They had to strip the Bible from the enslaved to make the institution work. That alone tells you something.
During the era of American chattel slavery, slaveholders did not let the people they owned read Scripture on their own. When enslaved Christians got their hands on the text anyway, they found something their enslavers did not want them to find: a God who introduces himself as a liberator, a Savior who died for every human soul and a set of teachings that, applied honestly, dissolve slavery from the inside. The enslaved read the Bible as anti-slavery, and New Testament scholar Dr. Esau McCaulley argues they were right.
This piece follows McCaulley’s argument directly. The question is simple: does the Bible endorse slavery? The answer is no. But getting there requires actually understanding how the Bible works.
Who Was Reading the Bible Better: The Enslavers or the Enslaved?
Most people come to this question already tilted in the wrong direction. They assume that because pro-slavery preachers marshaled Bible verses, the Bible must lean that way. McCaulley flips the assumption.
It’s weird that we now just assume the slave masters were better interpreters than the enslaved. We seem to start this thing on the back foot.
— Esau McCaulley
During abolition, Black Christians were largely convinced the Bible stood against slavery, and they made strong arguments from it. Harriet Beecher Stowe did not invent the anti-slavery reading. Frederick Douglass did not invent it. It was already present in the Black church, carried in sermons and spirituals and the slow, careful reading of a people who had everything to lose if they got the text wrong.
The pro-slavery side could not win the exegetical argument, so they changed the subject. Their arguments rested not on close reading of the text but on a claim about who Black people were. They said Black people were less than fully human, and that is why slavery was permissible. Take away that racist premise, and the whole case collapses. Their argument required denying the very humanity the Bible everywhere assumes.
Dr. Charlie Dates, speaking in the Jude 3 Project’s Contributions of the Black Church course, puts the interpretive history plainly: “The Black church gave to America a new hermeneutic, a new system of interpretation.” The Black church read from the margin, not the empire, and the margin was where the text was pointing all along.
Slavery Is a Contradiction Imposed by Violence
McCaulley is not satisfied with a vague answer. He wants to show, from the inside of Scripture’s logic, why the Bible and chattel slavery are incompatible. He starts with a definition.
Slavery is the contradiction imposed by violence. A person is naturally free, so the only way you can enslave someone is through the threat of violence. Remove the violence, and you remove the power of slavery.
— Esau McCaulley
This is not a sentimental observation. It is an analytical one. And it opens directly into the New Testament. Paul, writing to people living under the Roman Empire, told masters not even to threaten their enslaved workers (Ephesians 6:9). That is not a small instruction. Take away the threat and you have already dismantled the mechanism that holds the system together.
Layer on what else Scripture says. Every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Marriage is a union God joins that no person should separate (Matthew 19:6). Parents have a God-given right to raise their children. Chattel slavery as practiced in America violated all three. It sold husbands away from wives and children away from parents, and it treated people made in God’s image as property. Not one of these is a minor policy question. Each one cuts at the institution’s root.
God’s Fundamental Character Is Liberation
The deepest answer to the question runs through who God says he is. When God introduces himself at Sinai, he does not begin with his power or his majesty. He begins with an act:
“I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2).
This is how he introduces himself. Liberation is not a side note to God’s character. It is the headline.
God’s fundamental character is one as a God who liberates. You want to understand who God is? He’s the kind of God who takes people out of slavery.
— Esau McCaulley
Israel was then supposed to embody that liberating character among the nations. The laws given at Sinai, for all their cultural distance, point in a direction. Hebrew servants were to go free in the seventh year (Exodus 21:2). A slave whose master knocked out a tooth went free (Exodus 21:26–27). These protections were imperfect and incomplete, and Israel often failed to keep even those. But the trajectory was always toward freedom, never toward entrenchment.
McCaulley, in a companion conversation on whether Old Testament slavery differs from American slavery, notes: “There is no law in any law book in American history that says if you knock the tooth out of a slave, it goes free.” American chattel slavery did not build on the protections the Old Testament offered. It abandoned them.
Why Didn’t Paul Just Abolish Slavery?
This is the question people get stuck on, and it deserves a real answer. Paul did not call for the abolition of slavery. But understanding why requires thinking about who Paul was and what power he actually had.
Paul was not a Roman senator. He was not a wealthy landowner with political leverage. He was a member of a tiny, persecuted, marginal movement under an empire that could and did execute its leaders. He had no vote, no petition and no platform in Roman law. Even from that position, he told enslaved people to take their freedom if they could get it (1 Corinthians 7:21). He personally pleaded with a slaveowner to receive the returning Onesimus “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philemon 1:16).
What you have in the New Testament is the floor, not the ceiling. To assume the floor in the first century is the ceiling in the nineteenth is a fundamental misunderstanding of God.
— Esau McCaulley
The mistake pro-slavery readers made was treating a first-century starting point as a permanent endpoint. American Christians in the 1850s were not powerless minorities under empire. They controlled legislatures, courts, churches and pulpits. A change in power changes what faithfulness requires. The same Spirit who planted the seed in Philemon was pressing those Christians toward full abolition. They should have been on the side of freedom.
Dr. Nijay Gupta, who has traced this same logic in how the New Testament handles women in leadership, makes the parallel explicit: “I believe every word of Scripture is true, but how we apply Scripture changes.” The question is always what the text is doing, where it is heading and what it requires from us here and now. A floor is a starting point, not a destination.
What About the Curse of Ham?
For completeness: the so-called curse of Ham (Genesis 9:20–27) was one of the most cited pro-slavery texts. Noah curses Canaan after Ham sees him naked. This curse was used for centuries to claim that Black Africans were divinely destined for servitude. McCaulley and other scholars are direct. This interpretation requires misreading the passage, misidentifying Canaan with Africa and building a racist theory on top of both errors. The text curses Canaan, not Ham, and has nothing to do with race as modern people understand it. This was not an honest reading. It was a convenient one.
Quick Answers
Does the Bible endorse slavery? No. McCaulley argues the enslaved read it as anti-slavery, and that the whole Bible’s teaching on the image of God, marriage, family and the limits of violence undercuts what chattel slavery required.
Why didn’t Paul abolish slavery? He wrote as part of a powerless minority under empire, with no political leverage. McCaulley calls the New Testament teaching the floor, not the ceiling, a starting point to be built on as circumstances change.
How did pro-slavery Christians defend their position? Not with exegesis, McCaulley says, but with a false doctrine of Black inferiority. Their argument required denying the full humanity of the enslaved.
What does the Old Testament show about God and slavery? God reveals himself as a liberator who brought Israel out of Egypt and commanded that Hebrew servants go free in the seventh year. The trajectory of the Old Testament points toward freedom.
What is the curse of Ham, and was it about race? The curse falls on Canaan, not Ham, and has nothing to do with African people. The racial reading was invented to provide theological cover for a racist institution.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This argument comes from the Jude 3 Project’s Problematic Passages event at the Museum of the Bible, where scholars take on the hardest questions in Scripture. Listen to the full conversation on the Jude 3 Project podcast or YouTube channel.
Dr. Esau McCaulley is an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and pastor of All Saints Anglican Church in Naperville. He is the author of Reading While Black and How Far to the Promised Land.