Posted on 12/29/2025 1:00:37 PM PST by Red Badger
Few topics are more distorted in public debate than slavery—especially its relationship to Scripture and Western history. When viewed through the lens of Scripture and credible historical research, the picture becomes far more complex—and, in many cases, radically different from the cultural narrative promulgated by many far-left progressives.
Here are seven myths that need to be challenged, each grounded in biblical truth and supported with historical data.
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The Bible Condones Slavery
Scripture’s storyline consistently moves toward liberation, human dignity, and equality in Christ—not the perpetuation of bondage.
Slaveholders in the American South understood this, which is why they forbade enslaved people from reading, as a plain reading of Scripture undermined slavery itself. Consider:
Exodus: the world’s most influential liberation narrative. Philemon 16: Paul urges receiving Onesimus “no longer as a slave… but as a beloved brother.” Galatians 3:28: status distinctions collapse in Christ. 1 Corinthians 7:21: the enslaved are urged to gain freedom whenever possible. John 8:36: “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” These passages became the theological backbone of evangelical abolitionism in Britain and America.
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Biblical Slavery Was Identical to American Chattel Slavery
This is historically and legally false.
In the ancient Near East, servitude often emerged from war captivity, debt, or famine-relief contracts, not racial ideology. Mosaic Law restricted power and protected the vulnerable:
Debt service was time-limited for the Hebrews. Runaway slaves were not returned (Deut. 23:15–16). Servants received Sabbath rest and legal protection. This bears no resemblance to race-based, hereditary, property-in-persons chattel slavery in the American South.
(For ancient slavery’s complexity, see the British Museum and Oxford Classical Dictionary.)
(Excerpt) Read more at stream.org ...
“The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another - that in my book is a working definition of slavery.” - Walter E. Williams.
“Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom.” -Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.” - Ezra Pound
When the media pushed that Gloria Steinem type careers would help a woman “find herself” it didn’t mention that tens of millions would be in deadening, monotonous ordinary jobs. Waitress. Renting out bowling shoes. Typing and filing all day. Cleaning jobs. Millions of low level jobs.
And lower wages so the 1950s men who were expected to buy a house, support a family with a woman who worked in the home and raised children, was replaced by a working husband and working wife and maybe part time jobs for teenagers, to have a life lower than the 1950s homeowner males had.
“The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.” ― Larken Rose
“Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting–or even demanding–their own enslavement.” ― Larken Rose
“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.” - Aldous Huxley
“Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.” - Joseph Sobran
“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.” ― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
“It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.” ― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on the ‘legacy of slavery’ with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.” -Thomas Sowell, A Legacy of Liberalism
The North so believed in ending slavery they put Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo in 1906.
“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.” - Thomas Sowell
“Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today’s intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders, and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn’t fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.” - Thomas Sowell
“The number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together.” - Thomas Sowell
The Leftists won’t pull down the statue in Chicago of Steven Douglass who was the leader of the northern Democrats who protected slavery.
"When you get in debt you become a slave." - Andrew Jackson
“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” - Lysander Spooner
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Frank Herbert
"The weak want to bring the strong down to their level. They would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom." - Alexis De Tocqueville
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