Abolition and social reform

People whom Christian nations bought and sold

From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, the ships of Christian nations, Portugal and Spain, Britain, France and the Netherlands, carried vast numbers of Africans across the Atlantic to the plantations of the Americas. Many died in chains below deck, and the survivors and their children became property for life. The church did not keep its hands clean. In 1710 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church of England's missionary society, inherited the Codrington plantations on Barbados and worked them with enslaved people General Synod of the Church of England, Motion of apology for the slave trade. Many pastors and theologians defended slavery from Scripture; their arguments and the Bible's answer are taken up in Does the Bible approve of slavery?.

There were other voices in the same centuries. Among Catholics, the Jesuit Peter Claver (1580–1654) spent his life at Cartagena caring for those who came off the slave ships and called himself the slave of the slaves, and in 1839 Pope Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade. The Quakers, the Society of Friends, saw early that buying and selling people was sin. In 1688 Quakers at Germantown in Pennsylvania wrote a protest against slavery, and John Woolman (1720–1772) went from house to house among his fellow Friends urging them to free their slaves.

The law said, "Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death" (Exodus 21:16), and Paul named "slave traders" among those the law condemns (1 Timothy 1:10). John Wesley called such men "The worst of all thieves" Wesley, and asked whether most of the traders in Africans in his own day were not exactly that.

Britain: Newton, Equiano and Wilberforce

John Newton (1725–1807) was the captain of a slave ship. He turned to God in a storm in 1748, yet went on sailing slave ships for several years; after illness ended his life at sea he became a Church of England minister and wrote the hymn of grace the whole world still sings. In 1787 a society for the abolition of the slave trade was founded in London, chiefly by Quakers, with the Anglicans Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, and the next year Newton published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, bearing witness to the slave ships' horrors, ashamed of his own part in them.

In 1789 Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), once enslaved, published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He wrote that he was born in Igboland, in what is now Nigeria, and was seized as a child, though some scholars have found records naming Carolina as his birthplace, and historians disagree. Having bought his freedom and become a Christian, he described families torn apart at a slave sale in Barbados and asked: "O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?"

William Wilberforce (1759–1833), a member of Parliament, came to an evangelical faith around 1785, and when he thought of leaving politics, Newton urged him to serve God where he was. From 1789, when he first described the trade's horrors to the Commons, he brought motions to end it again and again and lost. His A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians of 1797 sets real Christianity against the nominal religion of the upper and middle classes, and shows the faith that drove him. Friends gathered around Clapham, south of London, among them the banker Henry Thornton, the writer Hannah More and Zachary Macaulay, prayed, gathered evidence and wrote alongside him, and in March 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade. Isaiah tells of the fast God chooses:

Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke?

Isaiah 58:6

The trade ended; slavery remained. Around Christmas 1831 in British Jamaica, Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved deacon of a Baptist church, led a plan to stop work that grew into a great rising; it was crushed, and he was hanged the next year. Baptist missionaries from Jamaica went home and told Britain what they had seen, and opinion moved. In July 1833 Wilberforce heard that the bill to abolish slavery would pass the Commons, and died three days later; in August Parliament made it law throughout the British colonies. Yet the act paid large compensation to the slave owners, and the freed had to work on for their former masters for some years as ‘apprentices’.

America: the slaveholders' religion and the Christianity of Christ

In the United States slavery grew with the cotton plantations, and the churches divided over it. The Methodists split north and south in 1844, and in 1845 Baptists in the South, insisting that slaveholders be eligible as missionaries, formed the Southern Baptist Convention. The churches Black Christians had built (see The Great Awakening and the Methodists) spoke out against slavery, and the Methodist Harriet Tubman led many enslaved people north to freedom. Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895), who had escaped slavery, in the appendix to his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) distinguished the slaveholding religion of his land from the Christianity of Christ, and wrote that because he loved the one he hated the other.

Paul had written, "slave nor free … you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The war that followed the southern states' secession began in 1861 and ended in 1865; after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery throughout the United States. Even after emancipation, discrimination and segregation lasted long, and many churches accepted them. In 1995, at its 150th anniversary, the Southern Baptist Convention resolved to repent of the defence of slavery at its founding and of long years of racism, and sought the forgiveness of African Americans Southern Baptist Convention, Resolution on Racial Reconciliation. The General Synod of the Church of England, too, apologised in 2006 for the church's part in the slave trade General Synod of the Church of England, Motion of apology for the slave trade.

For the church today

Evangelicals and Quakers of the same age gave themselves to other reforms as well: Robert Raikes opened Sunday schools in 1780 to teach working children to read the Bible, the Quaker Elizabeth Fry visited women in prison, and Lord Shaftesbury fought for laws that shortened children's hours in the factories.

Two things in this story should stay with us. Many Christians, reading the same Bible, defended the buying and selling of people for their own profit and custom; and among those who led in putting it right were those who had suffered it, like Equiano, Samuel Sharpe and Douglass. The heroes had shadows too: Newton went on sailing slave ships after his conversion, and Wilberforce is criticised for supporting laws that kept British workers from combining. The prophet's word still stands before the church:

But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos 5:24

Of that stream Wesley writes, "Bearing down all that opposes it" Wesley. Justice is not finished by one law; it flows when the church confesses its own sin and will not keep silent before the trafficking and discrimination of today. The next lesson, The Korean Catholic Church: beginnings and persecution, goes to Joseon in the same years, where scholars came to faith by reading books.

Practice