RE: Is Christianity Inherently Supportive Of Slavery And Misogyny?
July 30, 2021 at 1:29 pm
(This post was last modified: July 30, 2021 at 1:37 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Christianity has a long and productive relationship with slavery. Without slavery and servitude and exploitation and abject poverty there would be no christianity. Not as we know it christianity, no christianity at all. The method of expansion in the early movement was to fill a void in what we would call the social services of a state. To some extent, rome supported this (which, in hindsight, they might have determined to be a mistake). The roman intelligentsia and officials and functionaries looked down their nose at their servants and both nurtured and despised their christianization for a whole host of reasons.
When it became clear that the administrative state had failed the least of roman society, and given how much of rome-as-a-state was dependent on that least of it's members, christian authority picked a side. The right side, I think. The last pagan critics of christianity in rome hovered around the nature of the body of the faith. Complaining that the poor illiterate and unfortunate populace had been manipulated to their detriment by charity - food specifically.
Rather than deny that this was the sop, the christian authorities of the time simply conceded that they had, in fact, and explicitly, fed the poor as a way to spread the gospel - and condemned the roman state for having failed to feed those same people. The fear of the roman upper classes of christians was based on their having become a disaffected mob with cause.
Just like today, however, the economically anxious were represented by their betters, people who's interests were decidedly not their constituencies. This has been a recurring theme for abrahamism all along the way. Oceans of ink have been spilled wondering why a people who imagined themselves to have so recently escaped slavery in egypt and actually had just escaped subjugation elsewhere would then become a society based upon it. Why the bottom up christianization of rome by oppressed people would lead to a state even less tolerant and representative than the one it had replaced. Why immigrants to this country would flee their homes out of imposed poverty or abject intolerance and maintain an even more ruthless system here - not as the primary beneficiaries of that system...even..but as the middle agents purchasing their own humanity by denying the same of others.
I think the truth of the matter is borne out by an explication of that history. The belief in the rightness or wrongness of slavery, in abrahamism, is negotiable. Its always there for christian slavers to grasp at, and their christian slaves can (and do) come to think otherwise, for example. Advocating for it, denying it's very existence in practice or writ, and concern trolling over a moral response to it..all, are on the slavers side of that line...all, are optional.
When it became clear that the administrative state had failed the least of roman society, and given how much of rome-as-a-state was dependent on that least of it's members, christian authority picked a side. The right side, I think. The last pagan critics of christianity in rome hovered around the nature of the body of the faith. Complaining that the poor illiterate and unfortunate populace had been manipulated to their detriment by charity - food specifically.
Rather than deny that this was the sop, the christian authorities of the time simply conceded that they had, in fact, and explicitly, fed the poor as a way to spread the gospel - and condemned the roman state for having failed to feed those same people. The fear of the roman upper classes of christians was based on their having become a disaffected mob with cause.
Just like today, however, the economically anxious were represented by their betters, people who's interests were decidedly not their constituencies. This has been a recurring theme for abrahamism all along the way. Oceans of ink have been spilled wondering why a people who imagined themselves to have so recently escaped slavery in egypt and actually had just escaped subjugation elsewhere would then become a society based upon it. Why the bottom up christianization of rome by oppressed people would lead to a state even less tolerant and representative than the one it had replaced. Why immigrants to this country would flee their homes out of imposed poverty or abject intolerance and maintain an even more ruthless system here - not as the primary beneficiaries of that system...even..but as the middle agents purchasing their own humanity by denying the same of others.
I think the truth of the matter is borne out by an explication of that history. The belief in the rightness or wrongness of slavery, in abrahamism, is negotiable. Its always there for christian slavers to grasp at, and their christian slaves can (and do) come to think otherwise, for example. Advocating for it, denying it's very existence in practice or writ, and concern trolling over a moral response to it..all, are on the slavers side of that line...all, are optional.
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