Episode 91

There is no shortage of debate and conversation about slavery and its heinous legacy in the United States. In this episode of the Removing Barriers podcast, we have Missionary Marco with us again to discuss how Christians interacted with the institution, and how our 21st century understanding of slavery may not fully appreciate all the factors in play in the 17th and 18th centuries. How do you think Christians should have dealt with slavery, and what can we learn about the past to ensure we respond well in our world today? Join the discussion!

What happened then? Starting, I don’t know, somewhere in the 1501, 600 is now we’ve got transatlantic trade. And now, for the first time in history, large groups of people can be moved between continents. And so then what began? The ugliness that came out of that was slave trade, particularly in our context, the transatlantic slave trade. So that was punishable by death in the Bible. The Bible calls that man stealing.Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers podcast. I’m Jay. And I’m MCG. And we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

This is episode 91 of the Removing Barriers podcast, and in this episode, we will be sitting down with missionary Marco to discuss slavery, the Bible, and Christians. This is a topic I had an interest in doing for a while. So, Marco, welcome back to the Removing Barriers podcast, and thank you for joining us once again. Thank you so much, MCG, andj for having me. I’m looking forward to talking to you as well. Great.

Before we dive into it, tell us what’s going on in your way. Anything new from the last time we spoke? Not really. It’s a little colder than last time. What’s going on? You get to visit more people and do a good work for the Lord, trying to obviously get the word out and preaching the folks, seeing some responses and just keeping at it, keeping working. Great. That’s good. It’s kind of weird. The last time we spoke, it was winter here for us, and now it’s winter here for you. Yeah, well, you enjoyed the call. I had my time.

All right, well, let’s dive into it. Let’s start with the overview. What is the overview of slave and slave ownership in the Bible? Does the Bible even speak about those things? Yeah, the Bible does speak about slavery. Slavery is actually the very first issue or topic that it deals with. Following the Ten Commandments, it puts parameters in place because slavery existed. Slavery certainly didn’t start with the Bible. I think slavery has been around as long as humanity has been around. I mean, slavery is still around today, and it’s illegal in a lot of places, but it exists. It’s just the trading of people. And so the Bible in Edison is 20. We have the Ten Commandments and an Exodus 21. The Bible put some parameters on how to protect the most vulnerable people in society. So the Bible does certainly talk about it. What’s different? Jordan Peterson says definitions are important, and what the world often defines as slavery is very different from how the Bible defines it. The Bible doesn’t have any issues dealing with hard issues in life. It deals with that. And slavery is one of those ugly issues that it deals with. And I think the reason it dealt with it is because God has always been concerned with protecting the vulnerable. The Bible oftentimes talks about protecting the vulnerable, protecting the orphan, protecting the widow time and time again, protecting the woman that was put away. And the slavery is one more of those groups that have been vulnerable in society, and God singles them out and begins with them to protect them. No other religion, no other faith, no other ideology ever did that before the Bible put that into text.

So would you say overall that slavery is condoned in the Bible, or is it condemned? And how exactly does the Bible define slavery? That’s a good question. Again, back to definition, it obviously I don’t know if you’d say it condones it, but it accepts it as part of the city that they were living in. If you go back a few thousand years ago, about 4500 years ago, where they were writing about this in the Old Testament, we’re talking about a warring culture. They get conquested and taken into slavery. They conquest other nations, and that was just normal. It’s pretty easy for us in 2022 to talk about how people should be living when most of us, certainly in our home, lives. Almost no one has experienced war unless they’ve gone somewhere else. Our homes are safe in this country. I know people who come from the Middle East who literally had their homes taken out from under them. Someone growing up in the western world has no idea what that’s like. And so these people were living in a very violent culture, and the Bible had some parameters about how to protect slaves in that sense. So the Bible, I guess it would condone it in the sense that it accepts that it happened, and here are some ways to protect those people. So whether it condones it, it certainly doesn’t condone the way it was done in the antebellum south and in the Western world with the slave trade was that would have been punishable by death by the same biblical laws in the book of Exodus and Leviticus. But its version of slavery, I guess, was accepted or acceptable or at least a way of dealing with something very ugly in society and culture. Yeah.

Would you say that slavery in the Bible is condoned, quote, unquote, as much as God condoned maybe divorced? Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it, because obviously the Bible says, clearly God hates putting away. God hates divorce. And yet God has parameters around divorce. So that doesn’t mean that he’s for people breaking up. He’s for the family to stay strong and together. And yet, knowing man’s sinful nature, god put parameters in place so that, again, women in that case who would have been vulnerable had protection. So no different with a slave. God was not for divorce, and yet he put parameters in place where people would be safe. God was not for, I would say, slavery, and yet for the situations where they occurred, god put parameters in place where people would be protected and safe.

