When it comes to history, many Americans treat the more uncomfortable parts more as an accusation than as a teacher. When embarrassing (or even heinous) facts surface, the instinct too often has been not to learn but to defend, dismiss, or even erase. That instinct did not appear overnight. It was formed. And for generations, it was formed inside the American church.
A recent example of this instinct to erase uncomfortable historical facts has come from the Trump administration, which has ordered the removal of exhibits emphasizing slavery and racial injustice at the Smithsonian Institution and national parks.
In light of the ongoing effort to “whitewash” America’s history of racism, slavery, and segregation, I’ve decided to write this brief article, which is focused purely on facts, not opinions. The following points are supported by documented realities drawn from sermons, denominational histories, government records, and lived experience. These facts, of course, will be dismissed by some because they expose how important Christian theology was to the shaping of racial injustice… and how little of that theology was ever corrected.
So let’s begin, shall we?
1. Christian European nations created the largest chattel slave trade in world history
From the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Christian European nations organized and sustained the largest system of race-based chattel slavery the world has ever known. Historians estimate that more than 12 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, with millions more dying during capture, transport, or enslavement. European Christian nations did not merely tolerate the Transatlantic slave trade. They theologically justified it and directly participated in it.
The earliest theological authorization of chattel slavery came from the Catholic Church through papal bulls such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), which explicitly authorized the kidnapping and perpetual enslavement of non-Christian peoples as a means of Christian expansion. While Pope Paul III issued statements in the 1530s that appeared to oppose the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, those would largely be neutralized by 1537 due to intense political backlash from Christian monarchs. So too, earlier papal bulls authorizing slavery were never revoked, leaving Christian empires to continue the slave trade uninterrupted.
But it wasn’t just Christian monarchs that exploited and trafficked human beings as chattel slaves. Catholic orders such as the Jesuits and Protestant institutions like the Church of England owned and operated plantations worked by enslaved people. After baptizing them, they exploited their labor to generate enormous wealth.
In later centuries, as Protestant nations rose to power, the original theological framework that sanctioned the Transatlantic slave trade was not abandoned. (Ironically, among the many doctrines Protestant reformers rejected, the Christian right to own non-Christians was not one of them!) Protestant empires such as Britain, the Netherlands, and later the American colonies inherited and defended the Transatlantic slave trade with Scripture (chapter and verse) rather than appealing to papal authority. Put simply, the Transatlantic slave trade was not some “secular” deviation that occurred despite Christianity’s best efforts to stop it. Rather, it was developed and regulated under Christian authority and sustained for centuries by Christian nations that operated under the belief that slavery was biblical.
2. Christianity often credits itself for ending the race-based chattel slavery it helped create and sustain
Modern Christians often point to figures like William Wilberforce, the Quakers, and other abolitionists as proof that Christianity ended slavery. Their courage should be honored. But that framing omits an essential fact. The same Christian nations that later produced abolitionists had already spent centuries building, expanding, and theologically defending the Transatlantic slave trade under a belief that spreading Christian civilization justified conquest and enslavement. By the time organized abolition gained traction in the late eighteenth century, slavery had been embedded in Christian empires for more than three hundred years.
It is true that many Christians opposed slavery. But for much of its history these Christians represented a dissenting minority within societies and churches that treated the institution as lawful, profitable, and biblically defensible.
To put it bluntly, praising Christians for helping dismantle race-based chattel slavery without reckoning with the Christians who organized and defended it is like praising an arsonist for helping put out his own fire.
For hundreds of years, Christian nations baptized slavery as God’s will with scriptural proof-texts and seared consciences. And when the pro-slavery theological defense finally collapsed under moral and economic pressure, Christianity attempted to rewrite history by recasting itself as the hero of the story.
Protestant America was the only nation that had to fight a civil war to eradicate slavery. 600,000+ Americans (mostly Christian) were slaughtered in the fight to preserve race-based chattel slavery. Meanwhile, it was not until 1917 that the Roman Catholic Church officially defined “selling a human being into slavery or for any other evil purpose” as a crime in its canon law.
Ending an injustice is honorable. Nevertheless, defending it for centuries (with chapter and verse) is still part of the story.
