[Vision2020] How religion has been used to promote slavery

[Art Deco]

How religion has been used to promote
slavery<http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/29/how-religion-has-been-used-to-promote-slavery/>

By *John Blake*, CNN

*Editor’s note: The CNN documentary 'Slavery's Last Stronghold'
<http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/>airs on CNN International TV
March 29, 30, 31 and April 22. Check local listings for times.*

*(CNN)* - Which revered religious figure – Moses, Jesus, or the Prophet
Muhammad – spoke out boldly and unambiguously against slavery?

Answer: None of them.

One of these men owned slaves, another created laws to regulate - but not
ban  - slavery. The third’s chief spokesman even ordered slaves to obey
their masters, religious scholars say.

Most modern people of faith see slavery as a great evil. Though the three
great Western religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – disagree on
many matters, most of their contemporary followers condemn slavery.

Yet there was a time when Jews, Christians and Muslims routinely cited the
words and deeds of their founders to justify human bondage, scholars say.

At times, religion was deployed more to promote the spread of slavery than
to prevent it.

 Read about present-day slavery in
Mauritania<http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html>

“The lesson in all this is we need historical humility,” says Daniel C.
Peterson, author of “Muhammad, Prophet of God.” “It’s stunning for us to
look back now and say, how can people face themselves in the mirror after
doing what they did, but they did.”

But what did the founders of the three great Western religions do? Did they
have slaves and did they condemn the practice? Or were they, at least on
this issue, squarely men of their times?

The answers to these questions are as murky and contradictory as history
itself.

*What’s a slave?*

* *Part of the problem is historical context. Most contemporary people
think of slaves as people condemned to a lifetime of bondage, working on
plantations and being whipped like oxen.

That kind of slavery did exist during the lives of Moses, Jesus and the
Prophet Muhammad. Many slaves were prisoners of war; concubines,
gladiators, laborers in salt mines. They could be killed, raped and
discarded at any moment.

Yet there were layers of slavery in the ancient world. Many slaves would be
seen today as indentured servants, or people trying to pay off debts; royal
bodyguards and entrepreneurs, historians say.

Sometimes the slaves became masters. In medieval Egypt, Muslim rulers
trained and educated slaves to be their bodyguards. One group of slaves
grew so powerful that they overthrew the rulers of Egypt and established
their own dynasty, says Ali Asani, a professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic
Languages and Culture at Harvard University.

“Slavery meant different things in different cultures,” Asani says. “There
wasn’t always this sense of powerlessness and oppression. In certain forms,
it became an access to power.”

In other forms, it became access to freedom, says John Dominic Crossan, one
of world’s leading scholars on the life and times of Jesus.

That was the case in the world of Jesus. The Roman Empire was the dominant
power of Jesus’ day, and it survived on the backs of millions of slaves.
Yet there was only one mass slave revolt against Rome, which was led by
Spartacus, a gladiatorial slave, Crossan says.

The reason there were so few massive slave rebellions against Rome was
because some of its slaves had avenues for advancement, dim though they may
seem to modern sensibilities.

Slaves could buy their freedom. They ran businesses for their masters or
tutored their children. Greek slaves, in particular, were often valued
because of their education and culture, he says.

Roman slavery was cruel and capricious, but not all Romans saw slaves as
subhuman.

“One of the most extraordinary aspects of Roman slavery,” says Crossan,
author of “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about
Jesus,” was that the Romans ended up with a huge number of slaves who were
smarter than their masters.”

*The uncomfortable historical record *

It’s been said that great religious figures transcend history. They rise
above the peculiar customs of their day to show a new path forward.

It’s a matter of debate if Moses, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad did that
with slavery. All three seemed to either ignore or tolerate some forms of
slavery, some scholars say.

The parables of Jesus, for example, were full of references to slaves.
Terms like “servants” or “stewards” are what we would call slaves today.
Yet Jesus doesn’t seem to make any moral judgments about slavery in his
parables, Crossan says.

The subject may have been irrelevant to him or his audience, says Crossan,
the Jesus scholar. Jesus didn’t own any slaves. Neither did his disciples
or the crowds Jesus addressed. They were all too poor and lived under
desperate economic circumstances.

“It may well be that the people he talked to were small farmers who would
not have the luxury of slaves,” Crossan says. “He [Jesus} doesn’t say
anything for or against it.”

Still, Crossan says that he believes that Jesus would have opposed slavery,
given the nature of his teachings. Scholars aren’t so certain about Jesus’
most influential disciple, the Apostle Paul.