Sounds like a tacit understanding or acknowledgment of the depravity of men. Like God saying, you all are just completely depraved. I know the extent of what you can do each other. So this is how we’re going to contain this. This is how we’re going to stop this. With that in mind, how does slavery in the Bible compare to the slavery that we would think of here in the 21st century and in the west? Sure, I guess part of what changed and part of what created it would just be technology and society in general. Thousands of years ago, slavery was normal to all culture. I don’t know that there’s a people group in the world who are free from either enslaving or being enslaved. So what happened is people would enslave their neighbors because that’s the people they had access to. So they wanted more land, they wanted more stuff. They wanted something they wanted to conquer. So it only made sense to conquer your neighbors. So there wasn’t a racial element to it, whether a need or a conquest ideology that drove that, and people would enslave their neighbors. That’s just how it works. What happened then? Starting, I don’t know, somewhere in the 1500, 1600 is now we’ve got transatlantic trade. And now, for the first time in history, large groups of people can be moved between continents. And so then what began the ugliness that came out of that was slave trade, particularly in our context, the transatlantic slave trade. So that was punishable by death in the Bible. The Bible calls that man stealing, and so that was something worth being executed for. So what the Bible talks about is slavery is very different from the transatlantic slave trade as we know it.

The Bible had a couple of reasons for slavery. In the Bible would have been conquest when one country conquered another. You may have that. And there’s a fellow named Abraham Booth who wrote a good sermon in the 17 hundreds about a Baptist preacher about slavery, and he said the context of what was going on there was God was conquering a nation. That just a depraved nation. He warned them for years, warned them for decades. They were being judged by God because they burned their own children in a kiln like mac to a god and a leg. They were just completely depraved and despicable people. God finally, after pleading with them and being patient with them, he judged them. And so there was a very specific place one time in history, or at that point in history, where God demanded a conquest of a nation that needed judgment. And so in that case, there were some slaves. The other cases the Bible has, aside from conquest, would be where people were indebted. And so the Bible has that there’s something called the year jubilee, where somebody could only be indebted up to seven years. So if someone made some terrible financial mistakes, they needed food. No different than how it was done in Egypt. People sold everything they had in the Bible, of course, book of Exodus. So they even ended up selling themselves. They could have food to eat. Well, in the Bible, that happened as well in Israel, except they could only sell themselves up to seven years. People who were Israelite were entitled to their land, their family plot of land, and so they could sell it. They can sell themselves, but at the end of that seven year term, it was over. And sometimes it would be less than seven years. It went by a calendar, not by the date of the selling or the loan, if you could put it that way. So, yeah, the Bible has that and had ways of dealing with it.

It’s interesting that you delineate that history because you mentioned that the scriptures call what the transatlantic slave trade was man stealing. And many people like to point back at that and point the finger at a particular group of people in this country and say, you all took us from our country. Well, the reality is not only, yes, there were people kidnapping and stealing people from Africa, but we also need to acknowledge that there were slave traders, African slave traders, kidnapping and conquering people and selling them to the so called whites that came to the continent as well. So if we’re going to point fingers, there’s enough blame to go around for everyone. It wasn’t just one particular group of people doing it. Everyone was doing it. And that doesn’t justify it, of course, but of course, right. Yeah. It’s very ugly. Yes. Many of these were prisoners that one try may conquer another tribe. They have the prisoners and sell them, some of them. I would imagine that at a certain time it became a business. Then folks will go out there and actually capture people, of course, just for that. But initially, a lot of them were selling their enemies into slavery.

And this is why we did that episode about Whoopi and her comment about the Holocaust. Her statement was so ignorant because she said it wasn’t about race, it was about men’s inhumanity to men. And all you need is a cursory evaluation of history to see that this wasn’t just onesided. This was most definitely a fundamental, evil, heart human problem. It wasn’t a skin color thing. Yeah, race is a whole not a topic yet. It’s a red bearing. Yeah. How did Western slave owners justify slavery? Using the scripture, though, if I can just go back to something that was mentioned, though, I think you’re right about the transatlantic slave trade. So you had a lot of Europeans who were doing that. It wasn’t just Europeans, it was Arabs as well who predominantly did that and did a lot more of it, actually. But as far as the Europeans go, I think the average lifespan of a European, like, of an englishman who went interior Africa was only a year, if I remember correctly. So just like they weren’t used to the life there, they weren’t used to the climate, they weren’t used to the diseases. So Englishmen were very content staying at the coast. When they did their trading, they were brought to them. I believe the only Europeans who actually went inland, as far as I know, were the Portuguese. Other than that, the English, the French, all others had the Africans do the slaves. And not to say the Portuguese didn’t rely on the Africans as well, but the Englishmen, the Europeans predominantly waited there to have the slaves brought to them. So you’re absolutely right. I know a missionary in Congo, and it still happens today. There’s pygmies who live in Congo and people who don’t live out in the sticks, who don’t live in the country, to put it another way, are basically kidnapped. They take them out of there, these pygmies, and they put them to work, and they work while they’re there, and they run away the first chance they can because they don’t want to be there. And so I think, obviously, that’s just a miniature version of what was happening during the transatlantic slave trade. People would kidnap, in that case, their neighbors, neighboring tribes, neighboring people, groups, and sell them. And obviously all kinds of inhumanity happened beyond that. Oh, yeah.

