it would appear that Britain's interests would have been best served by expanding the slave trade and broadening the frontiers of its slave empire. Just as the US expanded its slave system westward along the Gulf Coast into Texas, so Britain could have established new slave regimes in Trinidad, British Guiana and other recently acquired territories. Instead of seeking to suppress the slave trade, it could have dominated it, and in the process outproduced Brazil and Cuba, increased its own wealth, and contributed to the economic growth of the Americas. No wonder Disraeli called abolition "the greatest blunder in the history of the English people."
Don't look now, but it was those damned Christianists, as certain people like to call us.
This is not the lesson that today's transnational and multicultural elites in the United States and the United Kingdom like to tell. They like to portray American slavery as particularly vicious and slavery as a system imposed by evil Dead White European Males on a virtuous but unfortunately powerless Rest of the World. Davis and Temperley know better. Almost all human societies had slavery. Only one human society--the Anglosphere, starting in Britain and then in America--set out to abolish first the slave trade (enormously profitable to many Britons) and then slavery itself (enormously profitable to many Americans). "There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record."
The book Barone's reviewing attributes abolition primarily to what we'd today call evangelicals:
Secular elites of our day, or for that matter their counterparts of a century or two centuries ago, like to think that all human progress is due to secular reason. But Christian belief in the moral equality of every person played a key role in inspiring the Britons and then the Americans who led the fight to abolish the slave trade and then slavery.
Which brings me (speaking of evangelicals) to a totally different story. Americans United for the Separation of Church & State recently filed suit against Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship. It's a voluntary program, serving Christians and non-Christians alike, but it was getting results (8% recidivism rate for program graduates vs. 60% nationally) and we can't have that. Putting aside the merits of the case, however, I call your attention to the fact that the judge devoted a dozen pages in his ruling to deciding what "evangelicalism" is. He concluded in part:
quite distinct from other self-described Christian faiths, such as Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, and Greek Orthodoxy." It is also "distinct from other … Christian denominations, such as Lutheran, United Methodist, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian."
Evangelical Christianity, he found, tends to be "anti-sacramental," downplaying "baptism, holy communion or Eucharist, marriage, [and] ordination" as "appropriate ways to interact or meet with God."
Oh, and they don't like Catholics. I think the judge is confusing evangelicals with fundamentalists, but be that as it may, I thought the point of the suit was to enforce a separation of Church & State? So what is a 12-pp theological discourse doing in a court opinion? Life would be so much easier if the Left would a) pick a side or b) become even modestly self-aware. Read more about the case here (caution: evil pdf file).
