"The slave owning argument really had more of the Bible on its side, at least read literally. You know, there's plenty of things to point to in the Bible where there's slavery mentioned [and] it's not condemned. The whole book of Philemon in the New Testament ... talks about slaves obeying their masters and even returning to their masters, a slave who's escaped is commended to return to slavery. And so the more straightforward arguments out of the Bible were simply there. And then read into that, I think, also was this idea of white supremacy, ... that God's design for human society was that whites of European descent would really be the vanguard of society, and at the top of society. And their goal was to "civilize" everyone else from their place at the top of the political and cultural hierarchy."
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Robert P. Jones as quoted by Terry Gross in “American Christianity Must Reckon With Legacy Of White Supremacy, Author Says”, Fresh Air, NPR, (July 30, 2020)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery
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Christian views on slavery
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