So how would you say that the Western slave owners justify slavery using scripture? Because it seems to me that a lot of the quote unquote Christians would use scripture to condone the transatlantic slave trade, to keep blacks in slavery and all these things. What are some scriptures that they use to do that? And what are the proper interpretations of the scripture? Yeah, I think that’s important, a consistent use of scripture. I don’t think anyone has to be afraid of the Bible or afraid of consistently applying the Bible. There are two scriptures I can think of that people will run to. The Book of Phi Lehman. Actually, not really directly answering your question. The book of Phi Lehman was actually a pivotal book in ending slavery. But as far as scriptures that maybe people use them as an excuse for slavery, in the Bible, in Genesis, it talks about canon being cursed, the son of Ham, because of something he did to his father or his grandfather. And so people use that and say, because apparently the Hamites, the canonites went to Africa, people will say, well, then they’re all still cursed. And so they’ll take that a step further and say, not only cursed, but slavery and everything else. And yet, if we look at that scripture in its entirety, it also talks about JAF or the sons of Jaffa living in the tents of Shem. And so if you take one part of the scripture, you have to take the other. You can’t just say that. If you say that the Canaanites are cursed, because of that perpetually for all generations. Then you can’t say, well, J fifth Ice would be generally your European people and Chemites would be your Semitic people, you’re Asian or Eastern people, your Middle Eastern people, and they’re living in the tents of Shem. So then what do you do about that? Is every white man who is not living in an Oriental tent, whatever that is, whether that’s a home or country, are they wrong? And so you would have to apply both parts of that prophecy. If you’re going to apply one way, you have to apply the second half the same way. And so I don’t think that’s the correct way to interpret that scripture. Unless you think that every white band should be living in an Asian tent, whatever you conceive that to be.

And then the other verse that they use, it’s not used as often, but the other one is that Pains Mark. When he killed his brother Abel, god put a mark on him. Some have said that that is I’m saying these are pretty spurious views. You’d be hard pressed to find a Bible commentary that we teach these. But I’m just bringing up some things that have been used to justify it. Kane’s mark, also, some have said was a change to the color of Kane’s skin. And so I don’t think that’s consistent either, because then at the Flood, that would have been negated because all races basically started over from there with the eight that were on board the Arc. And the other thing that does I just think it’s funny is it presupposes that Adam and Eve were white or not black. And so we don’t know that. We don’t know what they look like. We can presuppose we have people use some science to determine what they think. Even they’ve done DNA evidence that they think we all evolved. If you call that or descended from a common ancestor, what that ancestor looked like, what color they were, I’m not sure. Everybody would like them to look like they’d like to look like them, I’m sure, but we don’t know.

Yeah, let’s pack there a little bit because this is a little bit of a topic that interested to me because I’ve said this on the podcast before when I was in college, a freshman year in college, I think it was Old Testament Survey class. Of course, for anyone who has been to Bible College, old Testaments of the New Testament Survey are big classes. You’re talking about 150 students, because everybody has to take those classes. And I remember my professor, as we were going to Genesis, he said that Harm was cursed. And I politely raised my hand and I challenged him on that because I don’t think that’s what the Bible said. And I don’t think my professor meant it any racial way because he was a black man or is a black man, just like I am. I think he was saying something that he was taught, maybe without further investigation, because once I challenge him, he said, you know what, I’m going to look it up and come back. And to my surprise, the very next class, you actually have us correct our notes, at least had the other students create a note, because I didn’t take a note that it was actually Kane who was curse and not Ham. But my contention here as well is even further than that because I was taught, or at least somehow read that Ham, Sherman, Jeffrey, who are responsible for all the different races that we see, or at least if you split up into three different groups. Sure, I don’t know if you have biblical evidence to prove that, but I don’t see any to prove that. I personally believe the different races or different people group, because the Bible never used the term race as we mean it today. The different people groups were actually started out of the Tower of Babel where we can see an isolation of gene pool. And because of the isolation of gene pool, then we have created different people groups because then of course we know back then brothers could marry sister and stuff like that. So the intermarriage was allowed in Scripture back then. And because of that you create the isolation dream pool. You create different people groups or races as we see today. But it was taught even in some churches that descendants are black and champagne. What are your thoughts on that? Do you hold to that? Do you see any Scripture to prove that? I’d have to say I’ve heard that before. I don’t know that I’ve studied the Table of nations, the list of 70 nations following Ham, Jafas and Sham. I’ve taken that for granted, but I haven’t studied it out myself. To know, probably just like your professor or most other pastors, that they were taught that they take that for granted. I do believe the Bible is accurate. I do believe those Table of nations are accurate as well. I know some of those people group can be traced to today. I know many of those have disappeared, or we don’t know who or what they are, but a lot of them can be traced to today. Whether it divides that neatly, I’m not sure. I know from a secular perspective, it seems to be somewhat rational because there is basically three predominant people type groups your European style people, your African type people, and your Semitic people. I’ve seen some scientific studies that also put the Aborigine in Australia in a separate group. Maybe so, but certainly worth studying out. I’d love to know.

