Church and slavery
Religion, power and the acceptance of human bondage in early modern Europe
The following text is specifically written about the stance of the Protestant and Catholic churches regarding the slave trade. If readers with knowledge of this topic have anything to add, please feel free to provide comments or text contributions via info@johnmeilink.com.
The drunkenness of Noah, by Giovanni Bellini. Left Ham, in the middle Shem and on the right Japheth.
A missing actor
When Europe’s slave-trading past is discussed today, attention usually turns to merchants, empires and plantation owners. One powerful institution often remains in the background: the church. Yet for centuries Christian theology helped Europeans explain, justify and ultimately accept slavery. Understanding that role changes how we see the history of the slave trade—and how moral systems adapt to power and profit.
A biblical hierarchy
In the seventeenth century many Europeans believed themselves to be descendants of Japheth, the son of Noah, and therefore natural heirs to power and prosperity. This belief drew on a well-known passage from the Old Testament (Genesis 9:18–29). According to the story, Noah fell asleep drunk and naked. His son Ham mocked him, while Japheth and their brother Shem respectfully covered their father without looking upon his nakedness. Noah then pronounced blessings upon Japheth and Shem, but cursed Ham and his descendants.
Over time this story became a theological framework used to explain the hierarchy of the world: Europeans as the descendants of Japheth, Jews as the descendants of Shem and Africans as the descendants of Ham, condemned to servitude. In this way, a contingent social order could be presented as part of a fixed and divinely sanctioned hierarchy.
When morality changed
Ironically, Dutch Protestants had initially opposed slavery. But in the early seventeenth century the situation changed rapidly. When the Dutch seized Portuguese plantations in Brazil and needed large numbers of labourers, moral objections faded and biblical justification soon followed.
The Dutch minister Johan Picardt wrote in 1660:
‘This fulfils Noah’s prophecy that the descendants of Ham will live in servitude, the descendants of Shem in exile, and the descendants of Japheth will be blessed with prosperity, power and knowledge. In this is explained the division between the Blacks, the Jews and the whites.’
Statements like these did more than reflect opinion; they structured it. Picardt does not present slavery as a moral dilemma, but as the fulfilment of divine prophecy. By presenting social hierarchy as the fulfilment of prophecy, he transforms a human system into a divine one. In this formulation, inequality is no longer something to be justified—it is something to be accepted.
The worldview of the common man
For the ordinary sailor or soldier on a ship of the Dutch West India Company, the slave trade likely did not appear immoral at all. By the 1680s the idea that Africans were cursed descendants of Ham had already been preached for more than half a century. Moreover, the Bible itself seemed to confirm the normality of slavery. The Apostle Paul returned the runaway slave Onesimus to his master in the Epistle to Philemon. Scripture contains numerous references to slaves and masters without condemning the institution itself.
Another argument often heard in sermons was that transporting Africans to Christian colonies was ultimately beneficial. Enslaved people, it was said, could be converted and thereby saved from eternal damnation. In this reasoning, slavery became almost a missionary enterprise.
Seen from the perspective of today, the logic is deeply cynical. Yet within the seventeenth-century worldview, shaped so thoroughly by religious authority, such reasoning was rarely questioned. By the end of the century, several generations had grown up hearing it.
The Preacher Eleazar Swalmius, by Rembrandt (1637)
A revealing example
A striking illustration of this mindset can be found in the Dutch minister Willem Kals. In 1731 he travelled to Suriname and later wrote an extensive report about colonial society. Kals was by all accounts a sincere and principled man. He condemned cruelty and openly criticised colonists who mistreated enslaved people. Yet nowhere in his writings did he question the existence of slavery itself.
This absence is telling. Kals was willing to condemn abuse, but not the system that made such abuse possible. His writings suggest that slavery itself had already been morally normalised to such an extent that it no longer required justification. Kals’s writings reveal a crucial shift: moral concern is directed at behaviour, not at structure. Cruelty is condemned, but slavery itself remains outside the scope of moral judgement. In this way, responsibility is individualised, while the system is left intact.
Rare voices of criticism
Criticism within the church did exist, but it was rare and usually limited. As early as 1665 the Dutch minister Georgius de Raad argued that defenders of the slave trade relied on false arguments. Enslaved Africans, he noted, were not merely prisoners of war or criminals; many had been abducted. Likewise, the minister Johannes Hondius briefly condemned kidnapping and human trafficking as contrary to God’s law.
Yet even such criticism rarely challenged the institution itself. By focusing on abuses such as kidnapping rather than on slavery as a system, these objections left its foundations largely intact. Even in criticism, the boundaries of debate remained narrow. By focusing on illegal enslavement rather than slavery itself, De Raad implicitly accepted the institution’s legitimacy. His critique did not dismantle the system—it refined it.
