You’d think that evangelicals would have learned a decade ago just what awful optics it is for anyone to vociferously defend slavery. BUT NO. Here we are yet again, staring down at the abyss of atrocity apologetics. In recent months, I’ve seen a serious uptick in hardline evangelicals defending what they euphemistically call biblical slavery.
So today, let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to about ten years ago when this cottage industry got started. And then, let’s see some of the Christians who are so eager to place themselves on Team Slavery-for-Jesus.
And after that, we’ll speculate about how their newest culture war will likely be received by the very people they claim to want to convert.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/24/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
WE DID SLAVERY TEN YEARS AGO WTAF IS THIS EVEN
The header above was originally my first line of notes when I decided to write about this topic. It was the first thing I said when I realized what I was reading on Twitter not long ago.
Here’s exactly what inspired the header:

After that, I didn’t hear anything out of the Tradcath. That’s short for traditionalist Catholic, meaning he’s almost certainly a convert from hardline evangelicalism—as well as someone who likely thinks he Catholics better than Pope Francis himself. (Oh, and here’s the link I gave him at the end and a better archive just in case. It’s a blog post from the incredible Bob Seidensticker from 2014. We’ll come back to it in a minute.)
Though it was mercifully short, I was still quite startled by the exchange. He was parroting bullshit I thought we’d debunked a decade ago. I really thought that’d be the last time we ever heard Christians go there.
Silly me.
Atrocity apologetics during the Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars
Back during the height of the Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars over ten years ago, evangelicals adopted slavery as a pet obsession. Perhaps that was our fault. See, when evangelicals tried to tell us on forums and comment boxes that Yahweh was an omnimax, omnibenevolent god obsessed with justice, we’d fire back with the Bible verses about slavery.
We thought that would shut them up. It seemed at the time like such a slam-dunk. We thought nobody who possessed even one tiny bit of love, one tendril of care about justice could possibly see those verses and come away thinking “Yahweh! That’s the god for me!”
Oh, what sweet summer children we were!
Even if you weren’t part of that war, you probably know exactly what happened:
Evangelicals immediately began churning out apologetics explaining that Yahweh’s form of slavery was actually fine and dandy!
Around that same time, I also frequently encountered evangelicals comparing “biblical slavery” to working at McDonald’s for minimum wage. They also tried to claim that Christians had a major hand in ending slavery and were never a big part of its existence in the first place. (Nope to both; the African slave trade got its biggest initial boost from a Pope, and the entire Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) exists because its members wanted to keep slavery as practice.)
I can see why it kept coming up. Around that time, evangelicals’ thinly-veiled desire to revive the practice of slavery was alarming a lot of people. Evangelicals even wrote long essays—like the one at WallBuilders—falsely linking the worldview of America’s deistic founders to modern evangelicals’ warped notion of the Bible’s take on slavery. Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the topic ominously hinted that they wanted slavery back.
And an evangelical pastor, Joe Morecraft, even publicly yearned for TRUE CHRISTIANS™ like himself to have the ability to literally enslave atheists. He wanted to force them to follow his rules. Not one Christian has ever held him accountable for such talk.
To evangelicals, their idolized Bible is still totally divine! Yahweh’s totally the god for them!
Thanks, we hate it
I called this defense atrocity apologetics. I’m not sure where that description originated., but it seemed to fit. Using atrocity apologetics, Christians contort themselves into knots to make the Bible’s many atrocities sound like perfectly moral actions.
As just one example, William Lane Craig’s defense of an Old Testament episode of Yahweh-mandated genocide was absolutely disgusting. In his explanation, the real victims here were the Hebrews that Yahweh ordered to murder and rape! He even claims that the Canaanite children who got murdered weren’t wronged in this genocide, because they went to Heaven. I don’t know how the man sleeps at night. I don’t use this word lightly, but this qualifies in spades for what I call evil.
We’ll talk about why atrocity apologetics exists in a minute. For right now, just know that the Bible contains a lot of atrocities, all of which evangelicals must square with their vision of an omnimax god who embodies perfect love and justice.
One of the very worst experiences I had during the Keyboard Wars involved a middle-aged, extremely earnest evangelical guy on my Facebook friends list. Back then, I wasn’t as skittish about having such people on the list—but I sure learned my lesson! One day, Facebook Guy proudly showed me a 4000-word essay he’d written on his blog to justify slavery and excuse his god for allowing it. Reading it made me feel like I was dangling above the very edge of a Sarlacc pit! Oh, I unfriended and blocked him with a quickness. I didn’t want to know what he considered an encore.