Yeah, I think Ken Ham and anti agencies, and I’ve read a number of what they have to say on this topic. The contention was, and of course I can’t prove this to Scripture, but the contention is that I think it’s between 50% and 80% of the people in the world are actually brown, some shade of brown. So you’re talking about Hispanic looking type people. Majority of the people in the world fall within that realm is a small percentage that they will consider the Europeans white or the Africans, which probably will fall differently. So if that’s true, race to me is more than the color of your skin, so to speak. Because if you’re talking about well over 50% of the folks usually within this shade, then race has nothing to do with the color of your skin because I’m sure there’s a lot of folks let’s take Chinese for instance. Yeah, good point. And your Mexicans, they don’t fall neatly within black and white. Of course they’re probably more brown if you want to put it that way. So that’s why I hold to that view because not only I can see it scientifically, I can see it biblically where you can prove it to science. Not that science is the end all of everything, but scientifically it makes logical sense. There’s an isolation of gene pool that created different people groups and then you can see God confounded the languages and because of that they split off and to me that history and the science to me kind of fit perfectly and say hey, this is how the race came about. Not because of Ham was black and shem was this J for yeah, I’m sure that had huge impact on the world.

We could also see that in the language tree as well, right? All of the languages, they map it as looking like a tree. It all stems from some prototype language that existed before written history and then it’s easily traceable and it lines up with what scripture says. So it makes obvious sense. And when these different people groups move to different areas, the effect of the environment on their genes as they pass it down to the next generation is going to affect how they look and that’s perfectly reasonable if you’re actually being objective and not trying to put on your own agenda onto stuff like evolution and things like that.

This is the Removal by Rich podcast. We will be right back.

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We’re talking about slave owners in the west justifying their slavery using the scriptures. So we’re talking about unsaved people, right? Because in that time, even if you weren’t saved there was this general morality that was framed by the scriptures. But then we would expect slave owners to behave like secular slave owners to behave that way even within the moral umbrella, if you would, of the west at that time. But what’s particularly distressing is that even christians partook in the slave trade and had slaves and justified and condoned it. Why do you think that is? Yeah, that’s interesting. I read newton’s biography. He was a slave trader, got saved, and ended up becoming a preacher. What’s interesting is that at the moment of his salvation, he didn’t instantly stop the slave trade. It dramatically changed him, and it dramatically changed the way it was, and he looked more after those people. But again, sort of like us in the 21st century, judging how people live in a wartorn country, it was completely normal what he was doing. It being an ethical dilemma was a new thing. And so there was nothing you wouldn’t be frowned upon for doing what he was doing. And so he was in shipping for his entire life. And so it’s hard for us because slavery is so abhorrent to us today. Like, how could you buy people that’s absolutely sickening and treat people like property? And yet that was normal. And so it took him a while, I think, oftentimes. And this happens to, I think, lost people, but it happens to christians, too. We have no patience with people. We come to a conclusion with something and realize somebody’s not on the same page as me and just completely lamb based them, think that they’re the devil. We’re just reasoning out things. Sometimes it takes people to to come take some time to come to some conclusions. And so I can think in my life. It’s taken me time for me to come to some conclusions that I’ve made in my life. Well, it took that this is a huge thing. Nobody in the history of humanity up until the 18th century challenged the institution of slavery. So it’s not that somebody even thought that getting rid of this was even an option. It was just normal.

