Booger McLovin

Any seasoned Christian apologist has faced the question of the evil of slavery. On the surface, the non-believer’s argument appears almost undefeated. Christianity proclaims that YHWH is a God of love, therefore many conclude that the mere existence of slavery disproves the God of Scripture entirely. Yet I would argue the issue is not nearly as simple as modern rhetoric often portrays it.

The first issue is moral grounding itself. The non-believer often speaks of slavery as objectively evil while simultaneously operating within a worldview that struggles to justify objective moral categories in the first place. To call something evil in the fullest sense requires more than emotional disgust or cultural consensus. Less than two centuries ago, abolition itself was not the majority position across much of the world. This does not make slavery good, but it does reveal that moral outrage alone is not sufficient grounding for objective moral truth. The Christian at least possesses a transcendent basis for moral judgment rooted in the character of God.

Now before any of you think I am defending slavery as morally ideal, let me be clear. There are multiple forms of bondage: voluntary servitude, imprisonment, debt servitude, and chattel slavery. Even among chattel systems there are major distinctions. No serious historian would argue that Biblical slavery among the Hebrews closely resembled the race-based slavery of the American South. The two systems differed legally, ethnically, economically, and morally in substantial ways.

For the sake of argument, voluntary servitude and imprisonment are not inherently evil categories. They certainly can become evil, but Biblically speaking, not all forms of servitude were treated identically. The Mosaic Law regulated a world where slavery already existed universally throughout the Ancient Near East. The question therefore is not whether slavery existed under Israel, because it clearly did. The question is what God was doing through His regulation of it.

The Law handed down to Moses imposed strict limitations upon slavery within Israel. Kidnapping a person into slavery was punishable by death. A slave permanently injured by his master was to be freed. A slave who escaped abuse was not to be returned to his master. Slaves were given Sabbath rest. Hebrew debt servants were not to remain permanent chattel in the same way foreign slaves could. At the same time, Christians should not pretend the harder texts do not exist. Leviticus 25 explicitly permits the holding of foreign slaves as inherited property. That passage is morally difficult to modern readers, and honesty requires admitting it rather than glossing over it.

The thing is, I do not claim to know the full reason God permitted slavery within the Mosaic period, and I suspect no answer would ultimately satisfy someone already committed to judging God through modern moral expectations. Yet Scripture repeatedly reminds us, especially in Job, that finite man is not always given exhaustive understanding of God’s governance across history. Job himself was never given a complete explanation for suffering, yet God repeatedly confronts the assumption that man possesses sufficient wisdom to sit in ultimate judgment over divine providence.

This does not remove the emotional difficulty surrounding slavery within the Mosaic period, nor should Christians pretend those passages are easy. But it does challenge the modern assumption that we possess the moral omniscience necessary to declare with certainty how God must govern fallen civilizations across redemptive history. Scripture repeatedly shows God working within fallen human societies while progressively restraining evil and transforming man over time. Jesus Himself says something similar regarding divorce, explaining that certain allowances existed because of the hardness of human hearts.

Within the Ancient Near East, slavery was deeply embedded across nearly all surrounding cultures. Many surrounding pagan nations practiced forms of slavery with far fewer protections than those found under Mosaic Law. Israel was even commanded not to return escaped slaves back to abusive masters, something highly unusual in the ancient world. So while Biblical slavery remains morally difficult to modern readers, it is also important to recognize that Mosaic Law functioned less as a celebration of slavery and more as a restraint upon an institution already woven into the ancient world.

Jesus never launched a political revolution against Rome, yet His teachings planted the moral foundation that would eventually undermine slavery itself. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is fundamentally incompatible with the dehumanization necessary for slavery to flourish consistently. The New Testament steadily elevates human dignity, teaching that all are one in Christ. Paul’s treatment of Onesimus in Philemon, along with the declaration that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, begins hollowing out the institution from the inside out. Christianity did not abolish slavery overnight, but it transformed the moral anthropology of the civilizations it touched.

Now critics will rightly point out that many Christians still defended slavery for centuries. That is true. But the fact that many Christians practiced Christianity poorly no more disproves Christianity than a pianist poorly playing Beethoven discredits Beethoven himself. Hypocrisy and inconsistency among Christians are not arguments against Christianity itself, but against man’s failure to consistently live according to Christian teaching. The deeper question is which worldview ultimately produced the moral framework that slavery violated. Historically, abolitionist movements in Britain and America overwhelmingly appealed to Christian ideas of human dignity, equality before God, and the image of God within man.

The Great Awakenings dramatically increased Biblical literacy and church involvement throughout America, especially in the North, helping fuel abolitionist sentiment that would eventually reach Congress and the Presidency. Slavery in the United States would finally be abolished legally through the 13th Amendment in 1865.

And yet we must go further: without God, there is no final justice, neither for the oppressed slave nor the cruel master. Their suffering and wickedness alike are eventually swallowed by time and cosmic silence. The universe does not remember. It does not care. In a godless reality, we are no more valuable than blades of grass withering beneath indifferent forces. Christianity offers something far more terrifying and far more hopeful: that evil is real, every person bears the image of God, and no injustice escapes His judgment.

The deeper issue then is not whether slavery existed in the Biblical world. It did. The deeper issue is whether God’s regulation of slavery within a fallen world is equivalent to moral endorsement of slavery as an eternal ideal. I do not believe the text supports that conclusion. Rather, Scripture presents a God progressively restraining human evil while transforming the hearts of men over time. And in that sense, Christianity did not create slavery. It ultimately provided the moral framework that destroyed it.