To The Daily Sun,
 
Don Ewing claims Christianity changed the world's attitude about slavery; that slavery is a sin. The Bible never claims slavery is a sin. In fact, Paul stated in Ephesians that slaves should obey their masters "according to the flesh, with fear and trembling." They're not "employers." After that period, when Christianity took over the empire, all the Christian emperors supported slavery. Furthermore, none of the seven major Ecumenical Ecclesiastical Councils (321-565) condemned slavery.  
 
During the medieval period, slavery was widespread in Christian Europe and the Mediterranean through a highly interconnected network of slave trading. As European societies adopted feudalism, serfdom became the dominant economic engine. A new species of abject servitude, serfdom was a condition in which a tenant farmer and his family were bound to a hereditary plot of land and the will of his landlord. No equality. No liberty.
 
During the early modern period (1500-1700), Protestant and Catholic churches, which dominated the kingdoms, strongly supported slavery. The Christianity brought to the Americas was generally exploitative, ruthless and cruel, establishing slave markets and networks throughout. Columbus initiated the first transatlantic slave voyage in 1493.
 
It was the influence of the humanist elements of the Enlightenment that began the sea change within the churches. This influence had an easier time in the north but almost every church in the U.S. supported slavery right up until around the start of the Civil War. By definition, abolitionists were liberal humanist Christians and they allied against slavery with the secular humanists of the times. At that time, it was the Democrats who were the slavery-supporting right-wing Christians. The "New Jim Crow" we see now is a Republican course of action that hasn't slowed in 60 years.
 
James Veverka
 
Laconia

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