Slavery, as a human institution, existed since pre-historical times, and remains with us to this day. Its form changes, but the reality behind it remains the same, as Pope Francis recently stated:
Slavery is not something from other times. It is a practice that has deep roots and continues to manifest itself today and in many different ways: trafficking of human beings, exploitation of work through debt, exploitation of children, sexual exploitation and forced domestic work are some of the many forms.[1]
Slavery is exploitative, it is dehumanizing, indeed, it is blasphemous, because those who are enslaved have within them the image and likeness of God in them. As Jesus indicated, what is being done to them, is being done to him (cf. Matt 25:40).
Sadly, Christians have often failed to realize the evil of slavery. Even in the patristic era, it was rare to find someone like St. Gregory of Nyssa completely and utterly denouncing the enterprise, making him one of the great moral theologians of the early church because of his outspoken words about slavery. In his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, St. Gregory of Nyssa gives some of his strongest words against the practice. He saw the practice as creating legislation or laws which must be rejected because they run contrary to God’s own moral law:
I got me slaves and slave-girls. What do you mean? You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. [2]
Positive, man-made laws could be, and often are, immoral, seeking to override the moral order which God established. Just because there is a force of custom or law does not make it right; if a particular law runs contrary to God’s expectations for humanity, the law is to be denounced, if not outright ignored. What God established for humanity is not slavery, but freedom, so that those who seek to enslave others find themselves rejecting the freedom which God grants in his gracious mercy:
I got me slaves and slave-girls. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness (Gen. 1,26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Rom 11,29). God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?[3]
While few saw through the time and tradition which they lived in like St. Gregory of Nyssa, other great thinkers set the stage for the overthrow of the whole justification for slavery, such as we find in the writings of St. Salvian. Sadly, he was too much a man of his time and of his society to entirely dismiss the institution, but he did condemn the way slaves were being treated, indeed, he justified their actions over and against their rich owners when their owners complained by saying they were lazy, good-for-nothing thieves who deserved any and all punishments they received. Salvian pointed out that these justifications were baseless; the poor conditions which slaves found themselves in made them incapable of blame:
First of all, if slaves are thieves, they are perhaps forced to steal through want. Even though they customary allowances are given, these allowances satisfy custom rather than sufficiency and thus fulfill the law without fulfilling the need. Their indulgence makes their fault less blameworthy, because the guilt of the thief who is unwillingly forced into theft is excusable. Holy Scripture seems to excuse in part the offense of the needy when it says: ‘the fault is not so great when a man has stolen; for he steals to feed his hungry soul.’ He steals to fill his hungry soul. For this reason, they who are excused by the Divine Word are not very well to be accused by us.[4]
Likewise, Salvian indicated, when they fled from harm, seeking refuge elsewhere, they were more than justified for their flight, because they merely were seeking proper living conditions which all humans should be able to have as a result of the dignity God gave to them:
This much can be said more correctly about their flight, that they are driven to flight, not only by their wretched condition, but by their punishments. [5]
Human laws and customs favored the rich and blamed the poor for the conditions which the rich put upon the poor. Salvian believed the rich were at fault and were themselves to be condemned for their unjust treatment of the underclasses. When such laws made it impossible for the oppressed to live reasonably within society, Salvian indicated, the oppressed were more than in their right to reject those laws, to reject servitude, and seek asylum and refuge, taking what they need in order to survive.
While many might think, “I reject the institution of slavery, and I agree with the condemnation of it by St. Gregory of Nyssa, and I accept what St. Salvian indicated slaves could and should be allowed to do without any blame,” they ignore the slavery which lies right in front of them, which they help enforce with laws and regulation which they are unwilling to overturn. As Pope Francis indicated, slavery remains with us in this day and age, found in and through all kinds exploitation reified in law. Some forms of slavery, to be sure, are actively being fought against, like sex-trafficking, but other, more subtle kinds of slavery are promoted, such as found in the prison for profit system as well as the way immigrants, documented or undocumented, are treated by their employers in the United States.
Private prisons are finding themselves benefiting from the Trump Administration. More prisoners are being sent to private prisons. The government, by seeking to privatize governmental services, are turning to these for-profit prison system as having a major rule in the future of the penitential system. These prisons are run for profit, without consideration of human dignity. Not only are abuses common, there is no oversight to protect the needs of the prisoners as they cover up abuses. They are poorly run, without the resources to help with the needs of the prison population. And this is why, in private prisons, but also in federal prisons as well, prisoners are being looked upon as a means of cheap labor: this means that prison labor often amounts to slavery; and as slaves, prisoners face and suffer terrible consequences for refusing to work. Similarly, connected to the historical slave trade in the United State, it is not surprising to find that minorities are more likely to be sent to private prisons for exploitation, indicating racism is still involved in this modern form of slavery. It is not difficult to see why prison reform is not popular in a capitalistic society. Slavery provides all kinds of economic incentives. Private prisons are themselves a form of big business, as sources of profit for corporate interests. While there is certainly the need for a penitential system, what we have now needs serious reform. We need to stop thinking of prisoners as mere objects to be manipulated. There is the need to treat prisoners with dignity. We must recognize, like St. Salvian, how many are thrown in jail for crimes of necessity, and realize that the system, and those who hold it up, are those truly guilty.