And I’m sure there are horrible things that we do in our society that 100 years from now or a few hundred years from now, people think, like, how on earth could you people do that? And so that’s how slavery was back then. So I don’t know that when you ask how christians could condone that, I think that was your question. I don’t know that there were that many christians who condoned it so much as they lived with it. Like, even there was some ugliness. The southern baptist in 1995 apologize because basically one of the greatest impetus for them being created was over the slavery issue. They separated from the baptist up north over that, and it wasn’t because they were pro slavery. It was because they believed it should be up to individuals liberty. They didn’t want to deal with that in their churches. They didn’t want to make a policy to put and part of that is as far as baptist go, part of that is being a baptist, because part of it is individual sole liberty. You know, you do you and so even though I don’t think that’s right, because human rights are in somebody’s individual rights are in the fray. That’s the way they took it. And so they did that. There were other denominations that divided over that, and it wasn’t because they were forced slavery as much as them saying, we don’t want to deal with this, we don’t know how to undo this. There was very, very few people who were pro slavery, even people who were anti abolitionist. What they were saying is one of the most vocal anti abolitionic’s was a man named Randolph. He owned over 200 slaves and he worried how he feed them. He left part of his estate to one of his slaves, to all of his slaves, rather. And he wanted them to go to live in a free state and try and make a go for them themselves. But he wasn’t for emancipation because he was thinking, this is a complicated thing. You have hundreds of thousands of people who live in this country who are illiterate, who don’t know how to live for themselves, who are, for the most part, hated. You can’t just cut them loose and say you’re free. That’s irresponsible, because even some of the people who are anti abolitionist, we’re not pro slavery, they just look at the whole issue and said, you can’t just cut ties and say everything is good. It was a complicated issue. So it wasn’t so much as people being proslavery and antislavery, as much as people saying, you can’t do this now, you can’t do this yet. We have to be smart about how we do this because even when the United States was founded, george Washington, who had slaves and other founding Fathers, they had slaves and hated the institution of slavery, but they just didn’t know, how are we going to do this? This is an integral part of our country. How do we do this without killing thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and ended it up happening anyway with the Civil War? But those are some of the concerns early on.

So to say that Christians condoned it, I think you’d have a hard time finding much literature of Christians actually being pro slavery as much as just being either indifferent in the fact of saying, leave it up to the individual people or else saying, we’ve got to be really smart about how we do this. Would you say, that’s a cop out, though? Because if you’re saying, I see you’re wrong and I’m not going to take a stand either way, I’m going to leave it up to someone else. We don’t normally do that in our culture. Wrong is wrong. So to me, more than if they condone it, was it a liberty issue? Because the Bible, of course, tell us not to take our liberty of the occasion for the flat. So was this a liberty issue or was this a sin issue? Because to me personally come across to me as a thin issue. And if you’re not doing anything about sin, then probably by extension say, then maybe you’re condoning it. I think you’re right. It was a thin issue very much. The Southern states were not very well known for, if you want to say, their theology or their education. And so, whereas the Northern states, they would have a declaration of faith, confession of faith that they held to, the Southerners didn’t like that. They thought that was too limiting on them. And I’m not saying they weren’t good Christians there, but they were never really as educated or as solid on what they believed and what to do theologically. I really believe what you believe in god will determine what you do with everything in your life. And I think that was the case here. I think it is a cop out. It was wrong what they did. But thin was pretty prevalent in the south. It wasn’t just slavery. If you read books on how people live, when Northerners would come down south, they were surprised at how decadent the people were there, whether there was just a great deal and I know this sounds pretty, I guess pretty prejudiced, but they couldn’t believe the drunkenness and the licentious living. And there’s just a lot written about the difference in culture. And this is not a racial thing. This is literally, unless you determine north and south or different races, it’s not. It’s just a question of how the different colonies developed very differently and they had a different feel to them and there was just a lot more sin prevalent. And slavery was just one of those. And so it wasn’t just a disregard for a fellow man on a racial issue. There was a lot of sin presence, unfortunately, in the south, and they didn’t deal with it. And I think you’re right. It was a thin issue. And it was one of many, if you look at it, unwed pregnancies like the few stats we have back then, the north and south were dramatically different. Church attendance, there was a dramatic difference between not just black and white, but Northern whites and Southern whites were dramatically different.

And so slavery was just part and parcel of that attitude towards Godliness and sin. Unless we look back and lift our heads up in pride and judge them and evaluate them according to our current standards because we’ve had the benefit of the struggles of the people before us to understand that this is wrong, we could take all of this and put it in today’s terms. Because before I make that comparison, it wasn’t just an issue of that particular sense that you mentioned, Marco. It was also the fact that, as you said, savory was an integral part of this nation in terms of economy, in terms of how families were run, how estates were run. It was basically in the foundation of it. And if you were to rip that out of course you would create a lot of problems but it was also a lack of trust in God to provide what I mean by that. I agree. If you release all of the slaves and there’s no one to do the work how are we going to support ourselves so we can justify holding on to the slaves, so that we can continue our lifestyle? We could transplant this to today. Like, for example, of course we all have our computers, our cell phones, we have cheap clothes. All of these things are created by cheap labor in other countries. People being exploited and living in slavery. They’re in slavery right now so that we can have our products and our luxury and our clothes and everything. If we were truly about freeing people and freedom and we were truly abolitionist we would stop supporting all of these things that allow us to have our cheap phones or cheap computers or cheap clothes and everything. But how many of us are genuinely willing to do that? We realize how much it would upset our economy, our luxury, our comfort. And so we can understand that in today’s pretax, in today’s sense. So when we look back and look at our ancestors, as it were, in this country we have to realize that they were dealing with the exact same thing. And before we puff our chests out and think that we’re so great we have to realize that we are doing almost the exact same thing that they were. It’s just that the time window has shifted several centuries. That’s pretty much it. And so I just say that to remind us that sometimes when people say, oh, if there’s a God, why does he let terrible things happen? And I want to quit back to them and say he lets terrible things happen so that we can see how evil and rotten we are. So that we don’t think that we’re something special. And he has to step in and save us and step in to make a way for us to be redeemed, to even have the possibility to dream of something better or more which you cannot do apart from Him. So that’s something that we probably need to consider before I go off on a tangent somewhere. That’s right on.

