The record
Borrowed Conscience
You inherited more than roads and laws, even some of the language.
Even our moral instincts have a history.
Oxford Bibliographies, Church and Slavery · Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital · Cambridge History of Christianity, Christianity and the campaign against slavery and the slave trade · Library of Congress, The African-American Mosaic: Abolition · UK Parliament, The Abolitionists · Tom Holland, Dominion
They say
Christians owned slaves for centuries, and some of them used the Bible to defend it. How does Christianity get to take credit for our moral conscience after that?
The scene
Christians did own slaves. They profited from slavery and sometimes opened their Bibles to defend it. We shouldn't try to clean that history up; it happened.
Other Christians opened the same Bible and came to the opposite conclusion.
Quakers were among the earliest organised opponents of slavery, while Black Christians and former slaves turned Scripture against Christian slaveholders. Christianity also became a major force within the abolition movement in Britain.
Christians had spent centuries learning to live with slavery, and Christians were also among those who eventually became convinced that living with it was no longer possible.
Christianity doesn't get sole credit for abolition or for the moral world we inherited. Greek philosophy and Roman law are part of that history, and so is the Enlightenment, but Christianity is undeniably part of it as well.
Go back to Rome for a moment. You read about people being bought and sold and probably didn't need anyone to explain why it was wrong.
It felt obvious.
You can grow up in Britain, never open a Bible and reject Christianity completely, while still inheriting a culture profoundly shaped by Christianity for well over a thousand years. Ideas survive their origins. They get into laws and customs, into our assumptions, until eventually there's just that powerful little feeling that says, "Well, obviously."
Perhaps some things really are obvious.
The point
Even our moral instincts have a history.
Sit with this
Where did your "obvious" come from?