It should not be surprising that the immigration system itself engages the same, dehumanizing treatment of aliens, turning many into slaves. Immigration centers mistreat and abuse people, treating them like slaves. Thousands of those detained by ICE have described the slave-like conditions, demonstrating the inhuman – and dehumanizing mentality which exploits the weak and vulnerable. Documented and undocumented immigrants alike fear for their lives. They do not know what to do, how to defend themselves when being abused, allowing for all kinds of exploitation and outright slavery. This is why documented immigrants, finding their immigration status tied to work related VISAS, quickly find themselves turned into slaves saying nothing against their employer out of fear of deportation. Human trafficking works to exploit the injustices which lay behind the current immigration system. Consistently, reports can be found where someone, thinking they have been offered a fair and just job in the United States, find themselves quickly turned into slaves, such as what happened to a woman who found herself turned into a nanny for students at Indiana University. Promised a better life in the United States, many immigrants come, not realizing until too late, that they have become enslaved, being forced to work out in the service industry, fearful of speaking out of their abuse, because they do not know what will happen to them once they do speak. They fear being sent back to their homeland, where it is likely they will suffer harm or death, which is why they do what they need to do in order to survive, even if it means breaking unjust laws and finding themselves exploited as a result.
While the exploitation of labor in the prison system, as well as of immigrants, are but two examples of where we can find slavery in the United States today, as Pope Francis indicated, there are many forms of slavery in society before us, if we but look and see what is going on. Likewise, we must note how the laws are used to promote such slavery; debt relief services, a proper social safety net, and the like are necessary preconditions for the ending of slavery. So long as the rich justify laws which benefit them over the interest and needs of the poor, slavery will be in place:
It is not enough for some states and International Organizations to adopt a particularly harsh policy in order to punish the exploitation of human beings, if then the causes, the deepest roots of the problem, are not addressed. When countries suffer extreme poverty, violence and corruption, neither the economy, nor the legislative framework nor the basic infrastructures are effective; they fail to guarantee security or assets or essential rights. In this way, it is easier for the perpetrators of these crimes to continue acting with total impunity.[6]
So long as we accept the status quo, no matter what we say about slavery, we are ourselves complicity in it, as Pope Francis also indicated: “Faced with this tragic reality, no one can wash their hands of it without being, in some way, an accomplice to this crime against humanity.”[7] Christians, knowing the dignity of life comes from the image of God within all humanity, must refuse all such exploitation, and all structures of sin which allow it:
While individuals and groups speculate shamefully on slavery, we Christians, all together, are called to develop more and more collaboration, to overcome all kinds of inequality, all kinds of discrimination, which are precisely what makes it possible for a man to make another man a slave. [8]
We, who know better, will be judged harshly for our inaction, for our silence in the midst of this great evil. Patriarch Bartholomew, in his joint declaration with the Archbishop of Canterbury, stated that we must acknowledge our sin; we must repent, overcome our indifference to all forms of modern slavery before us, and work to protect the vulnerable who are being exploited because of their vulnerability:
We repent for not doing nearly enough swiftly enough to curb the plague of modern slavery, acknowledging that our ignorance and indifference are the worst forms of tolerance and complicity. We are judged each day by what we refuse to see and fail to do for the most vulnerable among us.[9]
We can no longer justify modern slavery just because the rules of law allow such exploitation and shrug our hands and say there is nothing we can do. In all times, slavery was established by and protected by the rule of law. As St. Salvian indicated, those being exploited, are not to be condemned for their rejection of unjust laws. We must realize they are not the ones at fault, we are. Until we do so, we will be judged and condemned for our unjust cruelty to others.
[Image= Exterior of STDC by GEO Group [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons]
[1] Pope Francis, Video Message To the Participants in the International Forum on Modern Slavery. Buenos Aires, May 5, 2018.
[2] St. Gregory of Nyssa, “Homily 4: in Homilies on Ecclesiastes. Ed. Stuart George Hall (New York: Walter de Gruter, 1993), 73.
[3] St. Gregory of Nyssa, “Homily 4,” 74.
[4] St. Salvian the Presbyter, “The Governance of God” in Salvian The Presbyter. Trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, PhD (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1962). 95.
[5] St. Salvian the Presbyter, “The Governance of God” in Salvian The Presbyter. Trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, PhD (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1962). 95.
[6] Pope Francis, Video Message To the Participants in the International Forum on Modern Slavery..
[7] Pope Francis, Video Message To the Participants in the International Forum on Modern Slavery..
[8] Pope Francis, Video Message To the Participants in the International Forum on Modern Slavery..
[9] Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Justin of Canterbury, Modern Slavery – A Join Declaration. Feb. 7, 2017.
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