The Moral Failings of Christianity - Slavery

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I personally think that it's wrong to look at the decline and eventual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade purely as an example of the heroic actions of humanitarians, but if you're only looking at humanitarian action, then you have to understand that those that were Christians (rather than merely culturally christian, like just about everyone in the 'West' then and now) would not have done what they did had they not been so. To active Christians of that type, Christianity - as they understood it - was the motivating factor behind all that they did. Slavery contradicted the principles of faith articulated by Christ (love thy neighbour and so on), therefore it was Unchristian. And what was Unchristian was Wrong.
Arguing that such people were not motivated by Christianity because their idea of Christianity was different to yours, is bizarre and wrongheaded. The problem with this series (I presume that it will be a long-running series?) is that you have a very unitary and essentialist concept of Christianity, one that is not appropriate for anything other than proselytising.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Understand, I'm not saying that their Christianity did not motivate them, but rather that in many cases their view of Christianity itself was molded by values coming from somewhere outside of Christianity.

The problem here is that your concept of Christianity is uselessly narrow. It is not, and has never been, a single thing in any sense. What values outside, really outside, of Christianity were there in 18th century England? Certainly nothing at a popular level; culture is largely a process of amalgamation and evolution and most of it was Christian by this point. Christianity in England was also very English. Working out the boundaries is actually impossible. Much the same is true at an intellectual level; all intellectual developments during this period happened within a framework shaped by over a thousand years of Christian thought. Certain things were clearly less Christian than others, but nothing was exactly outside Christianity in a cultural sense.

And this has always been the case in all places and at all times. There is no pure strand of essential Christianity which you can use to judge whether a particular way of thinking is or is not Christian. You can't even go 'but, but, the Bible says!' because, of course, the exact role played by the Bible (and by different parts of it) has never been settled within formal Christianity, to say nothing of the minefields that are interpretation, selection and translation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I never claimed there was, but there are central tenets held by most Christians throughout history.

True enough, but they have tended not to extent much further than 'we should do what Jesus said we should' and 'sin is bad'. Until the nineteenth century or so we can add 'God is scary'. I am guilty of gross oversimplification, obviously. The emphasis being on most Christians, because that implies the religion of the people; and, eventually, the culture of the people. At an intellectual level things were/are quite different, but you must understand that only a tiny minority of the population at any time have ever had much interest in theology.

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I think we can be fairly certain that slavery is not one of the central tenants of Christianity.

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I wouldn't really characterise that particular intellectual... er... movement or set of movements... in that way. It's true that much of it was a reaction against overtly Christian forms of thought and so on (and so was obviously less christian than older intellectual tendencies and, of course, wider society), but it still operated within cultures and societies that were fundamentally Christian in many respects. Even were this not true, the thinkers of the Enlightenment were not exactly very influential outside a relatively small elite.

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Probably the best way to explain my point is to move onto a different topic. Anti-colonial writers almost always wrote in the language of the colonial master of their native country, were almost always educated in the systems of said colonial master and were influenced by works written by various Western authors and political activists. The obvious problems there are, more or less, what I'm trying to get at in this case.

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Disagree entirely, I'm afraid.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And the Enlightenment being critical of Christianity doesn't really contradict the fact that it was largely dependent on it. That's pretty much standard fare within the realm of history.

Indeed, indeed. I like to call it the Fanon Problem, for reasons I alluded to upthread.

History is pretty worthless without at least a degree of historicism, imo.