3. Race-based chattel slavery was proclaimed as “God’s will” from American Christian pulpits
America’s history of race-based slavery was not treated as an embarrassing contradiction to Christianity. It was defended as consistent with it.
Nineteenth-century Christian pastors confidently defended slavery by appealing directly to the Bible. Sermons, pamphlets, books, and other theological writings routinely cited the so-called “curse of Ham” as found in Genesis 9:25, which was repeatedly misapplied to Africans as a proof-text in order to defend racial hierarchy as divinely ordained.
Abraham owned slaves. Genesis 17 explicitly refers to servants “bought with money.” Isaac inherited Abraham’s wealth, including “male and female servants.” (Genesis 26:14) Jacob, Job, King David, King Solomon and many more biblical figures owned slaves. These facts alone served as evidence, at least to pro-slavery Christians, that God had long permitted slaveholding.
Pro-slavery pastors and theologians appealed to Exodus 21 to argue that slavery was a regulated and therefore legitimate institution, and to Deuteronomy 20 and Leviticus 25:44–46 to justify the idea that conquered peoples could be permanently subjugated.
So too, the New Testament addresses slaves and masters directly, assuming slaveholding households within early Christian communities. (See Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22; Titus 2:9–10; 1 Peter 2:18 and 1 Timothy 6:1–2). These passages were used to demand obedience from enslaved peoples as a Christian obligation.
So too, Paul’s letter to Philemon was frequently invoked to suggest that Christians were to be “kind” to the human beings they owned as property without challenging the institution itself. These passages, and many others, were quoted repeatedly in defense of slavery.
But perhaps the strongest “biblical” evidence in favor of the pro-slavery movement was the fact that Jesus’ never directly condemned the institution of slavery. This point was frequently cited as an absolute confirmation that the institution of slavery did not violate God’s moral order. Pro-slavery pastors proclaimed that the literal absence of a direct command to dismantle the institution of slavery, either in the Old or New Testament, was further evidence of its divine approval, even as Jesus’ explicit teachings on love, mercy, and neighbor were sidelined.
The argument was simple: if Scripture regulates slavery and Christ does not condemn it, then the church has no authority to oppose it.
The result was a pro-slavery biblical framework supported by numerous proof-texts that missed the entire point of the gospel of Jesus. Such is a devastating example of what happens to those who appeal directly to scripture, but without Christ at the center. Christian abolitionists read the same Bible but through a different lens, emphasizing the image of God (“Imago Dei”), the Exodus narrative, and the Golden Rule.
For generations, Christian congregations were taught that race-based chattel slavery was not merely lawful, but biblical. And when slavery is framed as “biblical,” resistance to it can appear as resistance to God.
4. Entire denominations were founded to protect slaveholding.
Did you know some of the biggest churches in America were literally founded to defend and preserve race-based chattel slavery?
Of course, the most well-known example is the Southern Baptist Convention, which was formed in 1845 after northern Baptists refused to appoint slaveholders as missionaries. Southern Christian leaders insisted that owning slaves was compatible with both the Christian faith and Christian history. After all, buying slaves is not declared to be a sin by the Bible. Pro-slavery advocates largely viewed the abolitionist movement as a rebellious “progressive” movement that 1) ignored a literal reading of the Bible and 2) sought to overturn God’s moral order. The slave states of the South wanted Washington D.C. to allow them to continue exercising their right to own and trade human beings as property. When those previously enjoyed rights were denied by the Union under Abraham Lincoln, the Confederacy was born. And with it came new Christian denominations committed to preserving and upholding the right to own human beings as property.
While the Baptist split over slavery is perhaps the most well-known, there were many other denominations that divided. For example, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South split from northern Methodists in 1844 after Bishop James O. Andrew was pressured to resign because he owned enslaved people. Southern Methodists cast themselves as the defenders of biblical authority and of the true Christian faith.
Likewise, the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America was organized in 1861 by southern Presbyterians in reaction to Northern Presbyterians affirming loyalty to the Union.
In each case, the justification for the split was theological. The pro-slavery advocates appealed directly to Scripture, church tradition, and God’s moral order in defending slaveholding as morally legitimate. Meanwhile, many of the strongest abolitionist voices came from Quakers, Free Will Baptists, and Unitarians, which were groups often viewed with suspicion or labeled doctrinally unsound by more conservative Protestants because of their approach to Scripture.
