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| Discourtesy of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. |
Precisely because the questions are intended to be
rhetorical, the New Atheist isn’t looking for an answer — it’s supposed to be a
slam-dunk “gotcha”, and anything you say is mere thimble-rigging, a pathetic
attempt to rationalize an obvious error. Moreover, the proper response requires
something of a full history lesson, for which many people have no patience …
especially if it challenges cherished myths about ante-Internet European
history.
That the
Bible was never intended to be treated as the sole infallible source of
Christian beliefs is not a sufficient answer in itself. To understand where
the defect lies, first ask yourself this question: How, after thousands of
years in which the propriety and naturalness of slavery was taken for granted,
did the West come to believe it wrong? I’ll give you a couple of clues: 1) It
had nothing to do with the rise of the scientific method; 2) it also had
nothing to do with the Renaissance and the so-called “Enlightenment”.
It’s very tough for Americans to remember that we were
almost the last of the modern First World countries to abandon slavery, and
then only as a byproduct of a horrific struggle that decimated a generation of
young men. It’s tougher to remember that people convicted of felonies can still
be forced to work by the state, as a stated exception in the Thirteenth
Amendment, or that international treaties still conditionally allow forced
labor by prisoners of war. But only history wonks like me know that, from about
1100 until 1492, slavery as we understand it was all but dead in Christian Europe,
hanging on mostly in the borderlands between the Christian and Moslem worlds.
The Bible doesn’t say in so many words that slavery is wrong.
But the Bible also doesn’t say that slavery is right or morally neutral. In
fact, in contrast to contemporary Greco-Roman and Arabic practices, the Law of
Moses set limitations and obligations on Hebrew masters; as Fr. Angel Sotelo
expressed in a recent conversation, the Law “introduced morality and ethics
into the slave business.”
For instance, Hebrew slaves were automatically set free after
six years’ service unless the slave refused to be set free (Exodus 21:2-6); in
a jubilee year, once every fifty years, all slaves were freed (Leviticus
25:10). Stealing a free man and either using or selling him as a slave earned
the thief and the “master” death sentences (Exodus 21:16; cf. Deuteronomy
24:7). Women sold into slavery as wives or concubines had to be treated as
wives or daughters-in-law or be released (Exodus 21:7-11); women taken as
captives in war had to be allowed to mourn for a full month before her master
could espouse her, and could not be sold to someone else if they didn’t please
(Deuteronomy 21:10-14). Slaves rested on the Sabbath as did their masters
(Exodus 23:12); if they escaped and sought shelter with someone else, asylum
was granted (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). Slaves who were damaged or disfigured by their
masters were set free by that fact (Exodus 21:26-27).
Slaves and foreigners were to be treated with mercy and
justice because, as God continually reminds the Israelites throughout the Law, “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt”
(Deuteronomy 24:22). As the old Catholic Encyclopedia pointed out, “In Jewish society
the slave was not an object of contempt, because labour was not despised as it
was elsewhere. No man thought it beneath him to ply a manual trade. These ideas
and habits of life the Apostles brought into the new society which so rapidly
grew up as the effect of their preaching.”[1]
Moreover, when Christ fulfilled the Law and opened up
salvation to the Gentiles with his sacrifice on the cross, all sorts of
distinctions became irrelevant: “God shows no partiality, but in every nation
anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35).
Thus could St. Paul tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female;
for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Thus also could he
recommend to Philemon that the latter receive his runaway slave Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, … both in the flesh and
in the Lord” (Philemon 16).
“Primitive Christianity did not attack slavery directly; but
it acted as though slavery did not exist.”[2]
G. K. Chesterton, naturally, put the matter better:
Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He started a movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle thought eternal.[3]
Chesterton’s point — and mine, here — is that Christianity
from its beginning wasn’t concerned with formal legal institutions but rather
with the behavior of individual people towards one another. As an example: it
doesn’t matter if the law permits me
to sleep with a prostitute; I must not
sleep with her, because the transaction is dehumanizing and depersonalizing. As
you change hearts, communities and societies change in their wake. The key,
then, to undermining and eventually destroying slavery always lay in teaching
the intrinsic infinity of value of every person in the eyes of God, against
which standard such a degrading practice must eventually become intolerable.
This is not to say that the Church never worked to weaken or
end the institution through legal channels. Prior to the Edict of Naples (312),
the pagan Roman emperors had started to place some protections on slaves; with
the accession of the Christian emperors, more changes came. The barbarian invasions
and the collapse of the Western Empire set this movement back; yet wherever the
Cross went in search of converts, slavery receded. Matters were complicated and
hampered as converts bestowed land on the Church complete with serfs; yet even
this failed to stop the erosion of the institution under Church pressure.
In fact, it was no accident that slavery resurged back to
life in the wake of the Protestant revolt and the Enlightenment. The
classically educated could point back to Greco-Roman society (which, as
historian Régine
Pernoud has successfully argued, the literati of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries took such pains to emulate);[4]
meanwhile the Protestants could wave off the writings of the Church Fathers,
several church councils, and all papal bulls in favor of a cherry-picked Bible.
This is not to say Catholics didn’t participate; sadly, many
did, especially the Spanish and Portuguese. The point is, however, that, to the
extent that secularists and Protestants did rise in opposition to slavery, they
were (as one writer once phrased it) “working off their Catholic capital”. It
was when the so-called “enlightened” turned away from the religious authority
of the Catholic Church to pursue their own visions of Truth that they found
justification for resurrecting the age-old institution of slavery in all its
barbaric hideousness. And even Robert Bolt’s historically unfaithful screenplay
for The Missionary couldn’t help but
admit that the precepts of the Church forbade slavery.[5]
This is something to remember, because irreligion doesn’t
come packaged with a moral code. Because the irreligious are free to pick the
moral principles they live by, they’re free to stop believing slavery to be
wrong. If human history — especially recent history — is any guide, that’s
precisely what will happen once the West’s Catholic capital is finally spent.
What’s the takeaway? The
Bible doesn’t have to say that slavery is wrong because it teaches us that
mistreating others is wrong, whether it’s
legally permissible or not. If you don’t get that, then you won’t get
why slavery is wrong.
[1] Allard, P. (1912).
“Slavery and Christianity”. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved April 13, 2014 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Chesterton, G. K. (1953). The Everlasting Man. San Francisco: Ignatius Press; p. 195.
[4] Pernoud, R. (2000). Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths. (Nash, A. E., trans.) San Francisco: Ignatius Press; chap. 2 and passim.
[5] Madrid, P. (1999). Pope Fiction. Encinitas, CA: Basilica Press; p. 202.
