On Slavery and Christianity

Megan has this exactly right:

[T]he northern church played a causal role in the abolition movement. There is no reasonable reading of history that attributes a similar causal role to the southern church. Indeed, the cause runs the other way--there was considerable selection pressure on southern churches, with churches that spoke out against slavery (there were some) seeing their membership transfer to more amenable congregations.

Think of it this way: if religious people had not been driven by their faith to come out against slavery, the abolitionist movement would have, at best, come into being much later and much weaker than it did. Had the the southern churches said nothing about slavery, would slavery have collapsed? It's unlikely to have had any effect. I am well aware that the southern church provided revolting justifications for slavery, but it's very hard to read the relevant history and conclude that these did much to strengthen an institution that had very strong self-interest behind it, as well as the universal human tendency towards xenophobia. If you hadn't been debating ridiculous religious texts, you would have been debating equally ridiculous eugenic claims, or cultural arguments. People have a powerful way of finding reasons to believe what they want to.

I'm an Adam Smith kind of guy in the sense that I believe voluntary cooperation and contract to be a superior form of economic organization when compared to its alternatives, not just (or even) in the moral sense, but also in its ability to generate wealth. But this is a non-obvious point; indeed it was considered controversial at the time Adam Smith made it. In contrast, the belief that it is in a man's own interest to force someone else to do his work for him is intuitive, even if that intuition is in error. So the bottom line is that I don't need a reason to engage in slavery; I need a reason not to.

The absence of such a reason was why slavery was a common feature of the world until relatively recently. If your tribe, nation, or empire had the power, it could conquer and enslave the populace of other tribes and nations. And why not? After all, they would (and often did) happily do the same to your tribe or nation given the opportunity.

My understanding of history is that non-African slavery began to recede in the Renaissance era, not because of moral enlightenment, but because European nation-states became strong enough to resist the efforts of others (specifically, the Ottomans) to enslave them. This left Africa as the last and only source for Muslim and, later, European slave merchants to procure slaves. That the slavers were Muslim and Christian were, in this context, an accident of history.

What was not an accident was how the African slave trade, and specifically the trans-Atlantic slave trade, came to an end. The African nations never became strong enough to resist their own enslavement as the European nations did; on the contrary, they happily sold each other into foreign slavery, and still practice it in some quarters. No, the end of the slave trade was a specifically European Christian (and, even more specifically, an English Protestant) undertaking, as the life of William Wilberforce demonstrates. Yes, there were some secularists who opposed slavery, but the notion that the abolitionist movement was animated by their contribution is a tortured version of history.

Megan and Ta-Nehisi have been going back and forth as to the moral justification for slavery, discussing the role in which concepts of "humanness" and "personhood" played in sustaining (or not) the institution. Without being a historian of slavery, I doubt such considerations played much of a role. Slavery was simply what the strong (we) did to the weak (you). Why would the strong (we) clutter this simple paradigm with abstract nonsense about "personhood"? Who cares?

Nonetheless, the usual suspects wish to indict Christianity, or at least the Christian church, with being somehow responsible for slavery (and particularly African slavery) because it occurred on the Church's watch, and they point to the "Curse of Ham" as providing its theological justification.

I have commented before that the "Curse of Ham" was always theologically weak and historically ignorant, but according to its Wikipedia entry it has a long pedigree. Secularist wet-dreams to the contrary, I am skeptical of the claim that the church was ever so all-powerful that slave interests had to approach it, cap in hand, seeking its permission to engage in the slave trade. More likely, it was either more-or-less instructed to approve of it, or those clergymen willing to approve it for their own reasons did thereby profit at the expense of those who did not.

But as I said, I'm not an historian, and I could be wrong, so allow me to stipulate, for the time being, that the church played the role that its enemies accuse of it.

It should be obvious that the only reason this would matter is because the church generally upheld the ethic that being among the strong was not the end of the argument, that "might" did not by definition make "right". The church held that morality was transcendent and universal: it was given by God and binding on all men in their relations with all other men. To the extent that it gave slavery (and much other evil) a pass, it was granting a waiver of this general rule. That it should not have done so is now obvious to everyone, including Christians, but we should not mistake cause and effect: this would not be significant except for the general rule.

Which brings us to abortion.

Here, again, the strong (pregnant women and their abortionists) do to the weak (the unborn child) as they will, and powerful political and social interests permit them. Why clutter this simple paradigm with abstract notions of "personhood"? Who cares?

Answer: the heirs of William Wilberforce.