Today, we fight our culture wars on cable news and social media. The sides are neatly drawn, the moral claims are absolute, and everyone insists history will vindicate his or her opinions. But beneath the noise, the same question lingers: What ideas shape the way we see right and wrong?

The battles we wage today over freedom, justice, and identity aren’t just about policies or politics—they’re about moral vision. Ideas still drive behavior, and they still justify our actions, sometimes in ways we barely notice. Four hundred years ago, England fought its own ideological battles—not on screens but in lecture halls, pulpits, and legal texts. Those arguments carried real moral stakes.

In The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World, John Samuel Harpham, assistant professor of constitutional studies at the University of Oklahoma, traces how English thinkers between 1550 and 1700 reshaped moral philosophy. What began as a debate over civil and natural law became a justification for owning human beings—an ideology that convinced early modern English people to justify, expand, and accelerate the evil of slavery into the lands of modern-day America.

I’ve often asked myself the same question that explains Harpham’s motivation for exploring this topic. He writes, “I wanted to know how what we now consider perhaps the most terrible wrong in the history of the nation came to be seen not only as necessary or profitable but as right from a moral point of view.” He adds, “I needed to know what moral account I would have given myself if I had been raised where I was raised but had been born two hundred years before” (1).

This book provides his answers.

Death or Slavery: Only Options?

According to Harpham’s account of English ideological history, the civil law tradition overcame the natural law tradition among the English in the early modern period. The natural law tradition was shaped by Aristotle, who taught that some persons are by nature slaves to be ruled, no matter their legal status. In contrast, the civil law tradition emerged from legal treatises during the Roman Empire and claimed that all persons are free by nature but that some might be made slaves as a result of accident or misfortune, most commonly through war.

Ironically, the triumph of the civil law tradition entrenched slavery more deeply. Whereas natural law slavery depended on dubious claims about natural inferiority and thus carried internal moral limits, civil law slavery required no such justification. By defining slavery as a legal condition arising from accident or war, English thinkers could affirm universal natural freedom in theory while maintaining slavery in practice. In Harpham’s account, this legal formalism created a more expansive and durable framework for enslavement in the Atlantic world.

The civil law tradition emerged from legal treatises from the Roman Empire and claimed that all persons are free by nature but that some might be made slaves as a result of accident or misfortune.

Harpham works through an impressive body of literature from the civil law tradition. This tradition begins with the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) compiled under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Harpham shows how the English adopted and adapted this text in various documents, including these: De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England) sometimes attributed to Henry of Bracton (ca. 13th century), John le Breton’s Britton (ca. 13th century), Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum (1583), John Cowell’s Institutes (1605), Hugo Grotius’s The Law of War and Peace (1625), Edward Coke’s Institutes (1628), Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689).

Through this extensive review, Harpham shows how the English could claim that all people are by nature free and that some people may become unfree—enslaved. The strongest reason for this seeming contradiction was the belief that slavery was preferred to death. As Harpham summarizes, “Slavery had come to be accepted because there was no fate worse than death” (170).

It’s regrettable that the early modern English hid behind a binary ideological choice rooted in confirmation bias. Did early modern English decision makers seriously consider ideological alternatives that decreased their wealth, land, and power? No. Similarly, we’d be wise to notice rhetorical moves that oversimplify some issues into binaries that bring clear benefits to those seeking or already in power.

Christians Did Speak Up

Despite impressively deep engagement by Harpham with the intellectual tradition of early modern English thinkers regarding slavery, he skims over at least one essential source: English Christians.

There’s no doubt, as Harpham briefly shows, that the Spanish and English used evangelism as a justification for enslaving Africans and Native Americans: “Expansion in America was authorized by the intention of the English to convert the native peoples to Christian religion” (69–70).

He also lightly engages the thoughts of the ministers Richard Baxter and Morgan Godwyn. For example, Harpham cites Godwyn, observing, “‘Our Planters [slave-holders] chief deity’ was none other than ‘Profit,’ and ‘their God, interest’” (175). Harpham also discusses whether the English believed that baptism and conversion emancipate enslaved people. But, overall, he’s selective in the texts and people he chooses to examine. In doing so, Harpham engages only a small sampling of the explicit Christian intellectual contribution regarding slavery while overlooking the ever-present Christian intellectual affirmation of slavery implicit in English beliefs in the era.

Harpham states that his research is inspired by historian David Brion Davis’s monumental scholarship first presented in the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Harpham’s book expands and deepens the scholarship on much of the intellectual tradition in this period. Readers can still prefer Davis’s breadth since his engagement of Christian sources—including sermons, theological works, and other writings from Christians—is broader and stronger. Mark Noll’s books In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 and—though it focuses on a later period—The Civil War as a Theological Crisis provide richer engagement with Christian sources.

Virtually every person in England in the early modern period identified as a Christian. They may have been influenced by Aristotelian and civil law ideology, but any thorough study of the intellectual tradition of the English between 1550 and 1700 must engage Christian sources thoroughly. If Harpham had engaged them further, he’d strengthen his argument regarding the homogeneity of the English approval of slavery in this era—as well as set up his important forthcoming research on the continued intellectual basis for American slavery.

When Ideologies Obscure Responsible Christianity

When we think about early American slavery, we’re bound to ask, How did they miss it? Harpham gives one clear answer: ideology. He shows powerfully that the civil law tradition provided many early modern English people a rationale for exactly what they needed to continue their participation in evil, a “tradition whose origins were to be found in complex legal texts that had been produced in ancient Rome” (51–52).

To this question, we can’t reply, “Their ideology made them do it.” Instead, English people, who almost exclusively identified as Christians, allowed their culture’s ideology to dictate their actions to enslave, dehumanize, and harm their fellow image-bearers. The honest answer to why they did it is closer to this: Their underexamined, self-serving beliefs rooted in secular ideology rather than neighbor-serving beliefs rooted in Scripture led to their actions to enslave people.

Christians must reckon with our propensity to let political, popular, and even pastoral power blind us. We, alongside other Christians and our churches, must constantly check our views against what the Bible teaches. The truth is that without being anchored in the whole counsel of God, we drift with the cultural tide that sometimes dehumanizes and destroys people made in God’s image.

A combination of factors contributed to the growth of abolitionism in the late 18th century: a rise in philosophies which emphasized freedom and independence, accompanied by the expansion of print media and journalism that brought previously unknown tragedies and personal experiences to light. None of that publicity would have been possible without the incredible courage of enslaved people risking their lives to tell their stories to people who would advocate for them. Christians were part of this story, but mostly after the cultural currents had already shifted. Tragically, Christians didn’t lead the way, though some of them (thankfully) grabbed an oar to join and row.

Christians must reckon with our propensity to let political, popular, and even pastoral power to blind us.

We’re right to celebrate later English Christians like William Wilberforce who confronted dominant ideologies and powerful entities to revisit the biblical teaching that all people are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). They faced enormous pressure as they argued that we ought to do for others what we’d want done for us (Matt. 7:12)—premises that reject the practice of enslaving people. Though it’s primarily written for an academic audience, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery reminds Christians of our need to constantly evaluate our culture’s ethics against Scripture’s norms.