On Slavery

The Church of Jesus Christ has always opposed slavery. Reading D&C 101:79, we see the way that principle is put in our times: "Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another." Jesus Christ taught in his mortal ministry that he had come to "preach deliverance to the captives" (Luke 4:18), and that his purpose was to make us all truly free (see John 8:32–36).

Understanding the concept of slavery as taught in the Scriptures, then, is an important part of understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet so few people in our modern world understand slavery the way it was understood in antiquity, when the Bible and the Book of Mormon were written. This post is an attempt to fill in the gap in our modern understanding.

The reason we misunderstand slavery in our world is because when we picture real slavery, we tend to picture the specific institution of the pre-industrial Americas through which Africans were forcefully used as agrarian laborers on New World plantations by European landlords. That form of slavery, though clearly evil and horrific, is something of a historical rarity. It was certainly not the model of slavery known in the ancient Mediterranean world that gave rise to the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Book of Mormon.

Slaves in the ancient Mediterranean world had a great deal more legal recognition and power than the slaves of our era. One of the most striking differences is that they could own property, including other slaves. In fact, it was the hope of many slaves to eventually save enough wealth to purchase their freedom. Another key difference was that they were normally (though not always) paid a wage for their labor on top of having their basic needs met by their masters. Indeed, it was through frugal management of this wage that many slaves hoped to purchase their freedom.

When the New Testament discusses slavery, it usually refers to it using the Greek word douleia. This is the word for the kind of slavery I've just described. It is also the usual word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament — the Septuagint. It is likely that a similar concept was what the Nephite prophets had in mind when they wrote of slavery and bondage.

Seen this way, it becomes clear that opposing slavery is not the simple task that it seems to us with our modern understanding of the word. When the ancient prophets wrote of the evils of slavery, they were speaking of a situation in which someone worked for someone else's profit in exchange for a small wage — a wage that, if prudently saved, could eventually purchase the worker's freedom from the endless cycle of labor for another's gain. That situation is the exact situation that the vast majority of people in our modern world find themselves in, thinking themselves free all the while.

When the Lord repeated the concept in our day, saying that it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another, we cannot think that he meant anything less than what he meant in antiquity. He is, after all, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And there is little reason to suppose that the average reader of that revelation from 1833 would have failed to see wage labor as bondage. It was not considered slavery, but it was an exceptional circumstance, limited usually to the poorest sectors of large cities. Most adult citizens of the United States in 1833 owned and worked their own land for their livelihood, following (whether intentionally or not) the ancient model of the free man. The industrial conversion of the population into wage laborers had only just barely begun, and hardly anyone would have seen it for what it was — the most significant economic trend of their day. Though they would not have seen wage labor as slavery, they would have recognized it as bondage just as surely as the ancients did.

This puts us in an awkward position today. We have long seen that it is not right that any man should be in bondage to another, but have usually not seen that most of us are in that very bondage we have always deplored. Such a system is contrary to the Lord's will, but feels so urgently necessary to almost all of us. We can do the right thing and reject the system of bondage, and starve; or we can maintain our lives by continuing our slavery, and thereby sustain wickedness.

I am not certain of the exact way out of our modern dilemma. But knowing it, understanding it, is the first step toward our freedom. Knowing that we all live in the douleia the ancient prophets thought so evil gives us power that we lack as long as we persist in reading 'slavery' in the Scriptures as a reference to something more like the enslavement of Africans throughout the Americas before the twentieth century. Not knowing, we are unable even to question our own slavery. Knowing, we gain the power to look for a way toward freedom.

We shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free.