An article on the front page of The Washington Post (October 1, 2023) documents the direct connection between the British royal family and the transatlantic African slave trade of the 17th and18th centuries. Researchers have found a seal containing the royal crown used to brand enslaved Africans. Accompanying the seal is a text written in 1715, declaring “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies,” as a part of a contract originally formed between Britain’s Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V.

It is difficult to imagine, but the hot-ironing of such seals into the flesh of captives was a common practice of the slave trade. Such brands were used to verify ownership claims, and to regulate sales of human beings. The enslaved people that were captured, forcibly transported across the Atlantic, and sold, were branded, sometimes on the back and on the chest.

Another researcher found documents from 1689 that show how King William III, who built Kensington Palace, profited from shares given to him by a notorious slave trader, Edward Colston. Other documents describe how a direct ancestor of King Charles III purchased at least 200 enslaved people to work on his tobacco plantation in Virginia.

It's not just that the British royal family was invested in slave trading companies, or that they made dividends and customs revenue. They were willing to have their insignia literally branded into people’s flesh. The slave trade was seen as a way to make money and build an empire. And those royals who were complicit in this ghastly enterprise were also “heads” of the Church of England!

For 270 years British kings and queens were supportive of a commercial enterprise that condemned people into bondage, and in many cases, even branded their bodies with royal insignia.

How could so-called “Christian” people participate in such inhumanity? It was the same logic that persuaded “Christian” people in the New World to justify slavery. And Baptists were certainly not exempt. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed, in part, to defend slavery.

In the Introduction to my book, Spelunking Scripture: The Letters of Paul, I note how the Bible has been misused to justify cultural conditions that are antithetical to the will of God as revealed in the teachings and example of Jesus. One such cultural condition was the institution of slavery, as found in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Not only was slavery common in the biblical world, but selected verses from Paul’s letters have been misinterpreted to conclude that slavery was ordained by God!

After examining some of those selected verses in the Introduction, I conclude that “there is no way that slavery can be squared with loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.” I continue, “it took a long time, but eventually most Christians came to realize that slavery is abhorrent to the will of God.” I conclude, “But the legacy of slavery is still with us, namely in the racism upon which slavery in the American experience was based.”

So, slavery is not just an issue of the past. The legacy of slavery continues even into our present time. We who seek to follow the Bible must learn to distinguish cultural conditions from God’s eternal truth.