Some of the largest Christian churches, seminaries, and institutions that exist today were originally organized, named, and built to protect the institution of race-based chattel slavery as a Christian right.
5. The Confederacy presented slavery and secession as God-ordained
The defense of slavery did not begin on the battlefield. It began with the Bible.
Christian pastors and political leaders across the American South framed secession from the U.S. as a moral and theological obligation. The official declarations issued by Confederate states make this unmistakably clear by openly and confidently defending the heinous practice of chattel slavery and white supremacy in religious terms.
The Texas Declaration of Secession (1861) is among the most explicit. It states that the federal government was established:
“exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity.”
It goes on to defend African slavery as both natural and beneficial, describing enslaved people as:
“an inferior and dependent race” that “benefited by the experience” of slavery.
Mississippi’s 1861 Declaration of Secession is even more direct:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
Mississippi argued that abolition would not only destroy the state’s economy but also its moral fabric. Abolitionists were depicted as dangerous agitators whose hostility to slavery amounted to hostility toward the plain reading of the Bible and God’s moral order.
Pro-slavery theology was reinforced weekly from Southern pulpits. In an 1860 sermon delivered in New Orleans and circulated across the South, Presbyterian pastor Benjamin Morgan Palmer declared:
“Slavery is a trust committed to us by God… and for which we are responsible to Him.”
Palmer goes on to argue that defending slavery was a “sacred” duty and that secession was divinely ordained. Rev. Palmer was not an isolated voice but represented a broad consensus among Southern clergy who confidently taught that opposing slavery meant opposing God’s moral order.
Before the Confederacy defended slavery with guns and cannons, it defended it with the Bible.
6. The bloodiest Christian dispute in American history was over slavery
It is a sad historical fact that the United States is the only modern nation that required a full-scale civil war to abolish slavery. More than 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War.
Both sides claimed God’s favor.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared national days of fasting and prayer, urging citizens to seek God’s blessing on the Southern cause. Southern pastors assured their congregations that they were on God’s side because Scripture and history stood on the side of slaveholders.
Meanwhile, abolitionists preached that the same Bible demanded liberation and judgment on the nation for the sin of slavery.
Abraham Lincoln clearly recognized the theological absurdity. In his Second Inaugural Address, he observed:
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”
But he wasn’t finished. He added:
“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The Civil War exposed what happens when Christians cannot agree on what Scripture requires. It also teaches us that when Scripture is weaponized, it can drive a nation to slaughter.
Hundreds of thousands died because American Christians were unable to peacefully agree about what the Bible says.
7. The end of slavery did not end Christian justifications for racial inequality
The South may have lost the shooting war, but the Christian denominations, seminaries, and institutions created to support the Southern cause would not only survive, but thrive.
In the decades following the Civil War, Southern churches rapidly adapted their theology to justify segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terror. White supremacy simply found a new form as the same biblical arguments once used to defend slavery were repurposed to defend Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and later, mass incarceration when segregation became legally untenable. Segregations relied heavily upon the Old Testament prohibition of intermarrying with foreign peoples (Deuteronomy 7:3,4) to prove that God still had an order even if slavery has been outlawed.
In short, while the 13th Amendment abolished the institution of chattel slavery (unless one was convicted of a crime), the theological logic that supported it remained largely intact.
The Lost Cause movement played a central role in this transition as it served to reframe slavery as benign, the cause of the Confederacy as righteous, and their defeat as noble suffering. Churches played a major role in helping propagate these myths.
As historian James Cone observed, white Christianity in America rarely confronted its own role in racial oppression. Instead, it learned to moralize inequality while denying responsibility for it.
Until the church reckons honestly with how it used the Bible to condone slavery and to even baptize inequality after emancipation, it will continue to mistake silence on the topic of race for progress.
The record is clear. Race-based chattel slavery was not merely tolerated by Christianity. It were built, defended, and sustained with Christian theology. And when the institution finally collapsed, much of that theology quietly survived, seeping into new systems of racial injustice.
If the church wants to speak credibly about justice, unity, or reconciliation, it must first tell the truth about its role in using Scripture to perpetuate the most vile form of chattel slavery in world history.
History will keep teaching the lesson until it is finally learned.
