Slavery, abolition and the church

"The Bible endorses slavery" is one of the most serious charges made against Christianity, and for an African reader it is not abstract. Millions of Africans were carried across the Atlantic by nations that called themselves Christian, and some of the ships had names like Jesus. At the same time, the movement that ended the trade was led largely by Christians, and one of Nigeria's greatest church leaders, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was a freed slave.

Both sides of that story are true. This article tries to tell both without flinching.

The Old Testament laws about slavery — debt servitude, the death penalty for kidnapping, the refuge for runaways — are treated in What about the violence in the Old Testament? Here the focus is the New Testament and the history of the church.

Slavery in the ancient world

Slavery was everywhere in the ancient world: in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China, and across Africa and the Americas. In Roman Italy, estimates of the enslaved share of the population range from around a tenth to a third; nobody knows exactly.

Roman slavery was not based on race. People became slaves through war, debt, kidnapping, birth or abandonment as infants. Slaves worked as farm labourers and miners, but also as teachers, doctors and estate managers. Freeing slaves — manumission — was common, especially in cities. None of that made it gentle: slaves had no legal personhood, could be beaten, sold away from their families and sexually exploited, and runaways could be branded or crucified.

This is the world in which the gospel arrived. Many of the first Christians were slaves.

What the New Testament says

The New Testament does not call for a slave revolt or a law to abolish slavery. A tiny, powerless movement in the Roman Empire had no means to do either, and a slave rising would have been crushed — as Spartacus's was. But it does several things that cut against the institution at its root.

It treats slaves as full moral persons. Paul addresses slaves directly in his letters (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25), as members of the church who make their own choices before God. In Roman law they were property; in the church they were brothers and sisters.

It puts masters under judgement. "Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven" (Colossians 4:1). Masters are told to "stop your threatening" because God shows no partiality (Ephesians 6:9). As John Stott notes in his commentary on Ephesians, this was radical: it denied the master's absolute power.

It declares equality in Christ. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Slave and master shared the same bread at the same table.

It encourages freedom. "Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.)" (1 Corinthians 7:21). The bracketed phrase is debated — some translate it "make use of your present condition" — but most modern versions read it as encouraging freedom.

It condemns slave-trading. In 1 Timothy 1:9-10 Paul lists those the law condemns: murderers, the sexually immoral, liars — and andrapodistai, translated "enslavers", "kidnappers" or "slave traders". This is the word for those who seized people to sell them. The Atlantic trade was built on exactly this.

It names human trafficking as the sin of Babylon. In Revelation 18:13, the list of Babylon's luxury cargoes ends with "slaves, that is, human souls". The traders weep at the city's fall.

Philemon

The clearest window is Paul's short letter to Philemon. Onesimus, Philemon's slave, had run away and met Paul, who led him to Christ. Paul sends him back with a letter asking Philemon to receive him "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16), to treat him as he would treat Paul himself, and to charge any debt to Paul's account. He hints that he expects Philemon to do "even more than I say" (Philemon 1:21).

Paul does not command manumission. But N. T. Wright, who opens his major study of Paul with this letter, argues that it shows Paul's whole theology at work: a new kind of community in which the categories of the old world can no longer hold. You cannot call a man your beloved brother on Sunday and sell him on Monday.

The early and medieval church

The early church did not abolish slavery, and some Christians owned slaves. But the direction of travel is visible.

Slaves were baptised, married in church, and honoured as martyrs: Blandina, a slave woman, was the most celebrated of the martyrs of Lyon in 177, and Felicity, a pregnant slave, died alongside the noblewoman Perpetua at Carthage in 203. Callistus, a former slave, led the church in Rome around 217. Churches used their funds to buy the freedom of slaves, and Roman law under Constantine allowed manumission to be declared in church.

Around 379 Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great theologians of the Trinity, preached a sermon on Ecclesiastes 2:7 — "I bought male and female slaves" — in which he condemned slave-owning outright. He asked what price could possibly be set on a being made in God's image, to whom God himself had given freedom, and he called owning people a form of arrogance against God. It is often described as the earliest surviving outright condemnation of slavery as an institution by any ancient writer, Christian or pagan.

Around the middle of the fifth century Patrick, who had been kidnapped from Britain as a teenager and enslaved in Ireland for six years, wrote a furious open letter excommunicating a British warlord named Coroticus, whose soldiers had murdered and enslaved Irish converts while they were still in their white baptismal clothes.

In the seventh century Bathild, an Anglo-Saxon girl sold into slavery in Francia, became the wife of King Clovis II and, after his death, regent. She used her power to ransom captives and to forbid the sale of Christian slaves. She died around 680 and was honoured as a saint.

Slavery gradually declined in western Europe, and by around 1100 it had largely disappeared from England and much of France. In 1102 a church council at Westminster under Archbishop Anselm forbade the trade in which people in England were sold like animals. Historians debate how much of this decline was due to Christian teaching and how much to economic change — serfdom, which tied peasants to the land, was harsh and widespread, and slavery continued around the Mediterranean, where Christians and Muslims enslaved each other's captives. Two religious orders, the Trinitarians (1198) and the Mercedarians (1218), were founded to ransom Christian captives, sometimes by members offering themselves in exchange.

The Atlantic trade and the church's complicity

Then it came back, on a new scale and with a new feature: race.

In 1452 and 1455 Pope Nicholas V issued bulls authorising the king of Portugal to reduce "Saracens and pagans" to perpetual servitude. The Portuguese were already buying captives on the West African coast. After 1492 the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and later the British, French and Dutch, built plantation economies on enslaved African labour.

Between the early sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, around 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships across the Atlantic, and around 10.7 million survived the crossing. These figures, from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, are the best scholarly estimates available.

