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= Slavery and religion = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Historically, slavery has been regulated, supported or opposed on religious grounds. It is worth noting that slavery is not to be blamed completely on the colonists, since part of the slave groups did not hesitate cooperating with the slaveholders and welcomed their cultures.

In Judaism, slaves were given a range of treatments and protections. They were to be treated as extended family with certain protections and could be freed. They were property but could also own material goods.

Early Christian authors maintained spiritual equality of slaves and free persons, while accepting slavery as an institution. Early modern papal decrees allowed enslavement of unbelievers, though some popes denounced slavery from the 15th century onwards. In the eighteenth century the abolition movement took shape among Christians across the globe, but various denominations continued to be pro-slavery into the 19th century. Enslaved non-believers were sometimes converted to Christianity, but elements of their traditional beliefs merged with their Christian beliefs.

Early Islamic texts encourage kindness towards slaves and manumission, while permitting enslavement of non-Muslim prisoners of war.

Christianity
In the Southern United States, however, support for slavery was strong; anti-slavery literature was prevented from passing through the postal system, and even sermons, from the famed English preacher Charles Spurgeon, were burned due to their censure of slavery. When the American Civil War broke out, slavery became one of the issues which would be decided by its outcome; the southern defeat led to a constitutional ban on slavery. Despite the general emancipation of slaves, members of fringe white Protestant groups like the Christian Identity movement, and the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist group) see the enslavement of Africans as a positive aspect of American history.

'''Various interpretations of Christianity were also used to justify slavery. For example,some people believed that slavery was a punishment for the sinners. ''' Some other Christian organizations were slaveholders. The 18th-century high-church Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts owned the Codrington Plantation, in Barbados, containing several hundred slaves, branded on their chests with the word Society. George Whitefield, famed for his sparking of the so-called Great Awakening of American evangelicalism, overturned a province-wide ban against slavery, and went on to own several hundred slaves himself. Yet Whitefield is remembered as one of the first to preach to the enslaved.