Was Christianity Condoned Or Banned Slavery?

There has been an ongoing debate on whether Christianity condoned or condemned slavery. In this essay, I will discuss how slave owners used biblical context to uphold the institution of slavery. I will begin analyzing scriptures in the bible that pertain to slavery. It is in my belief that the Bible did not condone slavery in the way that slave owners upheld slavery. I do not argue against that there were not slaves in the Bible but they were not enslaved against their will but through the will of God. Before I begin dissecting any arguments or scriptures I must tell how the people of Africa lived before the slave trade and how the African people became enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade.
It was in 1441 that the Europeans began trading …show more content…
The Atlantic slave trade was the movement of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean from the 15th through the 19th century. Between ten and eleven million African slaves came to America. They were transported to the Americas through what is called the Middle Passage (Faragher,2015). The Europeans would travel to Africa and trade goods with tribal chiefs in return for captured Africans. The Europeans would then march the captives in chains to the coast where they were kept in barracoons where they were separated from their families, branded and dehumanized (Faragher,2015). Then they were sold and traded to slave traders. During the middle passage the slaves were packed into ships onto shelves that were six feet by thirty inches (Faragher,2015). They received little to no food with little to no sanitation and because of the unsanitary conditions many of the slaves died from dysentery and other diseases (Faragher,2015). When the slaves arrived to the Americas they were then sold. The selling of slaves occurred in several ways: a single buyer may have purchased the whole cargo or each individual slave would be auctioned to the highest bidder. The slave trade resulted in the loss of millions of people over hundreds of years. The trade weakened African states who became dependent on European trade. It caused the long-term stagnation of the west African economy. The result of the slave trade prepared the way for European …show more content…
The scripture reads “ And he that steals a man, and sells him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death (Exodus 21:16). This verse states that if someone has stolen a person and sell that same person, whoever the person that kid napped the person and the person who has the person in his possession shall be put to death. To put this in perspective to slavery in America. If a person was stolen to be put into slavery, then the person who kidnapped them and the person that they were sold to should be put to death or imprisoned according to this verse. Kidnapping during the time of the Old Testament was considered a capital offense. In the eyes of God, criminally enslaving a man was not far from murdering him. An account of this scripture should have applied is of the story of Olaudah Equiano. Equiano published his autobiography in 1789 titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. In his autobiography Equiano recounted the incident on how him and his sister were kid napped and sold into slavery. He was around the age of eleven when he and his sister were taken from their family compound and were separated and sold to slave traders. It is a known fact that many of African slaves that first arrived in America were stolen from their villages and not sold into slavery by tribal chiefs. If many of the white Southerners were