[aomurphy]

One of the best books on the subject is Prof. Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis". The first part is a discussion of how different American groups understood Slavery as Christians in antebellum America. Broadly, several strands can be identified 1) Southerners generally felt content to argue that Slavery was in the Bible, and thus Christian. That Roman and Hebrew slavery was wildly different than Southern Slavery, with race as the underlying factor was not generally mentioned. Roman Slavery was done on peoples of all sorts, and not generally passed down from family member to family member, and was not conceived of as part of a racial hierarchy. There was also a lot of nonsense about sons of Ham and such. 2) Northerners generally felt that the Bible was "in Spirit" against slavery, either broadly in the sense that one should not do it (but not necessarily seek emancipation violently), or actively as many Abolitionists read it. Interestingly, Northerners sort of gave up on the literal argument, and generally argued from broad principles of the New Testament. What could be Christian about owning other men? If all Christians are brothers, how can one justify such an institution as slavery? 3) African Americans read the Bible as not only "in Spirit", but also sought a lot of specific arguments. How could Slavery be Christian when it broke up Christian marriages between slaves? Encouraged the rape of black Women by often married white Slave owners? That banned reading, and thereby prevented Christian blacks from reading the gospel? There was a lot of discussion about how Biblical Roman Slavery differed from modern Southern Slavery - Roman slaves were not racialized, nor forbidden to read by law. One particularly interesting line of thought to me is the idea that Roman slavery and Hebrew slavery, since it was not based on race, and often came from debt implied that if what Americans in 1860 were doing was Biblical Slavery, then White Slavery must be legal. Obviously, this was refused by White Americans, so something must be different. This wasn't picked up by many Whites, but one of the few who did was John Gregg Fee a really interesting preacher in Kentucky who argued that slavery must be ended, lest eventually the majority must be slaves. 4) Catholics and European protestants had a wide variety of views, which honestly I don't remember well enough to summarize here. In general though, outside of America the issue wasn't as pressing, only Brazil legally had kept around Slavery in this period.

It's a good book, and definitely well worth reading. Not that long either.