187. On Slavery

John Dickson (0:00)

Hey, just a heads up that we are dealing with slavery in this episode, both the ancient form and the modern scourge. It's distressing stuff. So please stay safe.

Esau McCaulley (0:14)

And they said, well, marriage, family, and the elimination of violence takes the power, ultimately, from the master and places it somewhere else.

So they argue that collectively, those things were meant to lead Christians to becoming abolitionists. They say that it's impossible to practice slavery as it existed in the record record one world and actually follow all the teachers and commands of Jesus. The important part about this, though, is they didn't say you should Christianize slavery. That's not what they said. They ultimately said the abolitionists said you just can't do it.

Sam Harris (0:58)

The Bible, in my view, can't be the real repository of our moral wisdom in any sense. Because when you go to read it, you are forced to ignore certain passages or reinterpret them rather aggressively to conform to what you now in the 21st century have every reason to believe is good or a direction worth going socially. So it is just an inconvenient fact that slavery is endorsed in the Bible. It is explicitly endorsed in the Old Testament and it is certainly not repudiated in the new. Jesus told slaves to serve their masters and to serve their Christian masters especially well. So there is no place in the Bible where you can get a truly compelling case against slavery because the creator of the universe clearly expected slavery to be a humanistic...

John Dickson (1:48)

Well, except for Abilene. That's Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist, philosopher and outspoken atheist offering a very common complaint about the Bible. Christianity can't claim any moral authority because the Bible itself endorses the evil of slavery. In a speech titled A Designer Universe, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg declared, and I quote, With or without religion, good people can behave well, and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion. The statement is often quoted in skeptical circles. In fact, it even comes on a T-shirt. Weinberg was in particular talking about the evil of American slavery. He makes the point that preaching in defense of slavery, allowed good people of the South in America to feel comfortable, perpetuating this dehumanizing practice. Weinberg mentions an anecdote from Mark Twain, the famous American author, who described his mother as a genuinely good person, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in Antebellum, Missouri, she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. So his point is that the Bible makes good people do bad things.

Well, you might imagine that I don't entirely agree with that. It's undeniable that Christians have supported slavery throughout history. I'd just like to point out that good secular humanists have supported slavery through history as well, and I hope I'm not being impolite in greater proportions. A strong historical argument can be made that while Christians and secular thinkers could both be found defending slavery, the organized movement to abolish slavery was overwhelmingly Christian in inspiration, in rhetoric and in leadership. Now, I know it's not as cool, but I reckon the more truthful t-shirt that would be wearable would say for bad people to turn good, that takes religion, or at least Christianity.

Still, we shouldn't rush to William Wilberforce and the Christian abolitionists so quickly we gloss over the uncomfortable fact that Christians really did use the Bible to keep slaves in their place.

Secular thinkers defended slavery using science, philosophy, politics, economics, and sheer pragmatism, but there's no doubt many Christians provided sort of moral cover by quoting passages from the Old Testament that seemed to endorse slavery and passages from the New Testament that seemed to just at the very least put up with slavery. So here's the thing. What do we do about slavery in the Bible and slavery today? I'm John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to underieve ourselves and let the truth out.

Esau McCaulley (6:16)

I mean, there's a bunch of things that people kind of get confused. It's because one of the things I would say is that when people compare the two slaveries, they tend to think that they're comparing American slavery to Christian slavery. But that's actually not what's happening. You're talking about American race-based chattel slavery to slavery in the Greco-Roman Empire.