And I really wasn’t looking forward to an encore of slavery-rationalizing apologetics.
How atrocity apologists learned to negate the evils of slavery
You trying to rebrand slavery? Lol. That’s not a red flag for you that your life’s gone wrong? [A Redditor trying to pierce a Christian’s antiprocess shields, July 2020]
Christians in general don’t really understand slavery and its history. Their modern religious worldview ensures that they’ve never known anybody enslaved, nor ever been in danger of enslavement themselves. So when they quote Bible verses about heathens being “slaves to sin” or Christians being “enslaved to Jesus,” they really don’t understand what those descriptions mean.
Evangelicals turn up that ignorance to 11.
In this way, they’re like vaccine deniers who have never experienced a world ravaged by polio. They simply have no way to comprehend the full scope of what it meant to live in fear of polio: Of one’s children catching this disease and getting wrecked for life or even dying from it.
(When I was a teen in school, I knew a Filipino boy who used braces and walked with crutches because he’d caught polio as a toddler before coming to America with his family. The Philippines wasn’t polio-free until 2000. So he was a sobering reminder of just what we’d all escaped in the States thanks to much earlier and much more complete vaccination programs. I don’t think that lesson was lost on any of my schoolmates, either.)
This fundamental ignorance of what slavery really is has led to evangelicals trying to negate actual slavery—as opposed to the purely metaphorical kind the Bible teaches them—as a moral evil. Maybe that’s the key that we heathens didn’t fully understand about their psychological makeup. We assumed that they agreed with us about how truly evil slavery is. That they’d accept its evilness without quibbling, as we did, and that they’d denounce it as completely too. I know a few of us even entertained the hope that maybe they’d come out of the Keyboard Wars with a more nuanced take on the Bible.
LOL no. We were wrong. We just hadn’t reckoned with their religion leading them to equate slavery with addiction or an inability to follow rules or make positive personal changes in one’s life.
In response to our assertions, evangelicals tried to rationalize slavery in a few different ways. Sometimes, they went with William Lane Craig’s lackluster assertion of Divine Command Theory. That means that whatever Yahweh does or tells people to do is by definition good. Even if the action sounds absolutely evil, it’s good purely because Yahweh did or ordered it.
Most of the time, though, evangelicals argued about “biblical slavery.”
The imaginary differences between Biblical slavery and actual slavery slavery
In Christianese, biblical means something that agrees with the Christian using the term. Here, biblical slavery is a supposedly unique, human dignity-affirming, entirely benign form of slavery that Yahweh ordered his people to practice—or allowed them to practice, in other reckonings, because gosh, y’all, he was just powerless in the face of overwhelming acceptance of slavery in the ancient world.
Specifically, evangelicals tried to argue that biblical slavery is somehow vastly different from New World-style slavery— which is sometimes phrased as Southern-style slavery. This attempt was by far the most common atrocity apologetic for slavery. It’s one that even modern evangelicals tend to accept without reservations or questions.
Here’s how The Gospel Coalition (TGC), a bunch of very hardline Calvinist evangelicals, recently described actual slavery:
[T]he Old Testament laws concerning slavery were far more humane than those of the surrounding cultures. Slavery in ancient Israel wasn’t founded on racism or human theft (see Ex. 21:6) but on economic considerations. In a subsistence economy, if you couldn’t repay your debts, becoming a servant was one way to survive.
Also, don’t miss TGC’s euphemism of “servant” at the end of that quote up there. Nice euphemism, right? A servant is not a slave, and it’s really interesting to me that so many Bible verses that clearly mean “slave” get translated as “servant” instead.
This isn’t even TGC’s only foray into slavery apologetics. They’ve got a whole tag for it. Another post they ran just last month insisted:
In short, the history of race-based chattel slavery in America is utterly unjustifiable from Scripture.
LOL nope. By the way, I noticed Gavin Ortlund, the author of the both of the TGC posts, on Twitter talking like that as well. He seems to touch on the topic very frequently—and never correctly.

Unfortunately for TGC and Gavin Ortlund, slavery wasn’t founded on racism. Race-based slavery couldn’t exist either. Racism in the modern sense didn’t even exist back then. (And a lot of that racism came from the African slave trade, which I reiterate was started thanks to a Pope in the 1400s.) Rather, people bought slaves because they wanted things they couldn’t get from voluntary workers who could leave whenever they wished. Slavery forces people to do things they really don’t want to do, then stops them from leaving that unpleasant situation.
