Over the past 50 years of Secular-Progressive hyper-influence over our media, Hollywood, schools, universities, government bureaucracy, and pop culture, the single, essential truth of history which has been effectively written out of our history books:
CHRISTIANITY’S LEADING ROLE IN ABOLISHING HUMAN SLAVERY.
Oh, you haven’t heard about this?
Don’t feel bad. The Desolators among us conspired to make sure you wouldn’t, and won’t. Once more, the truth doesn’t fit their political narrative and agenda. Of course, this historical fact, and essential truth, is one of the key truths we at www.desolators.com live to illuminate every day.
Human slavery is one of the oldest human enterprises, perhaps the oldest. And its existence is universal throughout the human experience. In every land among every people slavery has been the rule, not the exception. What’s unusual, what’s rarely seen in the past (even the present in some regions) is when good men and women have risen up to eliminate it, often at great personal cost and physical threat.
For millennia, the slave trade was one of the most lucrative parts of any and all markets and economies, on every inhabited continent—Africa, Asia, Europe, and both North and South America. Slavery, and the barbaric men and women who profited by the practice, have been the norm, the “natural” condition of humankind. Put another way, slavery, along with prostitution (an exploitive, often closely related endeavor), and forced indentured servitude, were tolerated, even promoted and lauded, everywhere. Their absence in history is rare, the highly notable exception.
THE TRUTH NO ONE WANTS TO ADMIT
The only earthly force to finally, successfully brand slavery for what it is—inhumanely cruel, unjust, even criminal, and most of all anti-God—was Christianity, led by Christian activists.
The early Abolitionists in Europe were almost entirely Christian. Many were ministers and priests, mostly in Britain, who began to see the satanic, exploitive evil that the practice represented through their uniquely Christian perspective. One man in particular, William Wilberforce, as a devout Christian, could see the glaring contradictions in the teachings of Christ and this hellish practice. At considerable cost to himself, physically, professionally, and politically, he fought for years to finally outlaw the practice in much of the British Empire, and to put a stop to trafficking in men and women on the high seas. For the first time in history, these budding anti-slavery laws then found a strong enforcer in the British Navy.
(If you don’t own it, you should order the excellent movie Amazing Grace (2007). It should be a part of every family’s video collection!)
THE AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS
In America, such men and women as William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Theodore Weld (The Bible Argument Against Slavery), Christians all, used the Scriptures in speeches and writings to make the case for the American abolition of slavery. Our westward-expanding and growing nation was torn on the matter. Whole regions, mostly in the Old South, were determined to protect the institution of slavery, to spread it west, and to preserve their “property rights” and political clout, as the Constitution supposedly guaranteed.
The then senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln was convinced that the Nation would either become either wholly free of slavery, or entirely slaveholding, but not part-free and part-slave. This he illuminated for history in his now famous “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand” speech (June 16, 1858).
TRYING TO USE THE BIBLE TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY
Many slavery advocates used the argument that the Bible tells of slavery being practiced in Ancient Israel, and that the Apostle Paul admonished slaves among the Christians to not rebel against their masters.
Still, while many Americans were racist (by today’s standards, but not by the standard of the times) in their views of American blacks, the core of those who fought to eliminate “that evil practice” were, essentially, powerful Christian ministers and practitioners of the faith.
Southern Democrats tried to claim that the Bible condoned the practice of human slavery. Northern Abolitionist Christians, however, countered that the Bible gave all slaves certain rights as human beings, rights that most Southerners were withholding from the blacks among them. The Christians, with a superior understanding of Holy Writ, countered Southern propaganda about God’s supposed “sanction” of slavery, proving that American slavery was not the same as described in Ancient Israel. Slaves in Israel were still human beings with specified rights. However, blacks in the South were property of the slave-owners with no rights, none. Demonstrating this in articles and speeches was important to the abolitionist cause because the Christians wanted to block Southern slaveholders and politicians from making the false case that God, in fact, sanctioned the practice.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
In the 1830s, Christian Evangelists formed The American Anti-Slavery Society. William Lloyd Garrison founded the newspaper, The Liberator, which promoted and gave hope to the Abolitionist Movement. Later, Harriet Beecher Stowe (the daughter and also wife of Christian seminary instructors) published the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, illuminating the cruelty of slavery.
Finally, in the 1850s, Abolitionists formed The Liberty Party, which became the Free Soil (as opposed to Slave Soil) Party, which then became the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President elected in 1860.
Mostly due to Southern Democrat opposition to Lincoln’s election, these slave states, one by one seceded from the Union. A disastrous civil war was the result, costing the lives of nearly 700,000 Americans. Towards the end of that War, President Lincoln stated:
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil (black slavery) shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash (the beatings and scourging of slaves) shall be paid by another drawn with the sword (the Civil War), as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” (Here Lincoln quotes, again, from the Bible).
Lincoln understood. The blood, death, and suffering Americans experienced in this Great War of Emancipation (to free the slaves) was necessary to pay for the American sin of slavery. This is precisely what Christian leaders had been warning America about for decades prior to the War.
Today we see a war on traditional, conservative Christianity in America and in the world. In this war these vital historical truths of Christian opposition to, and elimination of, slavery are seldom, if ever, taught anymore. Rewriting history, the Left, these Desolators among us, believe their secular-utopian ends justify their deceptive means. For human beings in general, the truth always upsets one’s applecart when living a lie.
Yet, I ask you, in the context of the great sacrifices made by those Christian leaders (including the martyr, President Lincoln) to once and for all abolish slavery, try for a moment to imagine what our world would look like today had Christ never been born, had Christianity no role in the development of Western Civilization.
If we are honest with ourselves, the true vision of a world that has never heard of Christ would be horrible to imagine. Such a world would be dark and inhumanly brutal, with slavery possibly even canonized in a modern hyper-secular system, hardly advanced morally beyond the totalitarian world of ancient Rome.
No, it is not possible to overstate the impact, for good, of this birth of a single, innocent baby in Bethlehem two millennia ago. And it is not possible to overstate the influence for good that Christianity has had on our nation and on our world, and in finally creating the most effective front for attacking, and hopefully one day eliminating…
…the greatest man-caused scourge in world history: Slavery, in all its forms.
–Richard Parker Robison