Christianity and Slavery
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 06, 1999
Paganism and Slavery
In history, there have been two great periods of benevolence and social services. One was under the Pagan Roman Stoics, and the other in the secular and irreligious times of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—what might be called modern Paganism. In between, for almost two millennia, free men were treated as if they were slaves, and Christianity dominated society.
In the early period of Roman expansion, the rich patricians of Rome had armies of slaves on their estates and treated them like cattle. The Greek and Roman moralists saw the injustice of slavery and often denounced it. Epicurus had come near to condemning it three centuries before Christ when he described the slave as “a friend in an inferior condition”. The Epicurean, Hegesias, pronounced slaves as the equals of free men. Plutarch condemned it. Dion Chyrsostom, the stoic orator and friend of Trajan, denounced slavery as unjust.
Florentinus and Ulpian, the two famous Stoic jurists, declared that the enslavement of a man was against the law of nature, the supreme standard of the Stoic. Seneca insisted that the slaves were our “lowly friends,” and he pleaded repeatedly and nobly for them. Juvenal fiercely attacked inhumanity to slaves. By the first century, the Stoics openly condemned slavery and, by its end, slaves were protected by law. In the second century, Pliny shows us in his letters that slaves were treated humanely, even on provincial estates.
A callous remark Cato made about his slaves and often quoted as an example of their treatment was written down by a Pagan writer as an example of “a mean and ungenerous spirit”. In short, for the Pagan, it was untypical.
Public feeling was profoundly affected by the Stoic principle, and the grant or sale of freedom to them—was a daily occurrence. Even before Christ this liberation proceeded on so large a scale that the Emperor Augustus checked it for a time, on political grounds. The Stoics urged it and facilitated it, and the final term of the movement was certain.
If the Roman Empire had continued free of barbarians and Christians, slavery would have been abolished. Abolition would, as every American knows, have been a colossal task. It would have been far more terrible in Rome than in the southern States, because the entire empire rested to a great extent upon slave labour. The immense privileges even of the working class Roman free men were based upon the labour of slaves in the provinces.
Rome fell upon evil days just when the humanitarian message was accepted. The empire had long frontiers, particularly the immensely long northern frontier along the Rhine and the Danube that was constantly being tested by the incursions of wave upon wave of people from the east. Preserving this frontier eventually impoverished Rome. The third century was one of great poverty and confusion. In the fourth century there was a recovery, but the empire was bleeding to death, and new formidable forces were advancing upon it.
When, early in the fifth century, Rome fell, slaves found themselves free by default. They were not freed in any magnaniminious act by Roman Christians but as a by-product of the invasions of the empire by German Christians called barbarians by the Roman Christians.
The whole economic system was shattered. The invasions ruined the great slave-owners, the imperial estates and wealthy Romans. The barbarians slew or sent into exile the owners, destroyed the connexion of the provinces with Rome, and wrecked the administration of the estates. The slaves dispersed and there were now no Roman troops to prevent them.
The Gospel and the Slave
Not a word in the Bible from cover to cover condemns slavery. Apologists find desperate and inadequate defences of women but, with all their ingenuity, they cannot find a condemnation of slavery or war, two wrongs that must have been evident to the New Testament writers, if they were indeed egalitarian pacifists. Apologists have had the nerve to claim that Jesus did not condemn slavery because he knew it would ruin the empire! Christians believe these absurd lies. They believe anything at all if it is attributed to their God.
Translation is again helpful for Christian trickery. The word rendered “servant” in the parables of Jesus is in Greek the word for slave. In those times, servants were slaves, so Christians dilute the real word, “slave,” to their preferred word, “servant”. So it is that throughout the Bible, slavery is assumed, as are war, poverty and royalty, but seems not to be slavery. The New Testament writers say we must be as slaves to others but does not suggest that slavery is wrong. Religious hypocrisy is denounced in strong language but not slavery.
Christianity had nothing to do with abolishing slavery nor gaving the world education. The conditions of the lowest classes have been improved in spite of the Christian religion. Some of the Christian emperors of the fourth century issued edicts about the condition of slaves, though they are less important than the measures of the Pagan emperors. Yet the petty princes, bishops, abbots, and land-owners, the Christian masters of Europe continued to use slavery in the form of the feudal system. No Christian leader denounced slavery until the ninth century, when the age of slavery was long gone, and no Pope ever condemned slavery. In the Christian Middle Ages, the workers were far worse off. People were serfs, and serfdom was slavery without its perquisites.
