The moral shift that ended slavery was a religious revolution
In short: We treat the abolition of slavery as a modern moral certainty, but it was once a contested fact of life. The transition from viewing slavery as a tolerable evil to an absolute wrong was driven by a profound, internal transformation within Protestant Christianity during the 18th and 19th centuries.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the prevailing consensus that slavery was a mere fact of life began to fracture. This shift was not a simple linear progression of human rights; rather, it was a period of intense internal conflict within Protestantism. While some Protestant activists began to oppose the practice with increasing force, other Protestants simultaneously developed more idealistic and principled defenses of the slave trade.
This ideological tug-of-war fundamentally reshaped the religion's internal logic. The scale of the Atlantic slave trade provides the grim context for this debate. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, approximately 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic by European traders. The human cost was staggering: an unknown number died resisting capture, while 10-15% of those who boarded ships perished during the voyage.
Those who lived through the journey entered a life of unending bondage, frequently suffering in environments where exhaustion led to fatality—at times spending 24 hours or longer straight tending to sugar-boilers. These victims faced irrevocable abduction, chained in dark, heaving ships with hundreds of others. Ultimately, the movement to end legal slavery resulted in more than just a policy change; it triggered profound structural changes in Protestant Christianity that continue to resonate today. Because Protestantism has historically dominated northern Europe and North America, its ability to assimilate the conditions of the modern world has helped define the intellectual and cultural patterns of the contemporary world. The abolition of slavery serves as a primary case study in how this religious tradition navigated its encounter with modernity.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: How We Learned That Slavery is Wrong - Professor Alec Ryrie
- Also: How we Learned that Slavery is Wrong
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