Christian Ethics and Modern Slavery and Injustice

Keelynn Dunn's Artist Statement

For my research project, I researched what religious figures and texts say about slavery, more specifically modern-day slavery of the American Prison System, and how Christian ethics (more specifically Catholicism) either support or denounce modern-day slavery. I chose this topic because I wanted to find out how some people in the past supported slavery and how people of today's society support the system within our prison system. Many people who supported slavery and injustice were also devout Christians who believed that the Word supported their hatred. Fast forward to now, many religious people are also pro-police and pro-prison systems, which I found was an unmistakable parallel. I referenced many texts for this research, including the Constitution, the Bible, and three academic sources that covered slavery. Modern slavery and the topic of what justice is in Catholicism. Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective by Siddharth Kara helped me define what modern-day slavery is and uncover the parallels that today's society has to America's history. While this book mainly focuses on the sex trafficking aspect of modern-day slavery, she mentions imprisonment as one of the West's main methods of keeping slavery legal. Kara defines modern-slavery as, "Individuals [who] might have been owned outright, placed in a lifetime of bondage in exchange for food and shelter, sold into slavery to discharge a debt, or enslaved after military conquest" (Kara, 6). These are the exact conditions that our Constitution states are legal for anyone in the prison system. Next, I referenced the journal article, Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation by Jaron Browne. I chose this article in particular because I appreciate how Browne highlights black codes, chain gangs, and how mass incarceration in poor black and brown communities plays a major part in why slavery in prison is counted as legally justified. He states, "When slavery was legally abolished, a new set of laws called the Black Codes emerged to criminalize legal activity for African Americans. [...] As a result of Black Codes, the percentage of African Americans in prison grew exponentially, surpassing whites for the first time" (Browne, 43). The fact that the effects of slavery still affect our society today, despite the progression of justice for all, is a topic that I really wanted to understand how a religious person would approach this.

So, the answer to my question is no, if we were to follow Christian ethics for precisely what they say, there would be no justification for slavery being legal for prisoners. This relates to foundational knowledge from the first half of the course because we talked a lot about human rights and social justice teaching of Catholicism, which I used to highlight the hypocrisy of a country that not only prides itself on its justice but also, for a long time, on its religious values. I looked at the Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teachings by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Catholic Church teaches the themes of: Life and Dignity of the Human Person, Call to Family, Community, and Participation, Rights and Responsibility, Option for the Poor and Vulnerable, the Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers, Solidarity, and Care for God's Creation. With my research, I have advanced our understanding of this area because it denounces any belief that the mistreatment of anyone, a criminal or not, is ethically unjust. It might be objected to my view that committing crimes is ethically unjust and outweighs the idea that criminals are equal to free samaritans. However, between the Bible and the Themes of Catholic Social Teachings, there are no verses or rules that support anything other than the idea that we are all God's creation and deserve fairness and justice.