The truth about Pagan slavery comes from Roman Pagan writers but not Christians. The only possible exception is that, around 370 AD, Gregory of Nyssa, in a work not definitely his, condemns the holding of any property. Since slaves were property, they must have been included. Not that this was any advance on the first Christians in the Acts of the Apostles who held everything in common, so that they also did not own property. That is because they were Essenes who neither held property or owned slaves.
A Christian, particularly a Catholic might cite Pope “St. Gregory the Great” who wrote in one of his letters that all men are “born free,” that slaves are only such by “the law of nations,” and that it is proper to free slaves. The letter was actually to two of his slaves, giving them their freedom. Noble? Pope Gregory was the greatest slave-owner in the world in the sixth century, but these two had inherited money and Pope Gregory hoped to swindle the money out of them. He did!
Enormous numbers of slaves tilled Church property, and when they had money he could persuade them to donate to God for their freedom, he freed them! That gave him a better idea. He announced that the end of the world would come in 600 AD, creating a panic of salvation fervour. He then advised land owners and slave owners to enter monasteries, first giving their property to the Church to be safe from the devil! This exceptionally brazen Christian scam of the gullible soon made the Church wealthy beyond imagination. The truth is Gregory never once condemned slavery and forbade any slave to become a cleric or marry a free Christian.
Where did the myth that Christianity freed the slave come from? It is a modern invention, like the idea that Christianity emancipated woman. In the main, Christians did not consider they had any welfare or charitable function until the nineteenth century. The business of Christianity was to save souls not to hand out dole, but the practice of some Christian institutions to provide charitable services, notably the monasteries that, taking their cue via the eastern monasteries from the original Essenes, offered hospitality to travellers and the sick—the origin of the word “hospital”. When the call for better social services arose, Christians, opportunistic as ever claimed they had started it.
These Christian purveyors of God’s Truth pretended that Christianity had been preceded by a dark age that it had enlightened. They then added the education of the masses, the rectification of morals, the introduction of charitable deeds and the emancipation of women and slaves to the list of enlightening acts.
The Churches and the Workers
In the year 1825 AD, when Christianity had ruled Europe for 1500 years, nine-tenths of the men of Europe, and a lot of the women, worked ninety hours a week, in filthy conditions, under brutal masters, for weekly wages of less than the price of a hardback book in present terms. Families lived mainly on bread, potatoes and water. Meat, milk, sugar, tea and fruit they rarely tasted. Less than 5 per cent could read or write. They were worse off than in earlier centuries of the Christian Era when, though impoverished, at least people lived on the land, in the fresh air, and had plenty of Holy Days off work each year.
Christianity not only did not emancipated the slaves, it set up the new slavery of serfdom, the slavery of Africans, and the wage slaves of the nineteenth century. It did not emancipated the serfs, it saw them thrown off the land to become human waste in squalid, overcrowded, disease ridden city cellars, compelled to work literally for crusts. Nineteenth century workers were brutalized and broken by excessive labour, excluded from knowledge and deprived of representation. Remind us, Christian, how Christianity emancipated mankind!
In the first flush of a new dawn upon the Dark Ages, the Moors of Spain had given Christendom a lesson in civilization. The sybarites of the Renaissance revived the long-buried civilizations of Greece and Rome. But, the Reformation had no effect on culture and social problems, seeking to concentrate people’s minds on the Bible and their immortal souls. The more our Christian “teachers” care for our immortal souls, the less they care about our mortal bodies.
To solve their problems, people had to rise up against the injustice and scare the landowners. Luther seemed concerned about exploitation but knew that the Bible ordered people to be “subject to all higher authorities” and he harshly condemned their actions. In July, 1624 AD, he wrote to the nobles of Saxony:
They must be crushed, strangled, and spitted, wherever it is possible, because a mad dog has to be killed.
Luther defended serfdom, saying that to abolish it would be “against the gospels, and robbery”. In later years he wrote:
All their blood is on my head, but I leave it to the Lord God, who bade me speak thus.
Melanchthon, second only to Luther in the German protestant movement, was no better. He said:
The Germans are always such ill-bred, perverse, blood-thirsty folk that they must be kept down more stringently than ever.
Christianity in fifteen centuries failed to improve conditions on earth and no priest or parson has been able to prove to us that, in compensation, it saved millions of souls from hell fire. In the three centuries after the Reformation, the condition of the workers grew steadily worse, whether in Protestant or Catholic countries. Then Rationalism appeared and the world made more progress in a century than it had done in fifteen. The majority of social idealists were Rationalists, though Rationalists were only five or ten percent of the population.