Further, “economic considerations” weren’t the only way that slaveowners acquired their slaves. You’d think hardline evangelicals with a boner for biblical inerrancy and literalism might remember all the times Yahweh’s people took slaves after wiping out entire tribes of people their god disliked.
And even if we just look at “economic considerations,” Hebrew slavery was not an improvement on other forms at the time. Slaves in Egypt, for example, clearly had considerably more rights than Hebrew slaves did. They could own property, expect to be treated as regular hired workers, and even (for men) sometimes marry free Egyptian women!
Even if I accepted evangelicals’ claims that “biblical slavery” was soooo much better than regular slavery, Yahweh still never told his people just never to keep slaves at all. Instead of making all these complicated laws about how to keep slaves the Yahweh way, he could easily have told his Hebrews not to keep them at all. He (generally unsuccessfully) forbade them pork, (apparently) got them to stop sacrificing their babies, and (far more successfully) commanded Hebrew men to take blades to their own genitals to join his covenant. But he couldn’t insist that people aren’t ever property? No way.
It’s too bad, too. An anti-slavery stance would have made them stand out among ancient civilizations. But no, the Hebrews just had to be Team Slavery—like everyone else!
And slavery then was just like slavery in Europe and the Deep South—and today
Until the past couple centuries, moreover, almost every society kept slaves. The Hebrews captured slaves after war for labor and for sex, just like everyone else. And Yahweh fully approved. (Interestingly, Deuteronomy 21:10-14 specifically forbids Hebrew men from enslaving women captured in war. Even after being forced to marry their captors, these women had more rights than slaves.) Once, Moses himself commanded the Hebrews to murder every Midianite—except for the virginal girls, of course. Those girls became slaves. We likely don’t need to wonder what work they did for their masters.
Just like in ickie Southern-style slavery, Hebrew slaveowners:
- Bought non-Hebrew slaves as permanent property that could be passed down to their heirs; only Hebrew slaves were strictly temporary (Leviticus 25:44-46)
- Could buy male Hebrew slaves, then force them to marry and have children with a slave woman; once the law freed such a male slave, he couldn’t take his family with him—and he had to voluntarily enslave himself forever to stay with them (Exodus 21:2-6)
- Subjected female slaves to sexual coercion just like modern slaveowners did (and do), which is hinted at all over the Old Testament’s rules for slaves (like Exodus 21:7-11)
- Were allowed to beat their slaves almost to death, “since the servant is [the master’s] property” (Exodus 21:20-21; I found two specific American state laws forbidding the killing of slaves: South Carolina in 1740, and Alabama in 1833; h/t to Nick Brasing on Twitter for help with this list)
In Bob Seidensticker’s blog post (relink), he destroyed the very concept of biblical slavery being somehow different from the form that existed in America before the Civil War. He wasn’t the only one destroying evangelicals’ shoddy history claims, of course. Hector Avalos, an archaeologist specializing in ancient Near Eastern archaeology and how it relates to the Bible, dismantled such claims as well in 2010. Progressive Christians also pushed back against evangelicals’ claims.
After a while, the slavery apologetics died down. I got the impression that evangelicals were deeply divided on the topic. This whole argument clearly unsettled many of the flocks.
Maybe evangelical hardliners forgot about the Keyboard Wars. Or maybe they weren’t yet old enough to fight in the trenches. (⇦ See? Trench warfare is nothing like arguing on forums, but I’m far enough from personal knowledge of its miseries that I reflexively reached for it as a comparison.)
After that recent Twitter exchange, then, I went looking around to see if this Tradcath was part of a new and horrifying trend.
Yes, yes he was: Slavery apologetics is alive and well in today’s hardline evangelicalism!
Over on YouTube, Cliffe Knechtle and his son/brother/whatever have been publishing a disturbing number of videos trying to square slavery with a good, loving omnipotent god. They came up in another Twitter discussion about slavery in the Bible. Toward the bottom you see the guesses zeroing in on them. OP is dark red:

Unsurprisingly, the channel in question is called “Rational Christian Faith.” Yes, obviously! Because believing nonsense for no good reason is very very rational. Yep yep, super duper rational. I had this sort’s number ten eleven years ago when I groused about “logical Christians.” Believe you me: Time has not improved this type. Here’s one of their videos:
The Knechtle boys completely disregard all of the Bible’s rules for slaves and slave-owners to claim that the Creation myth created men and women equal. Therefore, Yahweh forbids slavery.