In light of all of these things, do you think that Christians bear responsibility for the institution of slavery? I think so. I think anybody who was involved, just like you’re saying now anybody who buys name brand clothes that are made in sweatshop I mean, they bear responsibility for that. I think in some cases they’re ignorance. But I think in a lot of other cases there’s just an issue of not caring, not wanting. When the slave trade, the institution of the slave trade was ended, it was a great cause, I know, to England and to America particularly maybe other countries. But it was a huge cost. It would have been better for them because not only did they stop it in their own country, england went and patrolled beyond to make sure it wasn’t going on elsewhere. And so it was done at great personal cost. It’s heart rending reading the stories of what people did to try and end this, and it didn’t affect them because after it was outlawed in their country, it was happening elsewhere. And so instead of not caring, these people went the extra mile and said, you know what? Great personal cost. Great personal risk. We’re going to try and save these people. So I think you’re absolutely right. Talking about the antebellum south, there was an economic factor there that the north didn’t have to consider because the south had a lot of cotton fields just like the Sugar Islands. People just took for granted those industries couldn’t continue without slavery. In some ways, it was pretty easy. There was one politician up north who had the attitude that we should stop slavery completely right now. And he was criticized by Southerners because he didn’t know it’s great to have these great ideas and ideals, but he didn’t have any answers on how to deal with the issue. Like now you’ve got this huge populace that all they know is slavery. So now what? Most masters were concerned that the people who lived under their property had enough food to eat, and so all of a sudden tell these people to go who knows where that’s taken out from under them. And so there was an economic consideration that the south had to deal with. But like you said, if we really do believe in God, if God is more important than money and mammon, then it’s an easier decision to make. We don’t know how we’re going to do this. And certainly there’s a lot of details. I don’t think we should be Christians who just have Sunday school answers say God will provide.

There was some real issues to tackle. Sure. Like how do you deal with these people? Booker T. Washington he was born in slavery and the emancipation happened in his lifetime. He decided to educate himself, and he educated so many former slaves through his school in Tuskegee. And so it’s fantastic seeing that. But the south had an economic burden that the north didn’t have. So almost like us today, judging how it doesn’t cost us anything to judge somebody 200 years ago, but to actually be in the situation and figure out, OK, how do I actually deal with this? How do we solve this problem? For a little while, they came up with different ideas. Some of the ideas were, we’ll ship them back to Africa. But at this point, first off, I don’t think that would have solved anything. Even if they did, it because these people now, they don’t know how to live in their own land. They don’t know their culture, they don’t know the tribe. Because Africa is not just one block of one people group. There’s thousands, probably tens of thousands of people groups, all with their own language. You can’t just set people loose and hope for the best somewhere else. There. They’re strangers to that land now too, because they’ve grown up somewhere else. They started doing that. That’s what Liberia is today. But they could have done it. If they put all the American and English ships to do that 24/7, they couldn’t have kept up. There was too many slaves. So it was a huge problem and easy for some people sometimes to say, well, they should have done this, they should have done this. But it was a very complicated issue with some huge people and economic ramifications for sure. I think one thing that we can point to today that could give us a rough idea of how complicated this was to even begin to attempt. There’s this game show called Family Feud, and recently they’ve been taping the show in different African countries. And the host of the show is an African American man. His name is Steve Harvey. And I noticed that some of the jokes that he would do here in the States when he was recording Family Feud were hits. I mean, everyone understood we have a common framework, we have a common history, so that we understood the jokes, that we would laugh and it was funny. But I noticed that when he started doing the jokes in Africa, many of his jokes fell flat. He wasn’t funny. It was just because the people are different, just because we have the same skin color doesn’t mean that we share the same foundation, that we find the same things funny or that we have the same culture. Our cultures are drastically different. That’s just a small example of what it means when they were saying, oh, well, we could send them all to Liberia or we could send them all back to Africa, you just drop them in the middle of the continent. You can’t do that. It was a lot more complicated than that. Yeah. Not that easy. Not that easy, right? Yeah.