The English church
The English Protestant world followed a similar path. The Church of England was not merely a passive observer of the slave economy; it was entangled in it. Church funds were invested in companies connected to the Atlantic trade, and Anglican missionary societies even owned plantations in the Caribbean, such as the Codrington plantations, where enslaved people were forced to work. In this way the church benefited directly from a system it rarely questioned.
Only much later did the tone begin to change. England would eventually produce one of the most influential abolitionist movements in Europe, many of its leading figures motivated by Christian conviction. Yet this later activism should not obscure the earlier reality. For generations the institution that preached morality had lived comfortably alongside slavery.
The Catholic world
The Catholic Church was hardly different. Influential theologians, including Augustine (354–430), had long argued that slavery was part of the divine order and could even benefit both master and slave. Medieval church jurists later justified slavery under ‘natural law’ and the ‘law of nations’. When European expansion in the fifteenth century made slavery economically indispensable, papal authorities did little to challenge the institution. While the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas was sometimes criticised, slavery itself was not fundamentally rejected.
In 1685 a Spanish investigation concluded bluntly:
‘Slaves are essential for the survival of the colonies… a custom not condemned by His Holiness the Pope and the Church but approved by all.’
A very late shift
A real shift came very late. In 1888—long after many countries had already abolished slavery—Pope Leo XIII finally condemned the practice in general terms. Yet an explicit denunciation of owning other human beings did not appear until the Second Vatican Council in 1965, when the church formally defended fundamental human rights and condemned slavery. Even then, older doctrines that allowed ‘justifiable reasons’ for slavery were not fully rejected until 2020.
In recent years the Church of England has acknowledged its past more openly than many other churches. Apologies have been issued and funds have been set aside to address the legacy of slavery. These gestures are significant, but they also underline a difficult truth: recognition came centuries after the system had flourished under the moral umbrella of Christianity.
A very late shift
A real shift came very late. In 1888—long after many countries had already abolished slavery—Pope Leo XIII finally condemned the practice in general terms. Yet an explicit denunciation of owning other human beings did not appear until the Second Vatican Council in 1965, when the church formally defended fundamental human rights and condemned slavery. Even then, older doctrines that allowed ‘justifiable reasons’ for slavery were not fully rejected until 2020.
In recent years the Church of England has acknowledged its past more openly than many other churches. Apologies have been issued and funds have been set aside to address the legacy of slavery. These gestures are significant, but they also underline a difficult truth: recognition came centuries after the system had flourished under the moral umbrella of Christianity.
The Dutch reckoning
The Dutch context followed a similar pattern. Slavery was abolished in the Netherlands in 1863. It took another century and a half before the churches formally acknowledged their role. In 2013 the Council of Churches in the Netherlands issued a statement recognising that churches and believers had helped legitimise slavery and that theology had been misused to justify it.
The words sounded solemn, yet they stopped short of an apology. The statement emphasised the responsibility of individual believers and church communities rather than the church as an institution. This careful distinction reflects a longer historical pattern: the separation of individual wrongdoing from the structures that made it possible.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Credit: Science History Images
An unfinished conversation
Since then the subject has largely faded again from public view. Yet historians and theologians have begun to reopen the discussion. Research initiatives by scholars from the Protestant Theological University and the Vrije Universiteit are examining the historical involvement of Protestant churches in slavery and colonialism.
The conversation is only just beginning. As René de Reuver of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands remarked in the newspaper Trouw:
‘We are only at the beginning of the discussion, but the discomfort with it is growing.’
During the commemorative year of 2023, marking 160 years since the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, the call for reflection grew louder. Pastor Jeroen Sytsma put it plainly:
‘Slavery was so extensive, lasted so long, and the role of the church was so significant that this issue must resonate within the church.’
Understanding that role is essential—not to pass easy judgement on the past, but to understand how a system as vast and brutal as slavery could exist for centuries with so little moral resistance.
Sources:
Georgius de Raad en zijn traktaat tegen de slavenhandel (Georgius de Raad and His Treatise Against the Slave Trade), by Christel van Dongen
Predikanten, slavernij en slavenhandel, 1640-1740 (Ministers, Slavery and the Slave Trade, 1640–1740), by L.J. Joosse;
Het slavernijverleden en de paus (The History of Slavery and the Pope), by Werkgroep Caraïbische letteren
Johan Picardt, by The Drents Archive
Britannica: Second Vatican Council
The Coymans asiento (1685-1689), by I.A. Wright
Wikipedia: Codrington Plantations
The Guardian: how Church of England’s ties to chattel slavery went to top of hierarchy
PolSci.Institute: Augustine on State, Property, War, and Slavery: A Christian Perspective