I just can’t. That whole line of thinking whizzes past stupid and into preposterous. That entire myth says nothing about slaves, of course. Even if we focus only on what it actually says, today’s evangelicals are all too comfortable handwaving away its apparent message of equality between the sexes.
In that short video, they bring up a couple of other verses that very obviously don’t relate to slaves at all, try to claim that the Bible condemns and forbids slavery by mangling some other verses. Finally, out of nowhere they bring up Frederick Douglass. He was an ex-slave who used the Bible to attack slavery.
Yes, Frederick Douglass did do that. But do you know who used the Bible to justify slavery?
Literally all of the slave-owners in America.
It’s astonishing to see how bad these two are at interpreting and understanding the Bible. I can’t even believe they voluntarily put this video up on their channel like it’s some kind of win without realizing what it makes them look like. They’ve ignored hundreds of Bible verses endorsing slavery and giving divinely-mandated rules for its practice to focus on a few misapplied verses. They shoehorn these into their cause and declare victory.
At least Gavin Ortlund clearly bases his opinions and interpretations on previous evangelical writings and apologetics. These two just pull Bible verses out of their asses and go for broke. I don’t think they understand enough of the Bible to even talk about big topics like this. Reminds me of this other exchange I saw on Twitter (OP isn’t anonymized; I assume anyone with a checkmark wants to be known):

Dude sauntered right into that one! And I agree with Orange at the end there: It’s really weird that this guy went to these lengths to figure out exactly how he’d treat slaves, instead of just saying he’d never own other human beings in the first place.
But that’s kind of the entire reason evangelicals use slavery apologetics.
Why evangelicals need slavery apologetics
Here’s what I mean.
As so many of us adults have discovered in life, sometimes there’s simply no way to win some fights. Slavery apologetics may be the best illustration possible of that sad truth. There’s simply no form of slavery that isn’t monstrous, no form of it that is moral or good for humanity. It degrades each and every person touched by it and every society that condones it. There simply does not exist any magical Jesusy way to make slavery less degrading and inhumane.
But evangelicals keep forgetting that even if they could find any facts to support their claims about “biblical slavery”, in the end they’d still be the Team Slavery people. Nothing else they have to say about morality or ethics matters in the least as long as they’re the Team Slavery people. There’s no recovering from that body blow to their credibility.
The Team Slavery people always without exception envision slavery as something done to others. We heathens always notice that they never imagine themselves or their loved ones becoming the slaves. But then, their sympathies have always been with the slaveowners and the CEOs, the billionaires and the megachurch pastors. Despite all their big talk to the contrary, they consistently abuse the Bible to excuse their power-grabs and odious behavior. And yes, we always notice that, too.
During the Keyboard Wars, the main motivator for evangelical combatants involved the protection of their Team Slavery worldview. These beliefs included not only their opinion of their god, but also their narcissistic self-importance and sense of superiority over others, their idolization of a perfect, divine, inerrant, literally-true Bible, and their ambitions to hold power over the entire world—under Jesus, of course. Ahem. Of course. Yes. Under Jesus.
All of these beliefs form a house of cards set atop an oscillating fan. If any one card falls, the entire house collapses. As I heard so many, many times as a Christian myself, if one thing turns out to be not true, what’s to say any of the rest is true either?
So no matter how bad they know it is to be the Team Slavery people, evangelicals can’t admit that the Bible was simply a product of its writers’ times, which obviously means the opinions and assertions we find in the Bible don’t differ much from those of other contemporary civilizations and cultures. No matter how much evidence they encounter, evangelicals can’t accept that not everything in the Bible is morally pure according to modern sensibilities, or that the Bible’s writers views evolved as they wrestled with their culture’s relationship to the divine.
These are some very dangerous ideas in evangelicalism. They could undo everything. At the very least, they could destroy evangelicals’ beloved moral high horses—and undo the authority they think they have over all us heathens.
And oh, don’t I just wish it’d happen! Because one of these days, the Team Slavery people are going to hear that heathens know about their god’s worldwide genocide and this deeply unpleasant ride will just start all over again.
NEXT UP: Life in Heaven. Well, sorta. See you soon! Happy Holidays! <3
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Closing note: I used the phrase “body blow” in the beginning of today’s topic. And it always reminds me of that old arcade game Punch-Out:
Maybe that’s just me, though.
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