DEBATENATE

Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“Christianity was used to justify slavery”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

Yes, slaveholders quoted the Bible. They had to twist it to do it. Exodus twenty-one makes kidnapping a person to sell him a capital crime, and kidnapping is what the Atlantic slave trade ran on. Paul sent the runaway Onesimus back to Philemon and asked him to receive the man no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother. You can't hold a man as property and as your brother for long. Then look who ended it. William Wilberforce, a devout evangelical, fought in Parliament for years until Britain banned the slave trade in eighteen oh seven. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, loved what he called the Christianity of Christ and hated the slaveholders' religion. You'll say whole churches defended it. They did, and their own book condemned them. So where did abolitionists get the idea that every slave bore God's image? A counterfeit doesn't disprove the currency.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Scripture condemns what American slavery was built on, kidnapping and selling human beings, and Paul tells a slaveholder to treat his slave as a brother.

    Exodus 21:16 makes kidnapping a person to sell him a capital crime, and First Timothy 1:10 lists enslavers among the lawless. In Philemon, Paul asks a slaveholder to receive his returning slave no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother.

  2. The people who suffered under slaveholder religion could tell it apart from Christ. They rejected the counterfeit, not Christ.

    In his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass wrote that he loved the pure Christianity of Christ and hated the slaveholding religion of the land.

  3. Christian conviction drove the abolition of the British slave trade.

    Evangelical William Wilberforce campaigned for years in Parliament until the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Major denominations like the Southern Baptists actually split over defending slavery, so this wasn't a few bad apples. It was mainstream Christianity.

Nate: That's true. The Southern Baptist Convention formed in eighteen forty-five in a split over slavery, and in nineteen ninety-five it formally repented of that history. When a church repents, it's admitting it betrayed its own book.

What he grants the other side

Slaveholders and whole denominations did use the Bible to defend slavery.

The lines

Sources

  1. The Bible, Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10; Genesis 1:27; Philemon 15-16
  2. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Appendix (1845)
  3. Parliament of the United Kingdom, Slave Trade Act (1807)
  4. Southern Baptist Convention, Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention (1995)

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