to shave her head and wear mourning clothes. At the end of that time, the Israelite could then have sexual relations with her—but if he did so, she became his legal wife, not a slave (“you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife,” Dt 21:13).

And if the Israelite later decided to divorce her, she left a free woman. “You shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion” (Dt 21:14).

Needless to say, ancient Roman aristocrats or Muslim pashas had no such scruples about the sex slaves in their harems.

Finally, the overarching theme that runs throughout the Hebrew Bible—from the Torah through the Deuteronomic History and the prophets—concerns how God ransomed the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Over and over again, the Hebrew Bible insists that Israelites must not mistreat their avadim (servants/slaves) because “you were once slaves [avadim] in the land of Egypt.”

Slaves and slavery in the Gospels

“Jesus never even comes close to expressing disapproval of the enslaving of other human beings, and many statements attributed to him reveal a tacit acceptance or even approval of that inhuman institution,” says atheist crusader Austin Cline, regional director for the Council for Secular Humanism.

Such sentiments are typical of atheist assaults on the Bible—and have become so common that even many Christian writers parrot them.

But the modern world’s attack on the “toleration” of slavery in the Bible, especially when it comes to the New Testament, is a monumental display of historical anachronism.

A Book Atheists Want to Burn

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success , by Rodney Stark; New York: Random House, 2005. Like living within a civilization that takes reason, freedom, democracy, and capitalism for granted? You can thank Christianity and the Bible.

By the New Testament era, a “slave” (Greek: doulos) often should be thought of more as an apprentice or indentured servant. The truth is that, by the first century, slavery in the Roman Empire was such a broad social and legal category it described everything from captured prisoners of war fighting to the death in gladiatorial combat to government bureaucrats who were educated at the state’s expense. Slaves could be brutalized quarry workers or famous philosophers (Epictetus), artists, physicians, and administrators (for example, M. A. Felix, the procurator who was Paul’s judge in Acts 23:24, was a slave).

It was not uncommon for a first-century urban Roman slave to live apart from his master, to own his own home and have a family. Some slaves even worked for businesses other than those of their masters and received a regular wage (part of which went to the master). Plus, by the first century slavery was no longer for life. Most slaves were set free before their thirtieth birthday and many received Roman citizenship.

Some slaves actually did not want manumission (freedom) and would beg their masters to delay their freedom until they had saved more money—and masters, for their part, often wanted to free their slaves sooner because of the expense of feeding and sheltering them. (The high cost of feeding hungry slaves is a common motif in Roman literature.)

This is the context, which modern critics of the Bible predictably ignore, in which St. Paul tells the Corinthians “If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity” (1 Cor 7:21).

But what about Jesus? What did Jesus say about slavery?

The answer is: Very little.

What about Jesus?

From the Gospels, it’s clear that Jesus assumed slavery was a fact of life—just as he apparently assumed taxes, the Roman occupation, prostitution, and torture were facts of life because he mentions all of them.

The Gospels do not record Jesus denouncing the Roman occupation—despite what some liberation theologians try to say—but that does not mean that he approved of Roman rule, only that opposing Roman rule wasn’t what he was all about. The Gospels never record Jesus publicly condemning torture or the Roman practice of crucifixion, but it is doubtful that he was an enthusiastic advocate for either. This is why the “argument from silence”—which is the mainstay of atheist polemics against the Bible—is such an obvious violation of the rules of logic.

In his parables, Jesus spoke of “slaves” and “masters” very matter-offactly, but a careful student of the Bible would pay attention to which Greek word was actually being used in any given passage—and would realize that Jesus himself, who likely spoke Aramaic, would not have used any of those words in his actual teaching.

The Gospels actually use four different Greek words that are sometimes all translated as “slave” in English but which actually had different connotations:

Doulos—the most common, comes closest to what modern people think of as “slave.” It is the normal Greek word for slave and is used in the parables frequently when Jesus is describing a situation involving a master and a slave.

Diakonos—from which we get the word deacon—means a servant or waiter. In Matthew 20:26, when Jesus says that “whoever would be great among you must be your servant”—the Greek word used is diakonos (servant), not doulos (slave).

Pais—which means “boy” or “youth.” In the synoptic Gospel story of the Centurion’s servant, many translations have the Centurion tell Jesus that his “slave” is sick but the word actually means “boy,” with the implicit meaning of slave. Later in the story, the Centurion tells Jesus that he is a man under authority, used to getting and giving orders, and says that when he tells his slave (doulos) to do something, he expects him to do it.

