Christopher Brown

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1,098 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

Yeah.

I mean, we can sort of work from North America outwards.

I mean, you know, the new Methodist movement that John Wesley founds in the 1730s and 1740s

is concerned to minister to all people and not just Europeans and to try to find converts even outside the structures of the church.

And they try to preach to enslaved men and women.

And some of those evangelicals get very frustrated with slavery because plantation holders don't want their slaves to hear the gospel.

They don't want to discover that they have equality in Christ, that Christ died for all men and women.

And they don't want their slaves to learn to read the Bible.

If they start reading the Bible, they might start reading other things.

And so there's definitely an evangelical strain of irritation and then opposition to a degree, which is oriented around the Bible.

the resistance they get to spreading Christianity in places where slave slaveholding really matters.

So that's another trajectory that becomes important for what actually did happen.

But in the absence of the Quakers might have become, you know, it might become a different route to the future that we know.

The story of the Catholic Church is really interesting because in the places where, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, manumission was far more common.

And there were many more directives from the church about what it meant to be a Christian master, which meant a certain kind of practices of what we might call sort of humane practices of worship.

You know, of treating enslaved men and women kindly, allowing them to go to church, allowing them, in some cases, to, over time, purchase their own freedom.

Now, I mean, you know, how much that happened is kind of an ideal that some parts of the church encouraged.

But the way the Catholic Church largely dealt with the problem of slavery was in a very broadest sense to try to encourage a kind of almost peace between masters and slaves so that the state of violence, which is natural to slavery,

um was instead sort of emphasized a degree of of reciprocity that's the that's the ideology didn't actually work out that way but um catholic church didn't question didn't there wasn't much challenges to the system as attempts to make slaveholders better people if i could put it in the most crude possible sense was that the focus the

saving the souls of the slaveholders because they might be harmed?

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