Slavery and religion

Historically, slavery has been regulated, supported, or opposed on religious grounds.
In Judaism, Hebrew slaves were given a range of treatments and protections. They were to be treated as an extended family with certain protections, and they could be freed. They were property but could also own material goods.
Early Christian authors maintained the spiritual equality of slaves and free persons while accepting slavery as an institution. Early modern papal decrees allowed the enslavement of the unbelievers, though popes denounced slavery from the fifteenth century onward. This denouncement of slavery did not discourage the diocese of the Anglican church from having an indirect involvement with the religious conversion of black slaves in Barbados, in which one of the main principles was the divine right of the master over the slave. In the eighteenth century, the abolition movement took shape among Christians across the globe, but various denominations did not prohibit slavery among their members into the nineteenth century. Enslaved non-believers were sometimes converted to Christianity, but elements of their traditional beliefs merged with their Christian beliefs.
Early Islamic texts encourage kindness towards slaves and manumission, while recognizing slavery as an institution and permitting enslavement of non-Muslims imprisoned or bought beyond the borders of Islamic rule. Children born to slaves were also considered legally as slaves.

Slavery in the Bible

The Genesis narrative about the Curse of Ham has often been held to be an aetiological story, giving a reason for the enslavement of the Canaanites. The word ham is very similar to the Hebrew word for hot, which is cognate with an Egyptian word and is used to refer to Egypt itself, in reference to the fertile black soil along the Nile valley. Although many scholars therefore view Ham as an eponym which is used to represent Egypt in the Table of Nations, a number of Christians throughout history, including Origen and the Cave of Treasures, have argued for the alternate proposition that Ham represents all black people, his name symbolising their dark skin colour; pro-slavery advocates, from Eutychius of Alexandria and John Philoponus, to American pro-slavery apologists, have therefore occasionally interpreted the narrative as a condemnation of all black people to slavery. A few Christians, like Jerome, even took up the racist notion that black people inherently had a soul as black as body.
Slavery was customary in antiquity, and it is condoned by the Torah. The Bible uses the Hebrew term to refer to slavery; however, has a much wider meaning than the English term slavery, and in several circumstances it is more accurately translated into English as servant. It was seen as legitimate to enslave captives obtained through warfare, but not through kidnapping. Children could also be sold into debt bondage, which was sometimes ordered by a court of law.
As with the Hittite Laws and the Code of Hammurabi, the Bible does set minimum rules for the conditions under which slaves were to be kept. These are written as condition statements reflective of bronze age law. A set of if/then parameters to account for specific transgressions. Slaves were to be treated as part of an extended family; they were allowed to celebrate the Sukkot festival, and expected to honour Shabbat. Israelite slaves could not be compelled to work with rigour, and debtors who sold themselves as slaves to their creditors had to be treated the same as a hired servant. If a master harmed a slave in one of the ways covered by the lex talionis, the slave was to be compensated by manumission; if the slave died within 24 to 48 hours, he or she was to be avenged.
Israelite slaves were automatically manumitted after six years of work, and/or at the next Jubilee, although the latter would not apply if the slave was owned by an Israelite and was not in debt bondage. Slaves released automatically in their 7th year of service, which did not include female slaves, or did, were to be given livestock, grain, and wine, as a parting gift. This 7th-year manumission could be voluntarily renounced, which would be signified, as in other Ancient Near Eastern nations, by the slave gaining a ritual ear piercing; after such renunciation, the individual was enslaved forever. Non-Israelite slaves were always to be enslaved forever, and treated as inheritable property.
In New Testament books, including the First Epistle of Peter, slaves are admonished to obey their masters, as to the Lord, and not to men; and the Epistle to Philemon was used by both pro-slavery advocates as well as by abolitionists; in the epistle, Paul returns Onesimus, a fugitive slave, back to his master.

