Where was God during slavery? In other words, what did he do to stop the Transatlantic slave trade? This is a tough question because God has been silent on many issues facing his creation. Instead, he has been hidden, never letting us see or hear God, but occasionally trying to get our attention through indirect means: "working" through people, revealing his supposed existence through creation and dropping "hints" here and there. But it is not direct.
Instead we saw God's word being used to justify atrocities and exploitation of brown-skinned people and Africans ("Black"). Also his name was an excuse to explain away the suffering of Africans under the Catholic Church. The Christian church's main justification of the concept of slavery
is based on Genesis 9:25-27. Noah cursed his Ham to perpetual slavery. Almost all, if not all slave masters and colonialists were Christians and the bible justified their evil acts.
John H Clarke wrote: "The greatest destroyer of African culture, the greatest ex-ploiter of the African, was the plantation system of the New World. The African was transformed into something called a Ne-
gro. He was demeaned. This is the thing that is uniquely tragic about the African slave system. Of all the slave systems in the
world, no other dehumanized the slave more than that started by the Europeans in the fifteenth century. Using the church as a ra-tionale, they began to set up myths that nearly always read the African out of human history, beginning with the classification of the African as a lesser being. The Catholic Church's justification
for slavery was that the African was being brought under the guidance of Christendom and that he would eventually receive its
blessings", he added.
"The rationale was that slavery was a blessing to the African.
It was not", he continued.
An extract from the Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries, 1883: "Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and, “It's very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us. I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish – warfare protection – which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear."
Again, we see the Christian faith been used as a political tool that aided the enslavement and colonialism of Africa. A tool that worked perfectly fine. Seemingly Western Christianity encouraged slavery and sanctioned it based on the biblical evidence. The letter continues: "Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. Recite every day – “Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”
I know that there are good Christians who argue that it is the "evil of man" that allowed slavery to happen in the first place, not God. He created Man with a free-will -- the power to make choices. But this logic is because it could be used to justify rape: it's like saying that God could have stopped a rapist from raping a toddler but that would have messed with his free-will. And rapist's free-will is much more important than the victim. Here we are not talking the free-will of man, but God's inability or unwillingness to meet the needs of the people.
If God respects human life, why did he let evil people poison his word and used it as motivation for evil? Why didn't he just put a stop to slavery? Even if the religious propaganda of "divine intervention" is correct, just few words from him could have put out the flames of slavery and colonialism. His absence, by contrast has ignited fire that could take many generations to put out. For many centuries
he has been absent from the world, doing nothing while it slid deeper into evil. Unfortunately, when he finally chooses to come back, things will still be messy but far better than what the world was five hundred years ago. The future is the only hope we can count on. I see a brighter future for the human race, only if we put the Golden Rule into practice.
things were a mess.
References
1. Dr. John Hendrik Clarke. "CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND AFRIKAN HOLOCAUST". Pg. 83
2. UNESCO. "Transatlantic Slave Trade". Last accessed 30 April 2016.
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