Oiketes—a word used only once in the Gospels and which means “household servant” or “household slave.” The Greek word oikos means “house,” and oiketes means a worker who is part of a household. In Luke 16:13, many English translations say “No one can serve two masters,” but the literal Greek means “No household servant can serve two masters.”

Many English translations, such as the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the New International Version (NIV), translate the word doulos as servant—because, as we saw above, the historical and social reality of first-century Palestine really does make “servant” a more accurate rendition of what was meant than “slave.” However, even in the parables we get a glimpse of the cruelty that even well-treated Roman slaves had to face.

For example, in the parable of the Unmerciful Servant/Slave, Jesus is asked by Peter how often he is to forgive his brother if he sins against him?

Up to seven times? Peter asks. Jesus replies that no, Peter is to forgive his brother seventy-seven times—and then tells the story of the Unmerciful Doulos:

A servant owed his master a great sum of money, but was unable to pay. His master ordered that he, his wife, and his children all be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees and begged for patience. The master took pity on the servant and cancelled his debt. The servant left and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a day’s salary. He began to choke the servant and demanded that he pay back what was owed. The fellow servant fell on his knees and begged for patience. But he refused and had the man thrown into prison. Word traveled quickly and got back to the merciful master. He was not pleased. “You wicked servant (doulos),” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

There are a number of aspects of slavery in New Testament times that we can deduce from this passage. The first is that douloi, as Jesus or the evangelists understood them, were in some sense real slaves. They could be bought and sold along with their wives and children. That was just a fact of life in first-century Palestine. Second, the douloi could conduct business transactions themselves.

Of the forty-three instances in the Gospels in which the various noun forms of doulos is used in the Gospels, virtually all of them in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are in parables. In the Gospel of John, the evangelist has Jesus using the word doulos in ordinary conversation—as when he says that “a slave (doulos) is not greater than his master” (13:16) or “no longer do I call you slaves (doulous) for the slave (doulos) does not know what his master is doing” (15:15). When Jesus speaks of slavery, it is almost invariably in the context of a parable—with the combination of gritty realism and moral idealism that was characteristic of Jesus’s stories.

Slavery in the writings of St. Paul

Many “progressive” critics of the Bible hate the apostle Paul because he says things they dislike—for example, that fornicators, adulterers, and homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9) or that women should be silent in church (1 Cor 14:34). Talk about politically incorrect!

Concerning slavery, Paul’s attitude seems to be that it doesn’t matter much—whether you are slave or free, Greek or Jew, male or female, isn’t important.

Writing to the newly founded Christian community in Galatia, in modern-day Turkey, Paul says precisely this:

Now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise (Gal 3:23).

In essence, what Paul is saying is that, for the new Christian community, the old distinctions of legal status, race, and sex no longer matter. Later on in his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that “you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”

It’s true that in two instances Paul counsels slaves to “be obedient to your masters” (Eph 6:4 and Rom 13:1). Writing to the Christians in Corinth, for example, he says: “Were you called [to be a follower of Christ] while a slave? Do not worry about it; but if you are able also to become free, do that. For he who was called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor 7: 21–24). Do not become slaves of men? That hardly sounds like an unqualified endorsement of slavery.

That Paul did not approve of slavery as an institution can be seen in his first letter to Timothy (1:10), where he includes “slave traders” (literally “men-stealers,” andrapodistais) among the “lawless and disobedient,” “godless and sinful,” “unholy and profane.” In this, he was following in the tradition of the Mosaic Law—which, as we saw above, punished “man-stealing” with death.

The slavery that concerns Paul is not social but spiritual: “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he wrote to the Galatians (5:1). “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery”—by which he means a reliance upon the law for salvation.

In this spirit Paul wrote to Philemon about a “runaway” slave, Onesimus, whom he has met in prison. Paul says that he is sending “my child Onesimus”—whom he calls “my heart”—back to Philemon, who is obviously a fellow Christian.

Paul asks Philemon to accept Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially by me.” And the apostle urges Philemon to “welcome him as you would me.”

In fact, if Onesimus owes Philemon money, Paul says, “charge it to me.” Paul’s letter to Philemon is often alleged to “prove” that Christians supported slavery. But anyone who actually reads this short letter will see that this is not Paul’s point at all: It is that slaves and masters are brothers in Christ.