Judaism

More mainstream forms of first-century Judaism did not exhibit such qualms about slavery, and ever since the second-century expulsion of Jews from Judea, wealthy Jews have owned non-Jewish slaves, wherever it was legal to do so; nevertheless, manumissions were approved by Jewish religious officials on the slightest of pretexts, and court cases concerning manumission were nearly always decided in favor of freedom, whenever there was uncertainty towards the facts.
The Talmud, a document of great importance in Judaism, made many rulings that made manumission easier and more likely:

The costly and compulsory giving of gifts was restricted to the 7th-year manumission only.
The price of freedom was reduced to a proportion of the original purchase price rather than the total fee of a hired servant and could be reduced further if the slave had become weak or sickly.
Voluntary manumission became officially possible, with the introduction of the manumission deed, which was counted as prima facie proof of manumission.
Verbal declarations of manumission could no longer be revoked.
Putting phylacteries on the slave, or making him publicly read three or more verses from the Torah, was counted as a declaration of the slave's manumission.
Extremely long term sickness, for up to four years in total, could not count against the slave's right to manumission after six years of enslavement.

Jewish participation in the slave trade itself was also regulated by the Talmud. Fear of apostasy lead to the Talmudic discouragement of the sale of Jewish slaves to non-Jews, although loans were allowed; similarly slave trade with Tyre was only to be for the purpose of removing slaves from non-Jewish religion. Other types of trade were also discouraged: men selling themselves to women, and post-pubescent daughters being sold into slavery by their fathers. Pre-pubescent slave girls sold by their fathers had to be freed-then-married by their new owner, or his son, when she started puberty; slaves could not be allowed to marry free Jews, although masters were often granted access to the services of the wives of any of their slaves.
According to the Talmudic law, killing a slave is punishable in the same way as killing a freeman, even if it was committed by the owner. While slaves are considered the owner's property, they may not work on Sabbath and holidays; they may acquire and hold property of the owner.
Several prominent Jewish writers of the Middle Ages took offense at the idea that Jews might be enslaved; Joseph Caro and Maimonides both argue that calling a Jew slave was so offensive that it should be punished by ex-communication. However, they did not condemn enslavement of non-Jews. Indeed, they argued that the biblical rule, that slaves should be freed for certain injuries, should actually only apply to slaves who had converted to Judaism; additionally, Maimonides argued that this manumission was real punishment of the owner, and therefore it could only be imposed by a court, and required evidence from witnesses. Unlike the biblical law protecting fugitive slaves, Maimonides argued that such slaves should be compelled to buy their freedom.
At the same time, Maimonides and other halachic authorities forbade or strongly discouraged any unethical treatment of slaves. According to the traditional Jewish law, a slave is more like an indentured servant, who has rights and should be treated almost like a member of the owner's family. Maimonides wrote that, regardless of whether a slave is Jewish or not, "The way of the pious and the wise is to be compassionate and to pursue justice, not to overburden or oppress a slave, and to provide them from every dish and every drink. The early sages would give their slaves from every dish on their table. They would feed their servants before sitting to their own meals... Slaves may not be maltreated of offended—the law destined them for service, not for humiliation. Do not shout at them or be angry with them, but hear them out." In another context, Maimonides wrote that all the laws of slavery are "mercy, compassion and forbearance".

