In the ancient world, as in the modern world, the primary means of generating revenue was slavery. In premodern times, this was largely abetted by an economic system that made debt, and therefore slavery, an ever-present threat for the lower strata of the population. It could not be otherwise in economies that combined resource scarcity with extreme concentration of wealth. This was certainly the case in the Roman world up to and into the time of the feudal system.
The feudal system, while theoretically less brutal and oppressive than the outright ownership of human beings as chattel, was nevertheless a continued form of slavery. It was only after the end of the feudal order at the hands of industrialists that people realized that the social standing of the lower classes could, in fact, get worse. In addition to back-breaking labor and predation from social superiors, they could also look forward to soot-choked skies and undrinkable water from the confines of their disease-ridden firehazard of a tenement apartment in the midst of the great teeming cities of Europe and America.
And though we like to think of the “Gilded Age” as passed and the robber barons a thing of history, it is only because the system of resource extraction and wealth accumulation is now global and the global upper class can keep the actual suffering of the system at far remove from the populations which support it, principally with their militaries.
If one is keen-eyed enough, and takes a wide enough view of human relations, one realizes that slavery is the default practice of man. Those who would confine the phenomenon to merely the Transatlantic Slave Trade highlight only the most egregious example of what has been perhaps the greatest throughline of human economic history. Even today, a man who must labor in work both menial and pointless, which he hates, because he must pay back the debts which he owes for simple existence, those debts which he incurs for housing and transportation, etc, is functionally a slave. Debt is the principal way in which the modern economy perpetuates slavery, just as it did so in a more naked way in the past with debtors prisons, indentured servitude, and “self-sale.”
The Church has a no less spotty record on this score. Christians were permitted to own slaves since apostolic times; churches themselves even owned slaves and permitted the trade in human beings. Between St. Gregory of Nyssa and Bartoleme de las Casas, the Christian outcry against slavery was very thin on the ground indeed.
And how strange, given Jesus’s insistence that “he did not come to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10), a ransom from slavery to sin, to be made sons and daughters in the household of God, “co-heirs with Christ,” the only begotten Son of the Father (Romans 8). Moreover, Jesus not only uses the language of ransom and coinheritance, but he also inverts the very logic of slavery when he describes the Christian life, specifically the way in which his priests and bishops should regard their relationship to the faithful: “whoever is first among you shall be your slave” (Matthew 20). This he says in direct contradiction to the way of the Gentiles, for whom lordship coincides with the total control over a vast number of slaves. It is from here that the Bishop of Rome derives his traditional title Servus Servorum Dei, which could be accurately translated as “slave of the slaves of God.” This made all the more fitting by Paul’s assertion that we have been freed from sin and made the slaves of God (Romans 6). And yet, the yoke of bondage to Christ is one, paradoxically, of freedom, both easy and unburdensome (Matthew 11).
There are two ways of integrating this information. One way, the way taken by many of the traditionalist persuasion, myself included, involves making excuses for slavery. This is a practice you grow more and more comfortable with in practice, I am sad to say. Firstly, you can draw a clear distinction between “really bad” chattel slavery such as that practiced in the American South, to “not as bad” ancient debt slavery, which is sometimes thought to be better (although anyone who thinks this should look into what sorts of power a Roman householder could exercise over his slaves). Then there is the “basically benign” slavery of the ancient Jews, who were even so kind as to emancipate their slaves every so often during the Jubilee. Seen through this lens, the history of human servitude becomes more easy to square with actual Christian history, but admittedly makes the Gospel make less and less intuitive sense. After all, if slavery is a morally neutral act, why should we care to give alms to the poor when we could just as well, and more efficiently, enslave them all? That was the premodern solution to the class problem anyway. Under this metric, perhaps the Romans were the society that was the most caring for the poor, given the lengths at which they would go to ensure that as many human beings as possible were materially provided for by (checks notes) enslaving a quarter of the population.
But when one sees slavery to Christ as emancipatory, and sees the Christian life as a kind of slavery to ones’ brothers, all of a sudden the idea of a slaveholding Christian or of a Christian society that tolerates slavery becomes unfathomable. So far so good, it only took us two thousand years. Most of us are here now, with only a few obscurantists clinging to arguments to the contrary. It’s rather sad when one considers that almost all of the people who are modern apologists for slavery, in some form or another, are themselves some kind of slave. This circles back to an earlier point.
We have said that modernity creates slaves in just as pernicious a form as the premodern world. We have also said that the Gospel is antithetical to slavery, as in fact it preaches the opposite of what worldly slavery is taken to mean. This means that to be truly Christian, we must take a wrecking ball to the world economy. Not merely because it is extractionary, violent, manipulative, and destructive to the social, legal, religious, cultural, and environmental order, but because it is nothing more than the continued proliferation of slavery. If we can command crusades against Black slavery in the 19th century, and against the most egregious forms of human trafficking in the 21st century, how much more force and vigor could we command if the world system were known for what it truly is: a worldwide system of slavery that makes all working people all over the world victims of an unaccountable brahmin class that they could no more resist alone than a caveman turn back an Abrams tank with a spear.
The watchword of the Christian order will be an end to the slavery to masters and a new beginning of the slavery to Christ. No man will look upon himself as a master, or lord, for every man will look upon every other man as his master. Our debts will no longer be debts of necessity, debts of scarcity, but debts of love. It is love that is the bedrock of the Christian order, as even not but Hope, Faith, and Love remain, the greatest of these is Love, Caritas, Charity (1 Corinthians 13).
Glad to see you've found time to write again- this is good. Crusades against worldly evils are often needed and called for, but the fallen nature of this world too often gives us a "monkey's paw" sort of outcome. Which in turn create a whole host of other issues, which also in turn require another movement or crusade to fix. Ultimately, it is a conversion of the heart that will win out in the end, from person to person and ultimately to the world.