Does the Bible Endorse Slavery? A Response to Alex O’Connor
Setting the record straight
I grew up white in Mississippi. I’ve seen what chattel slavery did to a culture, and what it keeps doing generations later. The scars don’t heal on their own. When someone says the Bible “endorses slavery,” I don’t hear an abstract philosophical puzzle. I hear an accusation that the book I’ve staked my life on blessed the institution that broke my home state.
So I take the question seriously.
Alex O’Connor is one of the sharper skeptics working today. Unlike the old New Atheist guard, he’s philosophically trained, genuinely curious, and willing to acknowledge when Christianity has stronger arguments than he’d initially assumed. When he presses on biblical slavery, he’s not just scoring rhetorical points. He’s raising a serious question that deserves a serious answer.
Let me give him one.
What O’Connor Gets Right
First, some acknowledgments. O’Connor is correct that the Bible contains regulatory language about slavery. Leviticus 25 tells Israelites they may purchase slaves from surrounding nations, hold them permanently, and pass them as inheritance. Exodus 21 provides rules for how masters should treat slaves. The New Testament includes instructions for slaves to obey their masters.
These aren’t passing references. They’re legislation. The Bible doesn’t merely describe slavery as a feature of the ancient world. It provides instructions for how to practice it within Israel’s legal framework.
O’Connor is also correct that Christians have used these texts to justify slavery. The antebellum South waved Bibles while defending the institution. Leviticus 25:44-46 appeared in countless proslavery sermons. This isn’t ancient history. It’s American history.
Any apologetic that pretends these texts don’t exist, or that biblical “slavery” was really just voluntary employment with good benefits, isn’t engaging O’Connor’s actual argument. He’s read the passages. He knows what they say. The question is what they mean within the broader framework of Scripture.
The Framework: Approve vs. Allow
Here’s the distinction O’Connor’s argument misses.
Historic Christian theology distinguishes between God’s prescriptive will (what God commands and delights in) and God’s permissive will (what God sovereignly allows in a fallen world without endorsing it as good). Slavery belongs in the second category. God permits and regulates it. That’s different from God approving it as an ideal.
Jesus makes this distinction explicit when addressing divorce. The Pharisees ask why Moses permitted divorce certificates. Jesus replies: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8).
Notice the logic. Moses permitted something that was not God’s original design. He allowed it as a concession to human hard-heartedness, to protect vulnerable parties within a practice that shouldn’t exist at all. The regulation wasn’t endorsement. It was damage control in a fallen world.
The same framework applies to slavery. God regulates what He doesn’t endorse because the alternative to accommodation is annihilation.
Why Not Just Prohibit It?
This is where O’Connor presses hardest. In his conversation with Ben Shapiro, he found the “wooing” language unsatisfying. If God is omnipotent and slavery is evil, why not simply prohibit it? God prohibits shellfish and mixed fabrics but merely regulates owning humans? The priorities seem inverted.
Think through the alternative.
God prohibits slavery under penalty of death. In a world where slavery is economically foundational and universally practiced, what happens? You get mass execution. Constant miraculous judgment. After the flood, God promised “never again” to destroy all life on earth (Genesis 9:11). That promise constrains the options.
So God faced a choice: destroy evil humanity (flood-level judgment) or regulate them while preserving human agency and progressively revealing the ideal. God chose regulation. Not because slavery is acceptable, but because mercy requires working with humanity as they are, not as we wish they were.
The shellfish comparison actually proves the point. Dietary laws could be enforced within a covenant community without civilizational collapse. Immediate abolition of slavery in the ancient Near East would have required either constant miraculous intervention or the destruction of every economy in the region. God chose a different strategy: constrain the worst abuses, plant the seeds of human dignity, and let the trajectory work itself out over time.
What Biblical Law Actually Did
O’Connor and others often treat “biblical slavery” as equivalent to American chattel slavery. It wasn’t. The differences matter.
Compare Israelite law to surrounding Ancient Near Eastern codes:
The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BC) prescribed death for anyone who helped an escaped slave (§15-16). Deuteronomy 23:15-16 prohibited returning escaped slaves to their masters. Think about that. In Israel, if a slave ran away, you couldn’t send them back. That’s a remarkable legal innovation.
Exodus 21:26-27 freed slaves who suffered permanent injury from their masters. Lose a tooth, gain your freedom. The master’s property rights were subordinate to the slave’s bodily integrity.