Prior to the legalization of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in 313 AD, the early Christian church was powerless to outlaw slavery and was often brutally persecuted itself.

Yet even before Christianity was legalized, and at considerable risk to their own lives, many Christian leaders spoke out forcefully and courageously against the barbarisms of the pagan Empire, including slavery, the gladiatorial games, and the common practices of abortion and infanticide.

For example, we know from St. Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians and from the Sherpherd of Hermas, both written about 95 AD, that some of the early Christians used to sell themselves into slavery in order to use the money to ransom others from bondage or to buy them food.⁴

And once Christianity was legalized, St. Gregory of Nyssa, writing in 385 AD, publicly scolded slave-owners: “You condemned a person to slavery whose nature is free and independent, and you make laws opposed to God and contrary to His natural Law,” St. Gregory thundered. “For you have subjected one who was made precisely to be lord of the earth, and whom the Creator intended to be a ruler, to the yoke of slavery, in resistance to and rejection of His divine precept. Have you forgotten what limits were given to your authority? Your rulership has been limited to the extent, namely, that you may only have ownership over brute animals.”⁵

Unlike pagan Greece and Rome, Christian Europe did not rely on slave labor. So liberal critics have to point to something else. It’s true that some church councils and popes supported life imprisonment and hard labor for captured prisoners of war and spies—particularly against Muslim forces threatening to invade Europe.

The Third Lateran Council of 1179, for example, decreed that slavery should be the penalty for those who “provide the Saracens with arms and wood for helmets, and become their equals or even their superiors in wickedness and supply them with arms and necessaries to attack Christians.”

But in this, the penalty of slavery differs little from what a U.S. court might impose—life imprisonment in a federal prison—for a spy or someone aiding Muslim terrorists in attacks against Americans. Retired navy warrant officer John A Walker, Jr., for example, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985 after he was convicted of spying for the USSR. Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst, was convicted in 1986 of spying for Israel and is still serving his sentence in prison today.

This is the same basic situation that led Pope Nicholas V, on January 8, 1455, to authorize Portuguese military forces, in their battle to the death against Muslim pirates and invaders, to reduce “all Saracens and other enemies of Christ . . . to perpetual slavery” (Dum Diversas) when captured in battle. These are the two texts cited most commonly by anti-Christian crusaders who claim the Christian church “tolerated” slavery.

But when it comes to slavery as it is usually understood—the kidnapping of innocent persons for sale as personal property—the popes were among the earliest and most forceful of those calling for its complete and total abolition, beginning with Pope Pius II’s condemnation of the slave trade as early as October 7, 1462.

Here are just a few statements by the popes against the slave trade:

Eugene IV: Sicut Dudum, 1435:

They have deprived the natives of their property or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery (subdiderunt perpetuae servituti), sold them to other persons and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them . . . .Therefore we . . . exhort . . . every kind among the Christian faithful of whatever state, grade or condition, that they themselves desist from the aforementioned deeds, cause those subject to them to desist from them, and restrain them rigorously. And no less do we order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex that, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their pristine liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands . . . who have been made subject to slavery (servituti subicere). These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money.

The Bible in American History, Part X

“The fundamental basis of this nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teaching we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don’t have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in the right for anybody except the state.”

Harry S. Truman

Paul III: Sublimus Deus, 1537:

Therefore, we, . . . noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men and are not only capable of the Christian faith, but, as has been made known to us, promptly hasten to the faith and wishing to provide suitable remedies for them, by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though they are outside the faith—who shall hereafter come to the knowledge of Christians have not been deprived or should not be deprived of their liberty or of their possessions.

Gregory XVI: In Supremo, 1839:

The slave trade, although it has been somewhat diminished, is still carried on by numerous Christians. Therefore, desiring to remove such a great shame from all Christian peoples . . . and walking in the footsteps of our predecessors, we, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery (in servitutem redigere) Indians, Blacks, or other such peoples. Nor are they to lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not humans but rather mere animals, having been brought into slavery in no matter what way, are, without any distinction and contrary to the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold and sometimes given over to the hardest labor.

As the social scientist Rodney Stark has written, it is only the profoundly anti-Christian biases of many liberal academics that blind them to the central role that Christianity—and the Bible—held in the abolition of the slave trade and eventually of slavery itself.

“Although it has been fashionable to deny it, antislavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe,” Stark writes, in his magisterial For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2003). “When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently ‘lost’ from history until recently.”⁶