Slavery, Christianity & Islam

 An important article on the title subject, by Robert Spencer, has been posted here at First Things. (Thank you, Stuart Koehl). Spencer begins:

It has become a feature of today’s atheist chic to shy bricks at Christianity for its record on slavery. This is part of a larger assault on Western history and society, which, by accident or design, plays into the hands of those who are today mounting on a global scale a sweeping and explicit cultural challenge to Judeo-Christian as well as post-Christian values. The fundamentally most misunderstood and overlooked aspect of today’s defense against the global jihad is this challenge that Jihadists make to Western values, which are in large part Judeo-Christian. Combine this with a historical critique that relentlessly portrays the West as the aggressors against the rest of the world, and as uniquely responsible for its evils, and Westerners’ will to defend something as rotten as Western civilization begins to ebb away.

Spencer is the author of Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t—which he "wrote in order to counter these tendencies and answer the Islamic cultural critique."

Comments

[Seth R.]

The singular defining characteristic of "Western Civilization" is not that it practiced slavery, but that it abolished it.

[Nox]

Well, it tried. One million children are forced into enslaved prostitution each year. Slavery is still very real across the globe. People have all sorts of ways of placing others under their control. I wish those who point at slavery in the past would try to do something about the slavery existing in the present.