Exodus 21:20 imposed penalties for killing a slave. In most ANE codes, slaves had no legal standing to be “murdered.” They were property. Israel’s law recognized them as persons under legal protection.
Hebrew debt-servants had mandatory release after six years (Exodus 21:2, Deuteronomy 15:12). Upon release, masters were required to provide generously from their flocks, grain, and wine (Deuteronomy 15:13-14). The released servant wasn’t just freed. He was resourced to start over.
None of this makes slavery righteous. Abolition is the ideal. But these regulations show God constraining an entrenched institution to protect human dignity rather than endorsing slavery as good.
The Hard Text: Leviticus 25:44-46
O’Connor’s strongest card is Leviticus 25. Let me quote it directly:
“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever.”
This isn’t debt servitude with release provisions. Foreign slaves could be held permanently and passed as inheritance. The text uses property language. O’Connor is right to press on this.
Here’s what he misses.
First, even permanent foreign slaves received protections. They got Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10). Masters couldn’t rule with “ruthlessness” (the same Hebrew term, perek, used in Leviticus 25:43 and 46). Murder of a slave was punishable. These weren’t full chattel with no legal standing. They were persons with constrained rights within a bad system.
Second, Leviticus 19:33-34 commands: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
The same author who wrote Leviticus 25 wrote Leviticus 19. It’s unlikely he intended one passage to authorize abuse that the other explicitly prohibits. The “property” language in Leviticus 25 has to be read alongside the “love as yourself” command in Leviticus 19. However we interpret the former, it can’t mean unlimited exploitation.
Third, and most importantly: even acknowledging that Leviticus 25 permits something we rightly find abhorrent, the question remains whether permission constitutes endorsement. Moses permitted divorce. Jesus says that wasn’t God’s ideal. The same logic applies here. God allowed foreign slavery within Israel’s broken context. That’s not the same as God declaring it good.
The Pattern: Accommodation Across Multiple Practices
If the accommodation framework were ad hoc special pleading invented to rescue one embarrassing text, O’Connor would be right to dismiss it. But the pattern appears across multiple practices.
Divorce: Permitted in Deuteronomy 24. Jesus clarifies it wasn’t God’s ideal (Matthew 19:8).
Polygamy: Never commanded, but regulated (Deuteronomy 21:15-17 addresses inheritance rights for children of multiple wives). Scripture’s own narratives expose its dysfunction. Abraham’s household torn by jealousy. Jacob’s family riven by favoritism. Solomon’s seven hundred wives turning his heart from God. When Jesus reasserts the creational norm, he emphasizes “the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5). The trajectory was always toward monogamy.
Monarchy: God warns Israel what kings will do. Samuel lists the abuses in detail (1 Samuel 8:10-18). God grants the request anyway, then works through deeply flawed kings while exposing their failures. Regulation without endorsement.
Slavery: Permitted and regulated. Never commanded. Constrained compared to surrounding cultures. Progressively undermined by the logic of imago Dei and neighbor-love until the trajectory reaches its destination in “neither slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28).
The pattern is consistent. God meets people where they are and moves them incrementally toward His ideal. That’s not moral failure. That’s the patience of a God who chose mercy over annihilation.
The New Testament Strategy
O’Connor could grant everything above and still press on the New Testament. Paul tells slaves to obey their masters (Colossians 3:22, Ephesians 6:5). Peter does the same (1 Peter 2:18). Aren’t these apostles endorsing the institution?
Context matters. Paul was writing to people already enslaved in the Roman Empire. His instructions were survival advice for a vulnerable population, not endorsement of their condition. “Obey your masters” meant “don’t get yourself killed in a system where you have no power.” That’s pastoral wisdom, not moral approval.
Meanwhile, look at what Paul actually does with a specific slave.
Philemon is a one-chapter letter about a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul sends Onesimus back to his master Philemon, but listen to how he frames it:
“I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart... no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 12, 16).
Paul doesn’t command Philemon to free Onesimus. He does something more subversive. He redefines the relationship. Onesimus isn’t property returning to an owner. He’s a brother returning to a brother. The categories of master and slave are being hollowed out from the inside.
This is the New Testament strategy. Not top-down legal abolition (which would have been impossible under Roman law), but bottom-up transformation of how Christians relate to one another. When masters see slaves as brothers, the institution can’t survive. The logic of Galatians 3:28 eventually does its work.
The Two Greatest Commandments
Jesus gives us the interpretive key:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
If all of Scripture hangs on love for God and neighbor, then every practice must be measured against that standard. Including slavery.
