Current Work: The Long Shadow of Slavery Over Women and Girls
by Bernadette Brooten
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In the United States, many people think slavery is a thing of the past and its effects are over. But more and more people are recognizing that past slavery still affects present society. A few policy analysts have begun to discuss how most effectively to address the long shadow still cast by slavery in our society. Whenever a society’s economy depends upon slavery, and slavery exists over a long period of time, the effects will likely be massive and long-lived as well.
Our current research shows that religious support for—and opposition to—slavery influenced slavery itself and even religion itself. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have traditionally accepted slavery in differing forms. Historically, slave-owners sexually exploited enslaved women and girls, coerced them to give birth, and separated families. In the U.S., Christianity particularly needs to overcome its legacy of slavery. In order to construct new sexual ethics based on the full human dignity of all persons, we need to analyze how gender, religion, sexuality, and slavery are intertwined.
The Project’s scholars and activists are now researching:
• Enslaved women and girls in early Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
• Early Christian female slaveholders
• Slavery’s impact on early Christian sexual ethics
• Christianity’s influence on American slavery
• The religious faith of enslaved women and girls
• The legacy of slavery in the United States
• How to create sexual ethics untainted by slave-holding values.
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The Bible and Slavery
The Christian Bible
figured prominently in
American debates concerning slavery and continues to shape
cultural understandings of women and of sexuality. Contemporary churches need interdisciplinary analysis of the Bible and of early Christian tradition in order to rethink how they use these, to develop their own policies for addressing the effects of slavery, and to consider how to respond to current public policies in which religion, gender, race, and sexuality intersect (for example, the chastity focus within Faith-based Initiatives and urging marriage as part of welfare reform).
Overcoming Slavery’s Effects
If slavery did not exist in some countries today, or if American society had fully overcome its effects, this research might make fascinating history, but be of little import for current ethics or for religious and public policy. Past slavery continues to cast a long shadow, and within every generation the impulse to enslave appears to hover just below the surface. The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project is helping religious communities to move beyond slave-holding values and to create ethics and social structures based on freedom and dignity.
