Slavery has not ended. There is still human trafficking going on. From what I understand, human trafficking in the U.S. (at least according to the police around here, since Lake County has apparently been a bit of a regional hub of it) is generally a market of young girls used for sex. And by the perfectly Biblical example of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, there is absolutely nothing wrong with owning concubines and bearing children by them. Correct? Many of the tribes of Israel came from such unions, after all. Is it okay for a Christian to buy a concubine? Not to return an escaped one? If some thirteen year old girl escaped from human traffickers, would you urge her to go back to them and do her duty? You personally can't necessarily determine how she became a slave in the first place-- maybe she was born to slaves, maybe she grew up a regular American suburban girls but was a rebel type who became a runaway, maybe a raiding party sacked her village, who knows? Not your problem. Nor are you responsible for the strange rules that govern these other cultures and subcultures. All you know is that a slave and concubine in 2023 America and has run away from her owner to your church. What do you do, and why? Would the only reason you call the authorities instead of returning her to her owners be that you are too gutless to go by a Biblical worldview instead of a humanist one? Or might it be that the whole idea that she is a concubine is so loathsome and alien to Christianity that it makes no difference what Jacob did, we are not going to participate in such practices?
Yes, women are illegally enslaved in the US and forced into prostitution. That's bad. It's bad to take people captive and force them into any kind of slavery.
Meanwhile, the cobalt in your cell phone is mined by slaves or near slaves working in inhuman conditions. Your coffee is grown by farmers who live like serfs in Colombia. Your clothes are made by children working in sweatshops in slavery or near slavery. Yet I'd venture to guess that every time you go to the store or start texting someone you aren't having a crisis of conscience about whether the product you're using or buying was made by someone who was forced into slavery. But there's a good chance it was.
That's bad. Agreed. And I hope we're agreed that it is bad not just because it is illegal and the equivalent of speeding or using a fake ID to get into a bar. It is bad because it is entirely incompatible with loving your neighbor as yourself. It is bad even though the sons of Israel did it. It is bad even though slavery was a normal part of life for the patriarchs. To call it bad is not to abandon a Biblical worldview in favor of a humanist one, as though maybe these cobalt mine owners are just using child slave labor because they're more Biblically faithful and reject the humanism of the West.
As for slave labor or the equivalent in other countries, that is a major issue that I have little control over, but to tiny the degree I do have some influence, I support measures to eliminate those conditions. I vote for people who pressure our state department to pressure places like China to address these human rights abuses.
As for how we treat people who did things we recognize as bad that they didn't recognize as bad, like Jacob fathering children via concubines, we don't have to say it was perfectly acceptable for them but not for us, as though somehow right and wrong changed. Nor do we have to condemn them as though their doing it is the moral equivalent of one of us doing it today. We look at the available options they had and the reasons they understood things as they did. Some things that are bad in themselves (like prisons) are nevertheless necessary because nobody can figure out how to operate society without them. But if they could-- if prisons were shown to be unnecessary for the protection of society or the reform of criminals, then imprisoning a criminal would be a terrible thing to do. Someone who did it in those circumstances would not be the moral equivalent of someone who did it in our circumstances, or at least it would be grossly uncharitable to judge them the same way.
That is my beef with the iconoclasts tearing down statues-- they're engaged in anachronistic, often irrelevant, and always uncharitable condemnations of people. A teacher today who whips her student is bonkers and should lose her license. But if your great-grandmother was teacher who sometimes whipped her students, well, she was probably a perfectly good teacher. It isn't necessarily that an alien worldview is replacing a Biblical worldview, though that might certainly be in play in many cases. It might just be better possibilities replacing worse ones, making the worse ones less and less excusable.