Ask the basic question: Can I be loving my neighbor as myself while owning them, controlling their body and labor for my gain, and holding the legal right to sell or beat them?
The answer is no. Even if some historical masters tried to be “kind,” the underlying structure treats the neighbor as property rather than as an equal image-bearer. That’s incompatible with the second great commandment.
This is why the deep logic of biblical ethics cuts against slavery at its root. Image of God. Love your neighbor. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Neither slave nor free in Christ. The more that logic is embraced, the less sustainable slavery becomes. The trajectory was built in from the start.
The Counter-Offensive: Where Does O’Connor Stand?
Here’s where I want to press back.
O’Connor is philosophically consistent. He holds moral non-cognitivism. He doesn’t claim objective moral authority to condemn slavery. In his framework, moral statements don’t express truths about reality. They express preferences, attitudes, or evolutionary byproducts.
But that creates a problem for his argument.
If moral non-cognitivism is true, O’Connor can’t say slavery is wrong. He can only say he finds it distasteful. And his distaste carries no more weight than someone else’s approval. It’s just competing preferences. On his own framework, the abolitionist and the slaveholder are both expressing attitudes, and neither is correct because there’s no moral truth to be correct about.
So when O’Connor uses slavery to critique the Bible, he’s borrowing moral capital he can’t generate from his own worldview. He’s standing on Christian ground to throw stones at the Christian house.
Where did he get the conviction that slavery is wicked? Not from naturalism. On naturalism, slavery is a successful evolutionary strategy practiced by countless species and human cultures. There’s no cosmic “ought” prohibiting it. There’s just what organisms do.
The moral intuition that slavery violates human dignity, that persons have inherent worth not reducible to their usefulness, that owning another human is categorically wrong regardless of cultural consensus: these convictions come from somewhere. They come from a tradition that taught humans are made in the image of God, that every person has transcendent value, that love of neighbor is a binding moral obligation.
O’Connor is using the fruit of Christian ethics to critique the Christian Scriptures. That’s standing on borrowed ground.
The “Both Directions” Problem
In his debate with Shapiro, O’Connor argued that if Christianity gets credit for abolition and human rights, it must also bear responsibility when the same texts were used to justify slavery. You can’t have it both ways.
Actually, this argument cuts against O’Connor, not for him.
If the Bible were simply pro-slavery with no contrary trajectory, there would be nothing to misuse. Slaveholders wouldn’t need to suppress texts or perform interpretive gymnastics. They could just quote the permission passages and be done.
But that’s not what happened. Abolitionists also appealed to Scripture. They cited the imago Dei. They quoted the golden rule. They pressed the logic of Galatians 3:28. And they won. Not just politically, but exegetically. The abolitionist reading prevailed because it followed the text’s own internal trajectory.
The “both directions” problem actually proves there’s a correct direction. The fact that Scripture can be misread doesn’t mean all readings are equally valid. The question is which interpretation follows the text’s own logic. Jesus’ summary of the Law answers that question.
Bringing It Together
For O’Connor and anyone pressing this objection, here’s the summary:
Slavery is genuinely wicked. The Bible itself gives us the resources to say so: imago Dei, neighbor-love, the golden rule, the eschatological vision of “neither slave nor free.”
God is just and will finally judge all evil, including slavery. God is also patient, working within fallen human cultures rather than constantly annihilating them.
In His permissive will, God allowed and regulated slavery in ancient Israel. Not because He approved it, but because accommodation was the cost of mercy after the flood.
Biblical law constrained and humanized slavery compared to surrounding cultures. The regulations protected dignity within a bad system rather than endorsing the system as ideal.
Jesus’ two greatest commandments reveal slavery as incompatible with God’s true moral will. The trajectory points toward abolition, not accommodation as permanent policy.
The New Testament strategy of transforming relationships from within eventually hollowed out the categories of master and slave. Christians who took Galatians 3:28 seriously couldn’t sustain the institution.
And here’s the final point: O’Connor’s moral intuition that slavery is evil comes from the very tradition he’s critiquing. On his own non-cognitivist framework, he can’t say slavery is wrong. He can only say he doesn’t like it. The borrowed moral capital reveals the borrowed ground.
The Bible doesn’t endorse slavery as good. It depicts a God who patiently governs a slaveholding world He intends to judge and transform, bearing with what He hates for the sake of redemption.
That’s not moral failure. That’s the patience of a God who chose to save rather than destroy.
JD