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 ...
Slavery has been around since humans have and it’s still going strong worldwide. America hasn’t really learned any lessons because if I had to guess there’s more slavery in the US today then during the Civil War (which wasn’t about slavery) it’s just nat as in your face and has more to do with women and children.
Native Americans raped, pillaged and made slaves of other tribes. It’s a human ideology.
Also, the vast percentage of African slaves were shipped to South America.
Myth number one... “It’s over”... It isn’t and it never will be.
The Bible only support voluntary slavery or indentured servitude as punishment for stealing.
The Irish were treated as bad as slaves early on.
Michigan is, hands down, the worst state I've ever lived in but for Massachusetts. I refused to go to Greenfield Village in part because of the false history the leftists really really love to spout in that state. Any time I've been in a museum about Michigan history, it feels comparable to a museum in Turkey celebrating the victory of the Ottomans over Vienna in 1683 while explaining that the ottomans decided to grant mercy to Vienna and their devious allies the Polish Winged Hussars. Or a museum in North Korea proclaiming their supreme leader's victory over running dog imperialist President Eisenhower who kept his subjects oppressed and poor.
That said, I remember visiting the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in DC in 1987 on a high school field trip and then again in 1997 when I worked there. (Yes, although Michigan tries hard for the title, DC is still the most corrupt den of iniquity and awfulness in ... ever?) On both trips to the natural history museum they still had a plaque in the holocene era wing that proclaimed that the earth was cooling, it was caused by human beings, and we were all doomed to a new ice age. When I went again in 2000, that plaque had been removed but there was nothing to replace it. I haven't gone back since, but that's mostly because I hate DC, even more than I hated Michigan.
Greenfield Village was fine. There wasn’t that much revisionist history there 40 years ago. If you know a better history, take theirs with a grain of salt and move on.
The Irish were treated worse. You needed to spend money to replace an injured slave. If an Irishman died or was injured, he was on his own.
My ancestors were “slaves” from Northern Ireland brought here in the early 1700’s. They were euphemistically called “indentured servants”.
Some slavery practiced by Old Testament Jews was not hereditary; some was. Not sure why the authors were not aware of this.
Also, the authors make reference to slavery in the “American South.” This, I suppose, was to draw a distinction to the “good kind of slavery” practiced in the American North.
The original slave states were New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island.
Also, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia were slave states. Don't ever forget to direct 4/13ths responsibility in that direction.
“Delivered as the Presidential Address at the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society, February 18, 1961.”
And they worked real cheap also. Why risk a valuable slave when you could get an Irishman for a bottle of whiskey.
As stated on page 5 and not to be confused with David Brandon Korn.
Are you familiar with his work?
Under the ill-defined practice of indentured servanthood, a father could "apprentice out" his son by contractually giving lawful mastery to an employer, either getting or giving monetary assurance for that child to live with, be fed, housed, and gain practical knowledge of how to earn his/her own living while still a minor under the law. Any wages would go back to the parent, not to the apprenticed laborer.
This kind of control over a minor child was not shy of similarity overlapping with out-and-out slavery, as if one were a chattel destined to be used as the owner's or leased master's discretion.
It is called "apprenticeship," of which more can be learned from sources such as Apprenticeship in the United States(click here). Here is an excerpt from it:
"Apprenticeship's distinguishing feature was its contract of indenture, which elaborated the terms of the arrangement. This contract differed in two major ways from the contracts of indenture that bound immigrants. First, the apprenticeship contract involved young people and, as such, required the signature of their parents or guardians. Second, indentured servitude, which Galenson (1981) argues was adapted from apprenticeship, substituted Atlantic transportation for trade instruction in the exchange of a servant's labor. Both forms of labor involved some degree of mutuality or voluntary agreement. In apprenticeship, however, legal or natural parents transferred legal authority over their child to another, the apprentice's master, for a substantial portion of his or her youth. In exchange for rights to their child's labor, parents were also relieved of direct responsibility for child rearing and occupational training. Thus the child's consent could be of less consequence than that of the parents.".Back in the 1940s as a child, I had access to a number of nineteenth century Horatio-Alger-type "youth novels" ( written about the turn of the (20th) century of which the core of the attraction was the story of a maturing youth wiggling out of and escaping such apprenticeship, and through fortune and hard work with diligence was able to gain successful adulthood without the domineering control of a mean master.
These narratives of a relatively unknown and unappreciated aspect of American history ought to be featured now, for the effects of it keep ringing in the ears of truly well-founded conservatives who still approve of the benificence of Constitutional order that was in force in America early on, having begun about three centuries ago, of which the Revolutionary War of Independence was only an milestone along the way that resulted in overcoming the overwhelming burdens of serf-hood, slavery, aristocracy, and state-supported religiosity, the times when the term "freedman" was not merely a token but very real and meaningful to the ordinary inhabitant.
Should we legislate that the exposure of that phase of America's cultural progress be forcefully included in our grade-school educatiobal syllabus?
(If it were up to me, yes.)
Today all but three of those hundred-odd novels are out of print. Alger himself is considered a dinosaur of popular literature, a writer whose “strive and succeed” philosophy is as cringe-making as that of his contemporary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal”). A pity: for Alger was at the forefront of a phenomenally successful experiment in social reform and improvement, a broad movement that inspired poor kids to take advantage of America’s social mobility and that led tens of thousands of New York’s post-Civil War juvenile delinquents into productive lives. Those who care about the future of the city’s poor should re-examine Alger’s message: it worked once, and could work again.
RE: Horse-whipping or other such corporal or mental punishment was practiced.
I’m against all that stuff.
Well, I’ll make an exception for punishing leftist news media people and Dem politicians.
“I didn’t want to. I just felt I owed it to them. Somehow.”
-—Judge Smails.
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