Wasn’t Christianity Used to Defend Slavery?

The short answer: Yes. Some Christians used the Bible to defend slavery, and that is a real and shameful part of history. But other Christians, many of them formerly enslaved, used the same Bible to fight it, and they read it far more faithfully. The Bible teaches that every human being bears God’s image, and it condemns stealing people to sell them.

This is a question you deserve a straight answer to, not a dodge.

What really happened

During the Atlantic slave trade, millions of Africans were kidnapped, shipped across the ocean in horrific conditions and sold. Many of the people who profited were baptised churchgoers. In the American South, preachers wrote books arguing that slavery was in the Bible and so must be acceptable. Some claimed Africans were under the “curse of Ham”, though in Genesis Noah’s curse actually falls on Canaan (Genesis 9:25) and says nothing about Africa or skin colour. In 1807 a shortened Bible was printed for enslaved people in the British Caribbean that cut out most of Scripture, including passages about God setting slaves free.

That last fact tells you something. The slaveholders knew that the whole Bible was dangerous to them.

What the Bible actually says

The Bible was written in a world where slavery of various kinds was everywhere, and it doesn’t abolish it in a single verse. That’s honestly hard to read. But look at what it does say.

• It begins with every human being made in God’s image: “male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Not just free people. Not just one race. “From one man He made every nation of men” (Acts 17:26).
• God introduces Himself to Israel as a liberator: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).
• The law made kidnapping a capital crime: “Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession” (Exodus 21:16). That describes the Atlantic slave trade exactly.
• A runaway slave was not to be sent back: “Let him live among you wherever he chooses” (Deuteronomy 23:16).
• The New Testament lists “slave traders” alongside murderers and liars as people who break God’s law (1 Timothy 1:10).
• Paul sent the runaway slave Onesimus back to his master Philemon asking him to receive him “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 1:16).

Put that together and you get a book that was steadily pointing towards freedom: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The Christians who fought it

The movement to end the slave trade was driven largely by Christians. Quakers were among the first to refuse to own slaves. John Wesley called the trade a villainy. William Wilberforce, after he became a committed Christian, spent decades in Parliament fighting the trade until it was banned in 1807, and he heard, days before he died in 1833, that slavery itself would be abolished across the British Empire.

Some of the bravest voices were people who had been enslaved. Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped as a child, bought his freedom, became a Christian and wrote a bestselling account of his life that helped turn Britain against the trade. Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in America and wrote that he loved “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” while hating the slaveholding religion of the land. Harriet Tubman, a woman of deep prayer, went back into slave territory again and again to lead others to freedom.

They weren’t reading a different Bible from the slaveholders. They were reading it honestly.

What this means for you

You don’t have to defend Christians who did evil. Jesus didn’t. When people use Scripture to justify cruelty, they’re twisting it, and other Christians are right to say so. The lesson for us is uncomfortable but important: Christians can be blind to the sins of their own time. So we need to keep reading the whole Bible, listening especially to those who are suffering, and asking where we might be wrong today.

Think about it: If Christians in the past were blind to something so terrible, what might Christians today be missing? How could you find out?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of John Wesley — this chapter shows Wesley’s love for the poor turning into one of the earliest attacks on the slave trade by a leading English churchman, and tells how, days before his death, he wrote to William Wilberforce urging him not to give up. Start with chapter 21, “The Poor and the Slave”.