The man whose writings make up most of the New Testament had to deal with
slavery. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, many slaves
joined the church.

At various parts of the New Testament, Paul seems to accept slavery. He
tells slaves to obey their masters. At other times, Paul seems to challenge
the morality of slavery. In one New Testament letter, Paul intercedes on
behalf of a runaway slave and chides the master for calling himself a
Christian and holding a slave.

Crossan, along with some other biblical scholars, says there are actually
two versions of Paul in the New Testament: the authentic, “radical” Paul
who opposed slavery and a “Pseudo-Paul” inserted into the texts by early
church leaders who were afraid of antagonizing Rome.

“It’s one thing to say that Jesus is Lord,” Crossan says. “Now if you’re
saying a Christian can’t have slaves, then something must be wrong with
slaves. So now you’re attacking the Roman system, which is a slave economy.”

Jesus’ apparent silence on slavery and Paul’s ambiguous statements on the
issue had dreadful historical consequences. It helped ensure that slavery
would survive well into the 19th century in the U.S., some scholars say.

American Christians who owned slaves had a simple but powerful defense in
the run-up to the Civil War. The Old and New Testament sanctioned slavery
and, since the Bible is infallible, slavery is part of God’s order, says
Mark Noll, author “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.”

“The defenders of slavery said Jesus condemned quite a few things that were
standard in the Old Testament,” Noll says. “He condemned polygamy,
violence, easy divorce, but he never condemned slavery.”

*Let my people go, but keep the others*

Neither did Moses, the founder of Judaism, say other scholars.

There’s no record of Moses owning slaves, but the Mosaic laws permitted and
regulated slavery, says Peterson, the author of “Muhammad, Prophet of God”
and a religious scholar at Brigham Young University in Utah.

Still, under Mosaic law, a master was encouraged to free slaves and forgive
debts after a certain period of time that was called the year of
jubilee,* *Peterson
says.

“They were not trying to create a permanent underclass of slaves that went
from parents to child and child and grandchildren,” Peterson says of the
ancient Israelites.

But how could ancient Israelites sanction any form of slavery given their
exodus from Egyptian captivity? Didn’t their God explicitly condemn slavery
when he ordered Moses to tell Pharaoh to “let my people go?”

The text is not clear on that question, says Brannon Wheeler, a religious
scholar.

He says the Exodus stories suggest that the God of Israel was angry at
Pharaoh not for enslaving a group of people, but for *unjustly* enslaving
the “Chosen People”—the people God had promised to give their own homeland.

“In order to make that promise stick, He [God] has to get them out of
Egypt,” says Wheeler, director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic
Studies at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland.

“It’s not like He [God] says slavery is bad and I want to abolish it.”

The Prophet Muhammad never explicitly condemned slavery, and actually owned
slaves, some scholars say.

Yet he recognized the humanity of slaves, teaching followers that freeing
slaves was an act of piety. He allowed slaves to buy their freedom and
demanded that they should be treated with love and respect, says Asani,
author of  “Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Popular Muslim
Poetry.”

“He himself did own slaves but he treated them as family,” Asani says. “One
called Zayd he treated like an adopted son and one of his wives was a
Coptic Christian slave.”

The followers of men like the Prophet Muhammad, though, would take a
harsher attitude toward slaves.

By the time of the crusades, Christians and Muslims were enslaving one
another by the thousands. They cited their faith as justification, says
Robert C. Davis, author of “Holy War and Human Bondage.”

“Religion was the defining principle of slavery—this person is another
faith and can be enslaved,” Davis says.

Some church leaders preached that enslaving others was an act of
evangelism, Davis says.

“One pope said that the justification for slavery was that it was important
for spreading the faith,” Davis says. “Once they were enslaved, they would
more readily take to Christianity.”

Those kinds of actions may now seem barbaric, but the texts and stories
that were used to justify slavery still exist in the sacred texts of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Few*, *though*, *would quote those scriptures today and many don’t even
know they exist.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” says Jonathan Brockopp, a religion professor
at Pennsylvania State University. “Religions redefine themselves and people
draw on different stories and underplay other stories. This happens
constantly.”

It happened with slavery, and, who knows, perhaps it’s happening again in
our time. There may be a religious practice accepted today that future
generations will look upon and ask the same question we ask about people
who enslaved others in the name of God:

How could they?

 John Blake <http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/author/jkblakecnn/> - CNN Writer

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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