Christian views on slavery

[52] In a paper published in Evangelical Quarterly, Kevin Giles notes that, while he often encountered the claim, "not one word of criticism did the Lord utter against slavery"; moreover a number of his stories are set in a slave/master situation, and involve slaves as key characters.

One notable example where church mission activities in the Caribbean were directly supported by the proceeds of slave ownership was under the terms of a charitable bequest in 1710 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

[80][81] In 340 the Synod of Gangra (in present-day Turkey) condemned certain Manicheans for a list of twenty practices including forbidding marriage, not eating meat, urging that slaves should liberate themselves,[82] abandoning their families, asceticism and reviling married priests.

[1] Theodore of Mopsuestia In Commentary on Philemon 2.264.10–14, he comments that some Christian ecclesiastics of his day 'would write with great authority that a slave who joined us in the faith and hastened to the true religion of his own free will should be freed from slavery.

Moreover, quoting partly from Paul the Apostle, Chrysostom opposed unfair and unjust forms of slavery by giving these instructions to those who owned slaves: " 'And ye masters', he continues, 'do the same things unto them'.

In the early 13th century, the Sachsenspiegel code of the Holy Roman Empire harshly condemns slavery as "a violation of man's likeness to God", giving legal form to the Christian vision of human rights that was already part of the German culture.

During the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that, although the subjection of one person to another (servitus) was not part of the primary intention of the natural law, it was appropriate and socially useful in a world impaired by original sin.

[102] According to John Francis Maxwell: Aquinas ... accepted the new Aristotelian view of slavery as well as the titles of slave ownership derived from Roman civil law, and attempted — without complete success — to reconcile them with Christian patristic tradition.

Enrique IV of Castile threatened war and Afonso V appealed to the Pope to support monopolies on the part of any particular Christian state able to open trade with a particular, non-Christian region or countries.

They were followed in 1766 by a senior Church of England figure, William Warburton, the Bishop of Gloucester and close friend of anti-slavery champion Lord Mansfield, who, in a "courageous" stand, publicly condemned the practices of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel whose possessions included 2 slave plantations in Barbados that they had been bequeathed in 1710.

So that I still ask, who can reconcile this treatment of the negroes, first and last, with either justice or mercy?Although some abolitionists opposed slavery for purely philosophical reasons, anti-slavery movements attracted strong religious elements.

Prominent among these abolitionists was Parliamentarian William Wilberforce in England, who wrote in his diary when he was 28 that, "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and Reformation of Morals.

Some sermons of the famous English preacher Charles Spurgeon were burned in America due to his censure of slavery, calling it "the foulest blot" and which "may have to be washed out in blood.

Speakers at huge rallies and editors of conservative papers in the North denounced these newcomers to radical reform as the same old 'church-and-state' zealots, who tried to shut down post offices, taverns, carriage companies, shops, and other public places on Sundays.

"[This quote needs a citation] A postal campaign in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS)—founded by African-American Presbyterian clergyman Theodore S. Wright—sent bundles of tracts and newspapers (over 100,000) to prominent clerical, legal, and political figures throughout the whole country, and culminated in massive demonstrations throughout the North and South.

He therefore decided that he would "aid in preserving the public peace" by refusing to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South himself, with the new Postmaster General Amos Kendall affirming, even though he admitted he had no legal authority to do so.

[142] In the 1850 Bull of Canonization of Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pope Pius IX branded the "supreme villainy" (summum nefas) of the slave traders.

With the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew, he organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition.

In his address Pope Francis said: ...Inspired by our confessions of faith, we are gathered here today for an historical initiative and to take concrete action: to declare that we will work together to eradicate the terrible scourge of modern slavery in all its forms.

[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.... the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.Historian Claude Clegg writes that at the time of the Second Great Awakening, there was a movement to create a narrative of a mutually beneficial relationship between slaves and masters.

He (Satan) has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians ... be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking the Catholic faith.

Slaves who were members of different ethnic groups displayed few religious commonalities, despite the fact that they came from the same continent; those Africans who were sold to American slavers shared little of their traditional cultures and religions.

Although the war began as a political struggle over the preservation of the nation, it took on religious overtones as southern preachers called for a defense of their homeland and northern abolitionists preached the good news of liberation for slaves.

[178] Harriet Tubman, who was a liberator with the Underground Railroad, warned "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing"—i.e., emancipating the slaves.

Popular songs such as John Brown's Body (later The Battle Hymn of the Republic) contained verses which painted the Northern war effort as a religious campaign to end slavery.

Throughout the remainder of the 19th century and throughout most of the 20th the Southern Baptist Convention continued to protect systemic racism and opposed civil rights for African-Americans, only officially and definitively renouncing slavery and "racial" discrimination with a resolution in 1995.

[187][188][189] As Catholics only started to become a significant part of the US population in the 1840s with the arrival of poor Irish and southern Italian immigrants, who congregated in urban (non-farming) environments, the overwhelming majority of slaveowners in the US were white Protestants, the elite.

[190] We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this trade in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in these Apostolic Letters.... [We]... admonish and adjure in the Lord all believers in Christ, of whatsoever condition, that no one hereafter may dare unjustly to molest Indians, Negroes, or other men of this sort; or to spoil them of their goods; or to reduce them to slavery; or to extend help or favour to others who perpetuate such things against them; or to excuse that inhuman trade by which Negroes, as if they were not men, but mere animals, howsoever reduced to slavery, are, without any distinction, contrary to the laws of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and doomed sometimes to the most severe and exhausting labours.

O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition.

Chief Walkara, one of the main slave traders in the region, was baptized into the church, and he received talking papers from Apostle George A. Smith that wished him success in trading Piede children.