So what about slavery, anyway? (Frank Bruni and morality)

Last updated on: April 8, 2015 at 10:56 am by Jane the Actuary

So what about slavery, anyway? (Frank Bruni and morality) 2015-04-08T10:56:39-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Back last week, New York Times columnist Frani Bruni wrote a piece saying that, basically, Christians should be persuaded and/or compelled, as needed, to cease considering gay or lesbian sexual acts as sins, in the same manner as, for most Christian groups, neither divorce nor contraception are considered sins any longer. Of course, mainline Protestant groups such as Episcopalians, ELCA-Lutherans, and USA-Presbyterians have already done so, in the same way as they’re “pro-choice” with respect to abortion, and really have no complaint against non-marital sex in general, so long as it’s not coerced. But he, and the individuals he quotes, want all Christians to fall in line. His money quote comes at the end, citing gay activist Mitchell Gold, that “church leaders must be made ‘to take homosexuality off the sin list.'”

So far, nothing new here. But there was one statement that struck me as worth thinking about more. Citing, David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University and who supports the sin-redefinition project, he says,

For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was.”

which is true. Now, I wouldn’t go in the contrary direction, to say that our recognition that somethings are sinful, that we hadn’t been aware of before, means that we should also feel free to reshuffle things in the opposite direction. But it would be worthwhile to look at the process by which slavery came to be seen as a sin.

Certainly, in the time of the Early Church, slavery was, for the most part, simply a given about the world’s economy; it wouldn’t have necessarily seemed any more unjust than the fact that some people were landowners and others landless. To be a slave could mean living in your master’s household and having a fair amount of independence, depending on the particular circumstances. And slavery did evolve, during the Early Middle Ages, into serfdom, in which peasants farmed land that they had rights to, even as they were at the same time, bound to the land. What did early Christian writers have to say about slaves? My guess is that there was counsel to treat them humanely but never a notion that the very concept of owning slaves was invalid, any more than the idea would have been that the Roman emperor didn’t have the right to rule, however tyrannical he may been.

Of course, throughout the Middle Ages, there was no longer any explicit slave-ownership in Christendom; the only way it appeared would have been Christians being taken by Arab raiders. It didn’t re-emerge until the Spanish/Portugese conquest of the Americas. So anyway — I’d be interested to know when Catholic theologians (and Popes, in official declarations of dogma) moved from urging humane treatment of slaves to statements that the very concept of one human being owning another, goes against natural law and is intrinsically sinful, regardless of the humaneness of the owner’s treatment of the slave.

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