don’t forget, the fight against slavery, certainly in britain, was lead by christains under a church banner in the 1800s
couldnt you say slavery is still, in a way, alive today…? kind of like anyone in debt to a big corporation like a bank or a cc company is pretty much putty in that corporations hands… if they dont repay that debt in the allotted time, very bad things can and do happen… to repay that debt you have to work really hard and give them all of your money… hehe. of course thats different i guess because no one forces you to use a credit card.
Slavery IS alive and well today, but not in the way you mean. See This site, and this one.
This site says:
FWIW, there’s a good book on this subject by Eugene Genovese entitled A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South.
You also have to remember that some (or even many or most, is my impression) of those slaves being referred to in the NT had sold themselves and possibly their families into slavery to pay off debts. We might call it “indentured servitude”, I think somewhat like the people who worked off their passage to America in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Remember that the OT concept of the year of Jubilee also required leased lands and slaves to be released every 50 years, at least if they were Hebrews:
Leviticus 25:39 If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave. 40 He is to be treated as a hired worker or a temporary resident among you; he is to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. 41 Then he and his children are to be released, and he will go back to his own clan and to the property of his forefathers. 42 Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. 43 Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.
44 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
In my weekly Bible study group, we were just going over the passage in I Peter about slaves, and I think Peter’s point there was that if you find yourself in the position of a slave, and a being a Christian, no one will ever notice anything different about you if you only act in a Godly manner to those who are nice to you. Everyone does that. You’re in a tough spot, but maintaining your attitude even when mistreated is a sign that you’re different.
Someone brought up what I thought was a good point: Where would the civil rights movement in America have gotten if it had consisted of busting up lunch counters that had segregation policies? Would the populace at large have responded positively to national riots and bigot lynchings? I seriously doubt it. By maintaining their lawful behavior (except for quietly violating the unjust laws), the protestors gave a far more effective message.
I’ve heard also of ranchers in CA being charged with slavery when they went beyond threatening to turn in illegal aliens, and went to locking the gates and physically trapping workers on their land.
Define “back in the day”?
if it was renaissance or the enlightenment, xian scholars would have incorporated Aristotle who defended slavery as natural and just.
My cousin gives way too much time and effort to Wal-Mart. He told me recently that he’s realized the store manager has no incentive to promote him, because then he won’t be available to run around and put out fires by taking over sub-par departments and turning them around. I told him he needs to find another job, and then inform them that it’s the promotion, in writing, or he’s gone.
how do the descendants of those slaves come to terms with abandoning the religion of their ancestors and submitting to the religion of their former masters? Abandoning the Religion of your forefathers is bad enough, but to embrace the God of the slavers? Do you think those captives who made the trip in shackles would be proud of their descendants?
The slaves were not permitted to continue the practice of their religions. Specific intervention to prevent such worship and the intermixing of people from disparate regions who worshipped differently both were used to eliminate the original beliefs, so it is not as though they had a choice. And, of course, the religion of their slave holders was also the religion of the abolitionists.
How do your distant ancestors feel about your less distant ancestors capitulating to that same religion and casting off the old gods?
Do you have a citation for this? The idea that any but a tiny handful of American slaves were literate, and were given Bibles by their masters, sounds very unlikely.
>How do your distant ancestors feel about your less distant ancestors capitulating to that same religion and casting off the old gods?<
A moot question, since that didn’t happen; my family is Pagan.
I agree with Walloon. Sounds very unlikely.
You are not mistaken. Africans had slavery just like everyone else. Usually, tribes would raid each other to capture the slaves. When white slave traders arrived, it was easy enough for them to plug into this system. Whites didn’t usually go on raids themselves. I’m not trying to excuse or accuse anybody, BTW, just tell it like it was.
I remembered it from an American history textbook in my elementary school. Sorry, but after 35 years I can’t remember the title, author, or publisher.
The number of literate slaves must have been very small (nevertheless it was nonzero; there exist slave writings, some in Arabic) — but, I guess, the point is there were preachers hired for ministry to the slaves who would make use of the scripture in such a way as to delete anything that could be understood as liberationist.
[hijack]
Just out of curiousity, Mothchunks, where does your family hail from and have they been Pagans going all the way back to antiquity?
I’d just like to point out that slavery has been with any large and complex human society since the beginning until the past 200 years or so. A religion that condemned slavery wouldn’t get very far. Everyone condemns it now, but I submit that it’s not because of a greater concern for humanity – I think people would have liberated slaves earlier, but they needed someone to do the grunt work of everyday life. What liberated people was steam. It’s no coincidence, I believe, that people began emanicipating slaves shortly after the invention of an efficient steam engine. Slavery in the Southern American States was an anachronism even in its own day. Something to consider as we contemplate our present wars over resources and how to conserve. When someone once asked cartoonist/author/humorist Gahan Wilson what the future power source would be, he cynically answered “Slavery!”
History is full of instances wherein a captive people kept their faith alive through that captivity and into their liberation; in fact, their faith may be what gave them the strength to endure it.
True, when the people was kept together as a people. There was, however, no one, great, comprehensive “African” religion to which all the people imported as slaves adhered which they could use to reinforce their beliefs. Instead, they were broken up, mixed among others with different beliefs, and parceled out to individual farmers. The notion of massive plantations of hundreds of slaves living in a colony is propaganda created by post-Civil War Southerners to promote an ideal of the ante-bellum South that never quite existed. There were plantations with large groups of slaves, but the majority of slaves were bought in groups of one or two by small farmers–hardly conducive to keeping alive a religion when your fellow slave had rather different beliefs.
Even Judaism is a poor example for what you are claiming. There are a very few instances of Jewish groups remaining “underground” for many generations, but the common practice in abusing Jews was to confine them to shtetls and ghettoes (where their religion was a source of strength) or to exile them from the country.