Christianity

Different forms of slavery existed for over 18 centuries within Christianity. Although in the early years of Christianity, freeing slaves was regarded as an act of charity, and the Christian view that all people were equal including slaves was a novel idea within the Roman Empire, the institution of slavery was rarely criticised. David Brion Davis writes that the "variations in early Christian opinion on servitude fit comfortably within a framework of thought that would exclude any attempt to abolish slavery as an institution". Indeed, in 340, the local Synod of Gangra condemned the Manicheans for urging that slaves should liberate themselves; with one of the 20 canons of the Synod declaring:
3) If anyone shall teach a slave, under the pretext of piety, to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his own master with good-will and all honor, let him be anathema.
A variation of the Canon would be adopted as Orthodox Catholic Law, during the 451 AD, Council of Chalcedon, as:
4)... Every monk must be subject to his bishop, and must not leave his house except at his suggestion. A slave, however, can not enter the monastic life without the consent of his master.
Augustine of Hippo, who renounced his former Manicheanism, argued that slavery was part of the mechanism to preserve the natural order of things; John Chrysostom, who is regarded as a saint by Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, argued that slaves should be resigned to their fate, because by "obeying his master he is obeying God". but he also stated that "Slavery is the fruit of covetousness, of extravagance, of insatiable greediness" in his Epist. ad Ephes. As the Apostle Paul admonished the early Christians; "There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus". And in fact, even some of the first popes were once slaves themselves. Pope Gelasius I, in 492 AD, sanctioned heathens in Gaul could be enslaved, imported and sold by Jews, in Rome. Though in the following centuries Roman popes would ban the ownership of Christian slaves by Jews, Muslims, heathens, and other Christians, while the Catholic Council of London in 1102, issued a local blanket decree, though not a Church canon: "Let no one dare hereafter to engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals."
In 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery. The approval of slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. In 1488 Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gift of 100 slaves from Ferdinand II of Aragon and distributed those slaves to his cardinals and the Roman nobility. Also, in 1639 Pope Urban VIII purchased slaves for himself from the Knights of Malta.
In the 15th and 16th centuries other popes denounced slavery as a great crime, including Pius II, Paul III, and Eugene IV.
In 1639, Pope Urban VIII forbade slavery, as did Benedict XIV in 1741. In 1815, pope Pius VII demanded that the Congress of Vienna suppress the slave trade, and Gregory XVI condemned it again in 1839.
In addition, the Dominican friars who arrived in the Spanish settlement of Santo Domingo in 1510 strongly denounced the enslavement of the local Indians. Along with other priests, they opposed the mistreatment of the Indians and denounced it as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king as well as in the subsequent royal commission. As a response to this position, the Spanish monarchy's subsequent Requerimiento provided a religious justification for the enslavement of the local populations, on the pretext that they refused to convert to Roman Catholicism and therefore denied the authority of the pope.
Various interpretations of Christianity were also used to justify slavery. For example, some people believed that slavery was a punishment that was reserved for sinners. Some other Christian organizations were slaveholders. The eighteenth-century high-church Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts owned the Codrington Plantation, in Barbados, which contained several hundred slaves, who were branded on their chests with the word Society. George Whitefield, who is famed for his sparking of the so-called Great Awakening of American evangelicalism, overturned a province-wide ban against slavery, and went on to own several hundred slaves himself. Yet Whitefield is remembered as one of the first evangelists who preached to the enslaved.
At other times, Christian groups worked against slavery. The seventh-century Saint Eloi used his vast wealth to purchase British and Saxon slaves in groups of 50 to 100 in order to set them free. The Quakers in particular were early leaders of abolitionism, and in keeping with this tradition they denounced slavery at least as early as 1688. In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, and 9 of its 12 founding members were Quakers; William Wilberforce, an early supporter of the society, went on to push through the 1807 Slave Trade Act, striking a major blow against the Atlantic slave trade. Leaders of Methodism and Presbyterianism also vehemently denounced human bondage, convincing their congregations to do likewise; Methodists and Presbyterians subsequently made the repudiation of slavery a condition of membership.
In the Southern United States, however, support for slavery was strong; anti-slavery literature was prevented from passing through the postal system, and even the transcripts of sermons, by the famed English preacher Charles Spurgeon, were burned due to their censure of slavery. When the American Civil War broke out, slavery became one of the issues which would be decided by its outcome; the southern defeat led to a constitutional ban on slavery. Despite the general emancipation of slaves, members of fringe white groups like the Christian Identity movement, and the Ku Klux Klan see the enslavement of Africans as a positive aspect of American history.