Churches and Christians were deeply involved:

• Clergy and churches owned slaves. In 1710 Christopher Codrington left two plantations in Barbados to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church of England's missionary society. The enslaved people on them were branded on the chest with the word SOCIETY. The SPG kept them until emancipation in 1834. In 2006 the Church of England's General Synod formally apologised, and in 2023 the Church Commissioners acknowledged that an early church fund had invested in the slave-trading South Sea Company.
• Theologians defended it. Pro-slavery writers argued that Africans were descended from Ham and under Noah's curse — although Genesis 9:25 curses Canaan, not Ham, and says nothing about skin. In the American South, respected Presbyterian and Baptist ministers wrote long biblical defences of slavery.
• Scripture was censored. One notorious edition, printed in London in 1807 for use among enslaved people in the British West Indies, cut out most of the Bible, including the Exodus story; passages such as Galatians 3:28 were also left out.
• Churches split to protect it. American Methodists divided in 1844 and Baptists in 1845, when the Southern Baptist Convention was formed so that slaveholders could serve as missionaries. In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention formally repented of its defence of slavery and asked forgiveness of African Americans.

Africa's own part

Honesty also requires another fact, stated calmly. The Atlantic trade depended on African states and traders who captured and sold people — among them the kingdoms of Dahomey and Oyo, the Aro network in Igboland, and the trading states of Bonny and Old Calabar in what is now Nigeria. Europeans rarely went inland; captives were brought to the coast.

There was also a much older trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade, carrying Africans to North Africa, the Middle East and beyond for more than a thousand years. Estimates of its total size vary widely but run into many millions. In the nineteenth century the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria was one of the largest slave-holding societies in the world.

None of this reduces European guilt. It means slavery was a human sin, not one race's sin — which is exactly what the Bible says about sin in general (Romans 3:23). Nigerian Christians are well placed to say so, since both histories run through their own country.

The Christians who ended it

The movement to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself was overwhelmingly led by Christians.

The Quakers came first. In 1688 German Quakers and Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote the first known protest against slavery in the American colonies, appealing to the golden rule. Over the eighteenth century John Woolman and Anthony Benezet persuaded the Quakers to stop owning slaves, and the Society of Friends became one of the first religious bodies to require its members to free them.

Granville Sharp, an evangelical Anglican, took up the cases of enslaved Africans in England. In 1772 his campaign led to the Somerset case, in which Lord Mansfield ruled that an enslaved man in England could not be forcibly shipped abroad. In 1783 Olaudah Equiano brought him the news of the Zong, a slave ship whose crew had thrown over a hundred living Africans into the sea to claim the insurance.

The Abolition Society was founded in London in May 1787 by twelve men — nine Quakers, plus Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, who travelled tens of thousands of miles collecting evidence. Josiah Wedgwood's medallion of a kneeling African asking "Am I not a man and a brother?" became the movement's emblem.

William Wilberforce, a young MP converted in 1785, was persuaded by John Newton and others to stay in politics and use it. He introduced abolition bills year after year from 1789. With his friends in the Clapham group — Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay, Hannah More and others, all evangelical Christians — he organised petitions, pamphlets and a sugar boycott joined by hundreds of thousands of ordinary families. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act passed on 25 March 1807. The Act abolishing slavery itself in the British Empire passed in 1833, days before Wilberforce died.

John Newton had captained slave ships, and even after his conversion in 1748 he continued in the trade for several years without seeing the contradiction. Ordained in 1764, he wrote "Amazing Grace" — and in 1788 he published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, confessing his part in it and calling for its end. His story is a warning that conversion does not instantly open every blind eye, and a picture of what repentance looks like when it comes.

African Christians were not bystanders. Olaudah Equiano, who described himself as an Igbo from the Bight of Benin, kidnapped as a child, published his autobiography in 1789. It was a bestseller, and its argument is soaked in Scripture. (Some baptismal and naval records list him as born in South Carolina, and historians still debate his birthplace; his testimony to the trade itself is not in doubt.) Ottobah Cugoano, a Fante from the Gold Coast, published Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species in 1787, arguing from the Bible that the trade broke God's law and demanding immediate emancipation — a more radical demand than most white abolitionists then dared.

In America, Black churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Richard Allen, became centres of resistance. Frederick Douglass, after escaping slavery, wrote in the appendix to his Narrative (1845) that he loved "the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ" and therefore hated "the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land". He was judging false Christianity by the true.

Crowther: abolition's fruit

After 1807 Britain's Royal Navy spent decades intercepting slave ships off West Africa. Something like 150,000 Africans were freed by the West Africa Squadron, and many were landed at Freetown in Sierra Leone.

One of them, in 1822, was a Yoruba teenager named Ajayi. Baptised as Samuel Crowther, he went on to become the first African Anglican bishop and the translator of the Yoruba Bible. His life links the abolition movement directly to the church in Nigeria. The story is told more fully in How Christianity came to Nigeria and West Africa.

How to answer "the Bible endorses slavery"

When the charge comes, a fair answer has four parts.

1. Agree with what is true. Christians owned slaves, traded slaves and defended slavery from the Bible. That was a great evil.
2. Distinguish regulation from endorsement. The Bible addresses slavery as it existed, the way it addresses divorce or war, while condemning its worst forms. Kidnapping for sale was a capital crime (Exodus 21:16); slave-trading is a sin (1 Timothy 1:10).
3. Show the trajectory. Every human being bears God's image (Genesis 1:27); in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28); Philemon is to receive Onesimus as a brother. These are the truths the abolitionists used.
4. Point to Christ. Jesus announced "liberty to the captives" (Luke 4:18). The very word redemption means buying a slave's freedom — and the gospel says that Christ paid that price for us.

"So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36).