Did Christianity end slavery?

Largely yes — and the guilt has to be said in the same breath. The Atlantic trade shipped more than twelve million Africans into bondage under overwhelmingly Christian ownership, and Christians defended slavery from Scripture for centuries. Abolition does not lessen that record; if anything, being handed the standard and betraying it aggravates the crime.

And yet slavery was the near-universal norm of almost every civilisation, so the thing that actually needs explaining is not that it existed but that it was abolished. The organised campaign that dismantled the Atlantic system — Wilberforce, the Clapham circle, and the enslaved Christians who out-read their masters — was at its root a religious movement, with Christian conviction necessary though not by itself sufficient (the historian Christopher Leslie Brown). The Enlightenment produced its own abolitionists too, and whether that conviction was itself a Christian inheritance is a real question this leaves open.

Doesn't the Bible endorse slavery? Honesty grants that it regulates rather than bans it, and the isolated proof-texts read easier for the slaveholders — a genuine crisis of interpretation. But read whole, the canon — the Exodus, the death penalty for man-stealing, “neither slave nor free in Christ” — runs against an institution its parts merely tolerate, as the enslaved who read it discovered.

None of this proves Christianity is true: a movement can do enormous good and still rest on false beliefs. The case for the faith rests on the resurrection, argued elsewhere — this is only the history of who ended slavery, and why.