As you guys were talking, I have several thoughts that went through my head. And I like sports, so I used to follow the NBA pretty closely. And NBA will not say anything about what’s going on in China, but let something happen in the US. All for civil rights and all these things. And I think it came out recently how much money they will lose if they lose China. I don’t know how much it is, but you’re talking about billions of dollars. I think the NBA makes anywhere between one to $2 billion per year. So probably half of their budget or their revenue will be lost just if they lose China. And so the same thing about China, but let’s not carolina decided that they won’t allow transgender to be in their bathroom of choice, but they have to be in the bathroom of their assigned sex at birth, and they decide, oh, well, we’re going to move because civil rights. I remember even at work, I don’t remember what it was. I think it was the Houston Rockets former general manager, who speak up about Taiwan and stuff like that was going on in Taiwan with China, and Commissioner was basically on defense with his comments. And we have a chat channel at work where we talk about different stuff, and one of them is basketball. And I remember one of the guys went in and said, oh, I like how Adam Silver, which is the NBA commissioner, trying to balance his comments and all this stuff. And I said to him, you know what, if this was about the US. And not about China and Taiwan, he would have taken aside big time. But because it’s China, he’s kind of a soft on the fence, like, you know, so we see it today. And as you mentioned, a hundred years from now, when people look back and say, okay, what was done about many other things today, even, quite honestly, what are we doing to our kids with the transgender movement today? And it’s just stuff I’m hopeful that even a year from now we’re going to look at that and say, you know what? That was really bad. But 100 years from now, are we going to look and say, we did a good thing to the kids by having Japanese stuff in our schools and exposing our kids to these kind of sexual of stuff at such a young age? I don’t think so. It’s easy, as you guys are saying, to judge things when we can look at it from our prism. Prism, of course.

But slavery, I think, was very evil. A lot of the slaves went through a lot of abuse and stuff, like from sexual abuse and stuff like that. Of course, we don’t want to minimize that. But my question for you, how should Christian have responded to slavery in America? Different Christians, how they should have. I think we can look at not only how should, how did they in England, William Wilverforce, he was not a Baptist, but he was a solid Christian, and he was just a prime mover for ending the slave trade there. And really, that ended up putting it into it throughout the world as we know it. So that was how Christians should have handled it. Preachers handled it. Baptist preachers handled it. There was ways that Christians dealt with it, even in the first century. Clement of Rome was a bishop in the first century, and we have some of his writings. And some Christians would sell themselves into slavery to reach other people. Some Christians would take offerings to rescue people from slavery. I mean, long before it was a racial issue, because I really don’t believe slavery was a racial issue until the end of all the south, which is another interesting, sad, but interesting fact, there’s some apostolic confessions, too, of the first few centuries, and it talked about how Christians should treat slaves. They said slaves should only work five days a week. This is like accepting slavery is what it is. But if you are a Christian, you own slaves, then you treat them as you treat yourself. And the bible talks about that equality of man, individual, soul, liberty. So, I mean, any good Christian knows that regardless of whether you’re a slave, a master, an employee, employer, president, street sweeper, men are men, people are people. They’re all like they say that it’s all level at the foot of the cross. And any good Christian knows and understands that people may have different positions. So then masters had decent ways of creating slaves. And right from the very beginning, the bible, early Christians didn’t think we’re going to topple down slavery. First off, if people have their souls changed, they’re going to change the way they act. And slavery won’t even be an issue because nobody will want to sell their fellow man. I’m talking about the slave trade. But because we live in a thin cross world, christians made ways to deal with it. Some of the richest black men in the south were actually slaves. One thing that some of the Quakers were known for doing was buying slaves and just setting them free. And some of those slaves became slave owners. And you’d think, well, that’s hypocritical. No, in a lot of cases not. They would buy their own family members back, and so they had no say in how you could free people, but they could buy a slave, and so they would buy them, and they were technically their master, even though they’re family. Why? Because they wanted them out from that slavery. So Christians had, if you want to call them workaround, had dealt with slavery for millennia.