The first proper reforms came in the French Revolution. Despite the horrors of the later revolutionaries—purposely overemphasised nowadays to deter people from such thoughts—the beginning of the French Revolution was a beneficent movement led mainly by the Rationalists or Encyclopaedists. Voltaire had been concerned mainly with superstition, though he has a fine record of humanitarian service, but the later and more radical unbelievers, just before the Revolution, were strong humanitarians, Agnostics or Materialists. A Christian like the Abbi Gregoire was a rare bird amongst the revolutionaries. He was angrily disowned by the Church!
The workers of France were in a lamentable plight. Twenty million people lived on the land, owned only two-fifths of it, and bore an intolerable burden of taxes for Church and State. Two hundred thousand priests, monks, and nuns owned a fifth of the land, and paid no taxes. Yet all these exponents of the gospel had ignored the condition of the people and only a few joined in the Revolution. Not Christians but a handful of skeptics, Atheists, Materialists and Voltaireans gave the world the Rights of Man. It is fashionable to decry materialism but remember we live our only sure life in a world that is material. The godless people who accept this rather than pie in the sky, not the believers in the immaterial life hereafter, have got us every material benefit that we experience today.
In England, the men and women of most influence were Paine, Byron, Shelley, Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Erasmus, Darwin, Godwin, Hardy, Holcroft, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Hardy’s opinion about religion is not recorded. Priestley was a Unitarian, not then regarded as Christian. None of the others was a Christian. The education and science that they promoted gave us most of the means of improving conditions.
In Europe, Church and Royalty strangled the revolution. “The Holy Alliance,” or White Terror spread over the whole of Europe, workers returned to the slummy conditions from which they hoped for liberation, and no priest or minister of the gospel saw any reason to speak out for them. In America, another almost simultaneous revolution with similarly motivated leaders and similar objectives succeeded in throwing off the imperial yoke of Great Britain under their German royal family, now renamed the Windsors.
The reaction against the French Revolution hardened the Churches in their attitude toward reform. The bishops of the English Church opposed all reform. Lord Brougham, noticing that the Anglican Bishops in the House of Lords avoided supporting even a temperance bill, said angrily:
Only two out of six-and-twenty right reverend prelates will sacrifice their dinner, and their regard for their belly, to attend and vote.
Lord Shaftesbury, a bigoted Christian himself, also angrily said of the clergy, they were:
Timid, time-serving, and great worshipers of wealth and power… [And] I can scarcely remember an instance in which a clergyman has been found to maintain the cause of labourers in the face of pew-holders.
Yet, Shaftesbury himself vigorously opposed every reform movement except his own, in favour of children, and he was so hated by the workers of London that he had to barricade his house against them. One Wesleyan clergyman, Stephens, and late in the nineteenth century one Anglican clergyman, Kingsley, worked for reform, and their Churches persecuted them.
Only in the twentieth century did the conditions of the world’s workers improve after 1500 years of Christianity. That too was because of a revolution. The revolution in Russia is as much the reason of the improved conditions in Europe as the American revolution. Shaken to their boots, employers and landowners in Europe decided that discretion was the better part of valour and, rather than resisting every reform suggested for the workers, a policy of grudging concession was more likely to avoid a western revolution. In the British General Strike of 1927 AD, Churchill still ordered machine guns to the street corners, just in case.
So, the distribution of wealth and benefits remained in the hands of the owners, but the Churches lost members heavily, forcing a social welfare ideology on to Christian institutions. When reform was desperately needed but revolutionarily new, Christians stood four square against it, and the Papacy has the blackest record of all. As Christianity had done from the first, it murdered anyone who fought for the rights of man. When reform succeeded and workers were deserting the churches in millions, the clergy discovered a wholely new interest in people’s conditions on earth rather than elsewhere.
In more recent times, reform having consolidated, a generation has arisen that takes the enlightened situation for granted. If this means people are no longer vigilant to defend their social gains, the danger is a return to a dark age. Plenty of the Christian Right are already starting the reactionary movement.
Pay no attention to the sweet words of present day preachers. Drag off their smiling masks by looking at the record of history, but be ready to be shocked. Christianity has not shown it is love incarnate, but that it is a monstrous homunculus of lies, exploitation, degradation, abuse and murder. Take care!
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