For centuries, Christians actively participated in the slave trade. They used slave labour. They treated their slaves as less than fully human. The most glaring example is that of the supposedly Christian Americans and their black plantation slaves.
But I have to say… So did the rest of the world.
The Barbary pirates took 1.25 million European slaves in unprovoked raids on the Mediterranean coast from the 9th to 18th century.
(They even attacked fledgling America’s ships, for the reason as the Tripoli ambassador explained:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman (Muslim) who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.
This eventually led to the fledgling USA’s first ever incursions into the Middle East to smash the state-sponsored terrorism – the irony, eh?)
But just who was it who eventually spoke out most strongly against the slave trade? (It was men like former slaver turned clergyman John Newton and former hedonist turned abolitionist William Wilberforce.)
Who was it who actually passed modern Parliamentary laws banning the trading of slaves and then the act of slavery itself? (It was the Christian British with the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.)
Who was it blockaded the entire Atlantic slave trade with their naval might? (It was the British Navy acting on the abolition laws passed by Christian Britain.)
Who was it who wrote, some 2000 years ago when slavery was the backbone of the world’s economic system, that a master should treat his thieving, runaway slave as a dear brother? (It was the Apostle Paul, in the entire Book of Philemon.)
So where were the enlightened, progressive, forward-thinking atheists during all this time? Why did it take backward, xenophobic, racist, prejudiced, slavery-sponsoring Christians to speak out against the backward, xenophobic, racist, prejudiced, slavery-sponsoring Christians?
Black Africans enslave Black Africans even today, as a continuation of their pre-colonial practices… No Caucasians to blame this time.
Slavery in modern Muslim countries continued to be legal – abolished only from the 1920s onwards, with Saudi Arabia and Yemen giving it up in 1962, Nigeria in 2003 and Mauritania in 2007. Slavery of non-Muslims in Sudan continues even today. (Video of former slave who escaped at this link.
So slavery is not a uniquely White Christian sin. On the contrary, White Christians were the first (and for a long time, only) ones to try and put a permanent stop to it in modern history.
And White Christians are definitely not the culprits when it comes to modern day slavery.
Slavery was the way of the world, and de facto still is the way of the world… And Christians are the ones who abolished it.
That is what Christians are to blame for regarding slavery.