Emancipation Bible
Robert P. George on the Pro-Choice Arguments for Slavery & Sodomy
In a posting on a law professor’s weblog, a scholar who argues for the revision of Catholic teaching to accept homosexual conduct in “loving, committed relationships” claimed to be struck by similarities in the use of Scripture between the contemporary debate over homosexuality and the nineteenth-century debate over slavery.
What he, and others who offer the same argument, have in mind, it seems, is that both Christian defenders of slavery in the nineteenth century and Christian critics of sodomy today use biblical passages in a literalist manner as “proof texts” for their views, and that the arguments of the second will someday be seen to have been as indefensible as those of the first. To my mind, however, it is the differences between the nineteenth-century debate over slavery and our debate that are more striking.
Christians who wished to practice or justify slavery in the antebellum American south immediately faced a problem: Sacred Scripture, in its opening passages, teaches that each and every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. All human beings are descended from the same original parents and, as such, are in the most fundamental sense brothers and sisters. Opponents of slavery pressed the point, and pro-slavery Christians had difficulty meeting their argument directly.
But an indirect defense was available. The Bible at various points refers to slavery, and even proposes norms pertaining to its practice, while not condemning it as unjust or in any way immoral. So, pro-slavery Christians asserted, those in a position to practice slavery are entitled to choose whether or not to practice it. No one may be forced against his conscience to own slaves, but anyone who chooses to own a slave does not necessarily contravene Christian moral principles by doing so.
Unsound Resources
In other words, Christians who were “pro-choice” on the slavery question (as we might today put it) pointed to the absence of a biblical condemnation and to suggestions of the Bible’s tacit approval in order to justify a position very difficult to square with the logical implications of biblical anthropology. (Of course, the fact that the slavery they were defending was a racially based form of chattel slavery made justifying their position even on biblical grounds especially difficult, but lay that aside for now.)
These pro-slavery Christians were wrong. And the practice they were defending was horribly wicked. But it must be conceded that they had available to them scriptural resources for an argument, albeit an unsound and, it is now clear, deeply scandalous one.
But these same resources (even unsound as they were) are not available to those who wish to defend the compatibility of the choice to engage in fornication, adultery, or sodomy with Christian anthropology and moral principles. Unlike slavery, these and other forms of sexual immorality are the subjects of scriptural condemnation, as clear and extensive in the New Testament as in the Old.
Moreover, the idea that they may legitimately be chosen has been rejected by the firm and constant teaching of the Church, East and West. This teaching, by its centering on what is involved in and required by the very concept of the marital (both for married and unmarried persons), was and is scripturally grounded in a way that goes far beyond mere “proof texting.”
Thus, Christians who today seek to justify deviations from traditional norms of sexual morality can do no more than attempt to explain away the scriptural condemnations of the conduct they defend. So, for example, some of them attempt to show that the explicit condemnation of homosexual conduct is merely a matter of ritual purity and practice, not the expression of a moral teaching.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (web.princeton.edu/sites/jmadison). His books include In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford University Press) and Conscience and Its Enemies (ISI Books). He has served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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