/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

There had of course long been a widespread opinion that slavery was not a deisrable condition - particularly for oneself. Frequently Christians had felt that being a Christian and being a slave were not compatible, so that it was an act of Christian charity to free slaves. But that is very different from condemning the whole institution - hardly surprisingly, since the christian Bible, both Tanakh and New Testament, unmistakably takes the condition of slavery for granted. Quite apart from its general connivance with slavery's existence, the Bible contributed a useful prop to the institution, in th story of the drunkenness of Noah. A drunken and naked Noah was humiliated when his son Ham saw him in this state, and subsequently Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his descendants to slavery at the hands of Ham's elder brothers, Shem and Japheth. Apart from its popularity among medieval Western preachers, who saw in the story a pleasingly ingenious allegory of Christ'as Passion and human redemption (Michelangelo uses it thus on the Sistine Chapel ceiling), this story was regularly trotted out by slave traders both Christian and Muslim to justify enslaving Africans, children of Ham. It is in early Muslim sources that the bible's listing of many black races among Ham's descendants was first extended into an aspect of Noah's curse - the first Muslims were familiar with black slaves from across the Red Sea. This interpretation ignored the fact that the Bible indicated that the curse was actually pronounced on Canaan and not his voyeur father (a baffling shift which Genesis does not explain), and further that Canaanites were not actually among the black races of the ancient world.

The link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late, and it was ironically via Judaism. Just when the Portuguese were beginning to take their share of the African slave trade, in the late fifteenth century, a celebrated Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac ben Abravanel, suggested that Caanan's descendants were black, while those of huis uncles were white, and so all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis 9 gives no support to this belief; nevertheless Abravanel's innovative exercise in biblical hermeneutics now proved extremely convenient for the same Iberian Christians who persecuted his own people, and later fo rchristian slavers everywhere. Other Christians followed a different line in Biblical interpretation not found in any Western Bible, but traceable right back to a reading in the Syriac Peshitta version of the story of Cain in Genesis 4.1 - 16: according to this Syriac take on the biblical text, black people actually descended from Cain because when God had punished Cain for killing his brother Abel, the 'mark' he gave the murderer was to blacken his skin. It was reasonable to suppose that this applied to all Cain's descendants. Neither biblical approach was calculated to raise the status of people defined as black.

It took original minds to kick against the authority of sacred scripture. What was needed was a prior conviction in one's conscience of the wrongness of slavery, which one might then decide to justify by a purposeful re-examination of the biblical text - it was an early form of the modern critical reconsideration of biblical intention and meaning. It was possible for people in the Puritan tradition to do so: that independent-minded Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall, who had recently had the courage to make a public apology for his part in the Salem witch trials, was one of the first. In 1700 he wrote a pamphlet highlighting a comment in Mosaic Law which had not been much considered before: "He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death' (Exodus 21.16). Coolly Sewall's pamphlet then demolished the standard Christian wisdom of his day on slavery, argument by argument. Back in Europe, it was possible for the Enlightenment to motivate people to argue for abolition, as part of the general Enlightenment urge to question ancient certainties. The Encylopedie's entry on 'Commerce' furiously attacked the slave trade, while in his De l'Esprit des Lois (1748) one of the most respect authors of the French Enlightenment, the Baron de Montesquieu, himself an inhabitant of the great slaving port of Bordeaux, like Sweall pitilessly dissected the various arguments justifying slavery, biblical and Classical, and showed their inadequacy.

By contrast, other intellectuals of the Enlightenment contributed substitute rationales for slavery, because they began studying world racial categories, and it became eminently possible to use this new 'science' as the basis for finding certain races inferior in characteristics and ripe for enslavement - especially if one despised the creation stories of Genesis, which did give all humankind a common ancestry in Adam and Eve. So both Christianity and the Enlightenment could lead Westerners in opposite directions on slavery. Far less equivocal than the philosophes were Pennsylvania Quakers, whose tradition enabled them to be less reverent towards biblical authority. They anticipated Sewall by twelve years, with a petition against slavery in Pennsylvania from some Dutch Quakers in 1688. Their brethren at that stage chose to ignore the initiative, but, tempted in the early eighteenth century to join their fellow colonists in using the growing number of slaves to sustain their Quaker haven, the Pennsylvania authorities now displayed their usual consecrated cussedness and came down firmly against slavery of any sort in 1758, the first Christians corporately to do so.

One Pennsylvania Friend at the heart of these discussions, Anthony Benezet, devoted himself to publicizing the Pennsylvania decision, and he drew on the transatlantic character of international Protestantism. His message was heard in the mother country - in particular, by an Anglican gentleman, Granville Sharp, who entered prolonged and enthusiastic correspondence with him. Sharp came to hate slavery as much as he hated Roman Catholicism, an equal threat to British liberty in his eyes, and he revealed a genius for organized campaigns against both. Grandson of a High Church Archbishop of York who had been patron to John Wesley's father, Sharp was a prolific biblical critic, turning his scriptural scholarship to constructing a case against slavery which would have a biblical base. Selectively he gathered from a scripture a message in favour of equality and freedom, looking past the bible's package of assumptions about the inequality of society. Yet Sharp's greatest triumph came not actually through any biblical argument but by his success in backing an English lawsuit in 1772, 'Somersett's Case'. In the judgement on this case, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield found in favour of an escaped slave, James Somersett, against his master, a customs officer of Boston, Massachusetts. Mansfield refused to accept that the institution of slavery existing in eighteenth-century England could be linked to the historic legal status of serfdom or villeinage recognized in English common law: logically, therefore, slavery had no legal existence in England. Thus the useful rigidity and traditionalism of English law became the basis for a swelling campaign against slavery, just as it had brought the Jews back to England in 1656 after three and a half centuries.

