Why biblical servitude is not American chattel slavery

By John B. Carpenter, Op-ed contributor Saturday, June 13, 2026

The Presbyterian Church in America recently disciplined Pastor Zachary Garris for “unwholesome speech.” I am not a Presbyterian, so I have no interest in denominational politics, but I am a Christian, and I care when my faith is made to launder evil.

Garris posted on X that the Bible contains “chattel slavery” and that some antebellum Presbyterians defended slavery because of “the Bible’s teaching.” That framing is exactly where the Lost Cause loves to hide. It baits Christians with reverence for Scripture, then switches the object of our sympathy from Moses’ law to Mississippi’s slave code.

Lost Cause propaganda works by wrapping falsehoods around partial truths. Yes, the Old Testament regulated forms of servitude. Yes, some of those forms were severe. But that does not make biblical servitude morally identical to the racialized, hereditary, man-stealing slavery of the Old South.

Garris’s use of the word “chattel” is the sleight of hand. In Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15, Hebrew slaves were to be released after six years, in the seventh year, and were protected against abuse. That is far closer to the indentured servitude many white settlers originally came to America under, in the colonial era. If someone replies that these protections applied only to Israelites, the answer is that Israel was not a racial state. A foreigner, like Rahab, could join Israel’s covenant life by confessing faith in the Lord and submitting to his law (Ex. 12:48-49). That alone makes Israel unlike the Old South.

The Old South did not allow enslaved Africans to confess their way out of bondage. Its system was racial, hereditary, and originated in “man-stealing,” which Exodus 21 condemns as deserving death, even for the one in possession of a slave originally caught that way, like many Southern plantation owners. Hence, John Wesley called American slavery “the vilest that ever saw the sun.” ^[1] He was right.

So, the issue is not whether Scripture uses the word “slave.” The issue is whether two systems that share a broad label are the same object. They are not. To treat them as equivalent is equivocation by generic leveling. It is like saying a kitchen knife and a murderer’s knife are morally the same because both are knives. The label remains, but the thing itself has changed.

Garris’s second move is to suggest that most antebellum Presbyterians opposed abolitionism because of the Bible. That is misleading. There was a major difference between opposing slavery and debating the method by which slavery should end. Some Christians favored immediate abolition. Others favored gradual emancipation. Disagreement over strategy does not prove that racial slavery was biblically justified.

Nor does the fact that a few Southern, Presbyterian theologians who quoted Scripture prove that they submitted to Scripture. Pro-slavery theologians had biblical arguments, but that does not mean they had the Bible’s argument. They isolated the Bible’s regulation of servitude while muting its condemnation of man-stealing, its protection of fugitive slaves, its laws of release and redemption, and Jesus’ Golden Rule. Their error was not that they took the Bible too seriously. Their error was that they made the Bible serve the Old South.

There was also a strong anti-slavery movement among the Reformed. One of the great ironies of American history is that one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials, Samuel Sewall, published The Selling of Joseph (1700), one of the first anti-slavery pamphlets in America. He wrote that all men, as sons of Adam, have “equal Right unto Liberty.” ^[2] Samuel Hopkins, a disciple of Jonathan Edwards, came to call enslaved Africans “our brethren and children” and argued that the new United States had a duty to free them. Jonathan Edwards the younger preached against slavery from the Golden Rule and urged Southern pastors to renounce it.

Presbyterians had the same witness. Jacob Green, pastor of Hanover Presbyterian Church in New Jersey, attacked slavery during the American Revolution, arguing that slaveholders were enemies of the struggle for liberty.^[3] The Reformed Presbyterians would not admit slaveholders to communion by 1800 and later declared slaveholding “opposed to the word of God” and a sin that civil authorities should treat as a crime.^[4] The Associate Reformed Presbyterians declared slavery a moral evil and, by 1830, barred slaveholders from communion.^[5]

In 1818, the Presbyterian General Assembly called slavery “a gross violation” of human rights and “utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” It urged Christians to labor “as speedily as possible” for “the complete abolition of slavery throughout Christendom.” That history matters. It proves that orthodox, Bible-believing Calvinists could see the Old South’s slavery for what it was: a sin, a scandal, and a stain on the church’s witness.

The story did not end with white churchmen. Henry Highland Garnet, who escaped slavery, came to Christ at First Colored Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and later pastored Shiloh Presbyterian Church. He made it a center of abolitionist witness. On Feb. 12, 1865, soon after Congress passed the 13th Amendment, Garnet became the first African American to speak in the House chamber, preaching at a worship service that marked slavery’s death sentence.

This is why the Lost Cause’s bait and switch must be rejected. Christians are not honoring Scripture when they blur the difference between Israel’s regulated servitude and the South’s racial caste system. We are not honoring our ancestors by defending their sins. And we are not loving our neighbors when we use theological sleight of hand to make old evils sound respectable.

The Church must tell the truth. The Bible is not embarrassed by justice. It condemns man-stealing, honors the image of God, commands love of neighbor, protects the vulnerable, and refuses to let the powerful call evil good. The Lost Cause cannot be baptized by Bible verses. It must be buried with repentance.

Notes

1. John Wesley to William Wilberforce, February 24, 1791, in The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. John Telford, vol. 8 (London: Epworth Press, 1931), 265.

2. Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph (Boston: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700).

3. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82-83.

4. W. Melancthon Glasgow, History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America (Baltimore: Hill & Harvey, 1888), 79; R. Scott Clark, “Some Reformed Churches Rejected American Slavery From The Beginning,” The Heidelblog, September 27, 2021.

5. Robert Ellis Thompson, A History of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1895), 91.