Bible Team Challenge
by Shelby Caruso & Samantha Keever
Religion is a large part of many people’s lives. In almost every time in history, religion has had an effect over different events for different reasons. Slavery has not been an exception. If anything, religion has had an extremely large background in the history slavery.
Throughout time, Christianity has had many instances of slavery being a part of their daily lives. My argument is that Christianity has condoned slavery in its history. One of the more extreme examples is in the 1600s and 1700s, when the majority of slavery was happening in the Caribbean colonies. The Caribbean became the epicenter of slavery during that time, done by the English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and Dutch. In Jamaica during the year 1688, Jamaica made a law that all slaves were to be made ready by their masters to follow Christianity. The end result would eventually be the church performing a baptism on slaves. So not only did Christianity affect the performance of slavery, but slaves were also required by law to convert to Christianity in some places. There weren’t many people at the time who would offend the public majority's opinion. Not until the 1800s would the idea of slavery being lawful be challenged by those who were brave enough.
Bible Excerpt from Leviticus 25: 44-46
Overtime the views of slavery in Christianity has changed drastically. There have been instances where Christians have believed slavery to be a sin and other times where majority of Christians believed slavery to be okay. For instance, in the 1600s until the 1800s, slavery was accepted by a lot of Christians. Throughout the 1800s to the 1900s, the number of Christians who thought it wasn’t bad dwindled. Eventually, after slavery was abolished in most places, Christians overall idea of slavery changed. The majority began thinking that it wasn’t acceptable.
-Shelby
Slavery was a big issue in our world throughout several decades, primarily the 1600s-1800s. A lot of people reinforce the idea that many religions including Christianity support slavery and actively partake in it. However, I do not agree with this proposition. I argue that Christians have condemned slavery. Most of these people look at the surface of the Bible’s message and see the words, “slaves and indentured servants” and assume the worst. They do not see the rules and regulations the Bible puts on the act of owning slaves. In several instances, the slave only has to work for seven years, and even got benefits from working, such as crops and livestock. After these years are up, the slave can be free. While there are examples in the Bible of the harsh kind of slavery we had in American history, it was not condoned Exodus 21:16. Christians even played this out through the abolishment of slavery. One example of this is the Grimké sisters. The famous Grimké family is known for their various abolitionist acts, a very famous one being Angelina Grimké’s letter, "An Appeal to Women in the South", that was published in “The Liberator.” This letter impacted many people within the church and the rest of society and is still a key part of history today.
-Samantha
Mostly everyone in today’s world can agree that slavery is harsh and unjust, and quite a lot of these people come from some sort of religious background. Before slavery was abolished, people manipulated the Bible and its context to fit whatever their belief was at the time; some still do to this day. As societies standards of slavery grew to where they are now, so did the Christian’s beliefs on it. I feel that the general public had a greater influence on them than their religious morals did.
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