The Abolition of Slavery

Slavery—we often think of it as a relic of the past. The children of Israel came out of it when they left Egypt. The United States supposedly saw the last of it at the time of the Civil War. It’s something that existed in ancient Rome, in the medieval age, in the colonial period. But it’s now gone, right?

Wrong. Sadly, slavery is still with us. The International Labor Organization estimates there are at least 12.3 million people in some form of forced labor in the world today. That is, over 12 million people are “treated as property and are forced to work” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery). They may be “held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation” (ibid.).

The modern world has not seen the last of slavery. Debt slavery is common in South Asia; it involves depriving vulnerable people of their freedom and forcing them to work to pay off real, invented or exaggerated debts.

A recent feature on CNN.com highlighted this situation in parts of India, where, for a debt of as little as 1,000 Indian rupees ($22 or 16 euros), poorly educated, sometimes illiterate people are kept against their will and forced to work with few or no freedoms and no apparent prospect of paying off their presumed financial obligations (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2011/03/08/cfp.sidner.india.slave.labor.cnn?iref=allsearch). This kind of debt slavery also exists in African and Middle Eastern countries such as Mauritania, Sudan, and the Ivory Coast. It often involves child slavery, with whole families at times forced to perform menial tasks, such as making bricks.

A common and fast-growing form of modern slavery is sex slavery. This usually involves teenage girls, caught up in the depraved thirst for prostitution, pornography and pedophilia. This form of slavery is lucrative and estimated to provide some 40 percent of worldwide profits from only a small percentage of the total number of slaves worldwide. Slavery is thought to be second only to drug trafficking in global criminal enterprises.

These thoughts on the subject of slavery were prompted by a meeting I attended in Cincinnati, Ohio, last week. The visitor was Juan Manuel Corzo, a senator from Colombia, who came to speak about U.S.-Colombian trade and political relations. He fielded questions about his country and its place in the Americas. But what came to light during the course of the evening was that he had been held hostage in the jungles of Colombia for several months by the leftist guerrilla FARC movement. He described his experiences of being a hostage, deprived of basic freedoms, the prisoner of a guerrilla movement still addicted to outdated worldviews. 

I tried to imagine being cut off from loved ones, chained to a tree, fed an inferior diet and held for an uncertain time against one’s will, subject to abuse by political fanatics. Another form of slavery, perhaps? Sadly, hostage-taking is still common in many parts of our world.

The Word of God contains both good and bad news on this subject.

First the bad news: The Bible describes a religious-economic-political system yet to be revived in the last days that will indulge in these practices (Ezekiel 27:13; Revelation 18:13). Note that this system, an end-time version of the ancient Babylonian civilization, will traffic in the “bodies and souls of men.”

Now the good news: The time is coming when slavery and privation of human freedoms will come to an end. We must keep reading: This Babylonian system, we learn, will be brought down with a giant crash at the return of Jesus Christ (Revelation 18:21-24); and with it will go the evil practices of slavery and hostage-taking. Permanently.

And isn’t that good news?