Mansfield's judgement in Somersett's Case proclaimed that only a decision of Parliament could legalize modern slavery in Britain. Now it became the ambition of one of Sharp's fellow Evangelicals, William Wilberforce, to do precisely the opposite, and legislate first the British slave trade and then slavery out of existence throughout the growing British Empire. Wilberforce's campaigning energies and charisma made him the dominant figure in his circle of Evangelical reformers, who gained the nickname 'the Clapham Sect' from a village south of London which was then a pleasant rural home to Wilberforce and other wealthy Evangelicals. His struggle was long and bitter, but in 1807 he achieved his first goal. When he and his friends realized that the abolition of the slave trade had not led to the weakening of slavery as they had hoped, they widened their horizons to persuade the British Parliament to cut off the institution at its root. It was only after Wilberforce's retirement from Parliament that, in 1833, the old man heard his friends had won that second victory, receiving the news just three days before he died. Like Charles Darwin later, the often-reviled reformer was now given national honour by burial in Westminster Abbey.

The long struggle to abolish slavery remained throughout a curious collaboration of fervent Evangelicals, who were mostly otherwise extremely politically conservative, with radical children of the Enlightenment, many of whom had no great love of Christianity, though some were enthusiastic Unitarians (as Socinians were now more courteously known). Such radicals saw an end to slavery as part of the war on oppression of which the French revolution also formed a part. So in 1791, before that Revolution became a liability rather than a potential ally for English radicals, the adventurous Whig MP Charles james Fox - whose colourful private life certainly did not make him a natural ally for morally censorious Evangelicals - spoke forcefully in Parliament in support of one of Wilberforce's earlier unsuccessful motions against 'this shameful trade in human flesh'. 'Personal freedom,' he insisted, 'must be the first object of every human being… a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal'.

There has been nearly a century of argument as to whether slavery's abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West's realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. It is understandable that descendants of enslaved Africans should tire of hearing complacent British repetition of the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W.E.H. Lecky, that the 'unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations'. Yet after all the debate, and the research it engendered, Lecky seems vindicated": abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations. Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties, spearheaded by British Evangelicals who made it a point of principle to uphold biblical certainties. Many of their fellow Evangelicals berated them for their inconsistency and few of their allies in mainland European Protestantism showed much sympathy for their project.

It is true that other moral dimensions nuance Lecky's judgement. The ethical imperative in the circle of Sharp and Wilberforce was part of a new self-confidence and imperial assertiveness on the part of Britain, taking shape even as its North American empire was ripped in two. A direct outcome of the abolitionist movement was one of the earliest British colonies to extend the Crown's territorial ambitions beyond coastal trading forts outside America and India: Sierra Leone in West Africa. Inaugurated in 1792 after a badly conceived false start in the same area five years before, this was a cooperation between the indefatigable Evangelical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, his ex-naval officer brother John and a West African - an Egba prince who in enslavement had taken the name Thomas Peters and then regained his freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence. The venture tried to learn lessons from a second previous failed colony of 1775 on the ominously (though coincidentally) named Mosquito Coast of Central America. That had been a partnership between an English businessman and another formerly enslaved African-American, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography had become a transatlantic best-seller, especially among Evangelicals, and who became one of the advisers to the new Sierra Leone scheme. The Mosquito Coast venture involved using enslaved Africans to make it commercially viable, with only a vague prospect that financial success would bring them freedom: that strategy was very far from abolitionism and the slaves sought to escape, all drowning in the attempt.

There was now no question but that the Sierra Leone colonists who started arriving in 1792 should be Africans to whom freedom had been restored, either liberated on the West African coast or shipped back from the Americas complete with Protestant Christian values. Thomas Peters had his own ideas as to what those values might be, and he had the temerity to demand more political rights for his black fellow settlers than Englishmen would have enjoyed back home. Against him were ranged the English directors of the Sierra Leone Company, who as in the Mosquito Coast venture linked 'the true principles of Commerce' to 'the introduction of Christianity and Civilization', and who crushed uprisings by kindred spirits to Peters after his early death. Yet Peters's fellow colonists who shared his spirit of independence and self-reliance had the advantage that the tropical climate made even shorter work of British administrators than it did of returned African-Americans. the new venture soon developed a hierarchical pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population, who, like the inhabitants of Canaan three millennia before, had not been given any say in God's territorial gift to these new Children of Israel. It was an unhealthy imbalance in which the seeds of modern troubles were sown for Sierra Leone; the later American initiative in founding an entirely independent West African state of Liberia (from 1822) suffered from the same problem.

Sierra Leone did not make money for its proprietors, but it did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, from the many Protestant denominations it hosted. Its Krio language, a creative development of English, soon served as a lingua franca throughout the region. The colony was also an interesting sign to imperial strategists that European African colonial possessions might usefully extend beyond scattered coastal outposts. From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, a British naval squadron which intercepted slave ships and freed their captives. The British government was not unaware that this was a useful part of the war effort against the commerce of the Napoleonic Empire, but the work did not stop with Napoleon's defeat. The navy now combined a moral campaign with the steady extension of British influence. Evangelicals had produced this result, and their continuing agitation sustained British commitment - which, perhaps surprisingly, extended to the British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the salve trade. Out of this moral crusade emerged the potent idea that the British Crown was a partner with its subjects in the worldwide enterprise of spreading Christian civilization - a theme as useful to imperial subjects as to imperial government.

This is an excerpt from the book "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Oxford Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. It is from a section of the book entitled "To Make the World Protestant (1700 - 1914)"…

Happy black history month!