And so even if you look at the old testament, it’s not that the old testament was cruel on slavery. In the old testament, you have the people who hauled water for the Jews. I’m trying to remember who they were. Now, the Nights, the gibby knights hauled water for Israel because they misled Joshua. They tricked him, and so they had to haul water for them. That was their thing, and they were happy to do it because they knew that if they didn’t submit to Israel that they would be conquested. So they just lived in harmony that way. Well, Saul’s children killed the Gibbonites unjustly. And so years later, there was a plague in Israel, and David beside god. Why do we have this plague? Why do we have this hunger? And it was because of that. It was because of what happened. So David called these princes and had them executed to pay for the sins against the give me nights. I don’t think there’s a story like that anywhere in any history of any people, group, anywhere other than the Bible. Where you have slaves who were killed unjustly and the princes of that country were executed for doing it. I mean think of anywhere where there’s been slavery that would have been slaves are just property and if ever it came to justice it certainly wouldn’t have come to executing the princes. Things would have just continued as normal. So God has always cared for if you want to say everyone certainly the underprivileged slaves, anybody who would have been underprivileged. So huge difference between how the world treated slaves and how god’s people did it. Should they have done it differently? It’s kind of easy saying well yeah, Christian should have done this, should have done this, monday morning quarterbacks how things should have been done. But there were some good people who did good things. I’m not neglecting the evil of slavery. Some wicked things were done. But I also have to realize nobody questioned this. Not any religion, not any thinker Aristotle thought that slavery was good it just happened to be the lowest rung on the ladder. Thinkers throughout history thought that it was okay. Catholics had slaves, Buddhists had slaves, Hindus had slaves, Muslims did and do have slaves. It was just an acceptable part of life. And then God moved some godly people, some Christian people in the 18th century to say you know what instead of working around this thing we’re going to deal with it because for the first time in history a nation predominantly had Christian values. Even like we said earlier I can’t say everybody in England and America was Christian by any means but even Deas had an esteem for the Bible because there was a lot of DYS here. So for the first time in history the slave trade became an ethical problem instead of just being accepted as a part of life as just another part of our society. So could they have done things differently? I’m sure they could have done things differently but the fact that it even ended is remarkable because from millennia nobody had an issue with it. Like the institution itself. Nobody even challenged his existence.

Yeah I know the Moravians did this. Today Moravians are not necessarily seen as having found doctrine but I know back then they would send out missionaries who would actually sell themselves into slavery so they can actually share the gospel with the slaves. So we see Christians even back then having a desire to share the gospel with the lost souls and the souls of slaves. The Christians did work a lot in not only freeing slaves but freeing them from the bondage of finn as well which is of course one of course the main point of the Removal Barriers podcast is to always want to share the gospel with people. We don’t bring up these topics not just because they’re interested. Of course we like talking about these things but we want to also bring up these things so we can guide people towards the ultimate freedom that is in Christ. And of course, the Bible says Romans 1030 for whoever of shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be free. And of course, Jesus said that I come, that he may have life and diet more abundantly. And quite honestly, if you’re not saved, you’re actually a slave to your sin. And if you’re a slave to your sin, you need that freedom that is in Christ. Yeah, that’s right.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Robert Woodbury. He’s an interesting fellow. I think he was writing his doctrine and it came upon him just the idea. I wonder what difference missionaries have made on the global scale. I think it’s interesting. Most of our world view about Christianity when I say we, I mean our society’s view. The west view of Christianity is based on fictional books. Like, we’re talking about slavery here. Most of what people, I think, know and believe about slavery probably came from the Roots series or the Roots book, which was a bestseller and also a fictional book. Most of what people think in the west about missions and missionaries is shaped by a rotten fictional book called the Poisonwood Bible, which is fiction as well. But people took it for granted that’s the way things are. And so this guy kind of took it upon himself to say, what impact did missionaries have throughout the world? And so he did an amazing study. He literally traveled to all kinds of missionary outposts throughout the planet and just collecting history where they were. And from there he started plotting things like economic disparity, healthcare, education, things like human rights. And he started seeing something pretty interesting as it seems, that wherever there was 19th century mission work and he used the term conversionary, protestant missionaries, I wouldn’t say Baptist or Protestants, but he would under his definition. He said wherever there was people who did that and missionaries who did that, it made a huge difference. And he actually said, quoted by saying, do you want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple if you have a time machine sending 19th century missionary and his work has been critiqued by Harvard, by dozens of universities, basically economists who are trying to see, is this guy right in what he’s saying? And sure enough, he’s finding that truth that is not really surprising to us as Christians because we know that Christ and the Gospel changes things. But not only what happened directly through the work of the missionaries, but indirectly huge things happen. Like I said, even though most Americans weren’t Christians, I don’t think back in the day there was a huge impact that Christ had on the society. And I think even though maybe the missionaries wouldn’t have had a huge impact on the whole society would have been Christian, their impact had side effects and rippled out into all kinds of things. And he compared, I think, the Republic of Congo with Congo. Congo was a country that allowed no missionaries, and the changes are drastic. So he’s done some really interesting work on that as well. And so I think that if it weren’t for Christianity and Godparent Christians, that history just shows us that slavery would still be at least the way the transatlantic slave trade function would still be around today.

Missionary Marco. We have a lot more to talk about, but we’ll continue in episode 92. Thank you for joining us on the Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you so much. God bless.

Thank you for listening. To get a hold of us. To support this podcast or to learn more about removing barriers, go to removingbarriers.net. This has been the Removal Barriers podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clear view of the cross.