Abstract
This is a book not without interest and utility for those seeking to find a toehold in how the Christian Scriptures and Christian traditions might inform individual and community responses to the current challenges of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, particularly from the perspective of northern economies.
Although the book is situated as an interdisciplinary study, and although it champions throughout the importance of ‘contextualization’ in order to appropriately situate one’s ‘canonically informed’ hermeneutic on the Scriptures, Carson could have usefully included a brief chapter contextualizing the wider socio-political discourse of ‘slavery’, ‘modern slavery’, ‘human trafficking’ and ‘labour exploitation’ to enable her readers to situate the complexity of these various highly emotive and forensically differentiated terms in the contemporary world. Carson clearly conceives this study as assisting in the galvanization of a self-consciously Christian response to the cluster of societal and inter-individual abuses that constitute contemporary human trafficking – or modern slavery, as she variously nominates such offences – stating: the Christian Scriptures suggest that there is a responsibility to see ourselves as part of a redemptive impulse, and with sensitivity and courage, bring its power into the lives of people today. (p. 114)
It might shock British readers to find American bishops, senior academics and various theologians using the Scriptures as in some cases ‘commanding enslavement of others’ (Leviticus 25.44–46), with a variety of other ‘clobber texts’ being assembled in short measure to support mixed households under white supremacy and patriarchally ordered and scripturally sanctioned control of African slaves, the rape of whom by their white owners was also quietly approved. It would have been interesting for Carson to have spent more time delving into the justificatory approaches of theologians and ecclesial dignitaries in Britain, as they sought to resist the parliamentary legislation brought through by Wilberforce in the first decade of the nineteenth century in Westminster. Whether informed by a literalist approach or by tradition, neither Scripture nor reason rescued those with vested interests in the production cycle of the triangulated, super-exploitation of slavery in the heyday of Western European and North American importation of enslaved West African lives. In the end, Carson points to the power of empathy, and the role of the slaves’ own engagement with the Scriptures – generating a narrative of liberation, justice and equality that would sound out again and again in the twentieth century for full civil rights in the post-bellum world of the United States. She also includes testimonies and ‘case studies’ of those who endured the gruesome maltreatment and human degradation that this form of slavery entailed, to finally effect political change and the arrival of a new, settled post-slavery hermeneutic.
The lack of contextualization of the challenges of contemporary trafficking, in terms of its range of manifestations and its critical differences in structure from the ‘state-approved’ enslavement of the US antebellum world, leaves the next substantial section of this book somewhat marooned, as a segment whose attention is focused on the potential of trafficking’s ‘abolition’. This section concentrates on prostitution and the challenges of how contemporary Christians might set about influencing policy and informing wider cultural understandings of the nature of sexual exploitation.
Carson recognizes that there are other areas of human trafficking challenges facing contemporary society, but, within the confines of this book, it is justifiable that, in the final two chapters, she decides to focus on the hugely conflicted and, for many, confusing discussions around the harms, choices, abuse and potential ‘enslavement’ of contemporary sex trafficking and its intersection with the long history of endemic prostitution practised in Western Christendom.
Carson carefully dissects the various scriptural traditions and redactions that have informed Western Christendom’s troubled understanding of ‘prostitution’ and the negative societal impacts that the presence of prostitution has been understood to inflict. She neatly draws out the multiple paradoxes and double standards that have operated around prostitution, noting that during the Middle Ages brothels were frequently under licence to bishops and ecclesial leaders, as a way of protecting the requirements of ‘celibacy’ and the management of male ‘sexual drives’ when away from their wives – in the military or in trade. By acknowledging the ‘complexity’ of approaches to prostitution, the deep-seated, unspoken anxieties that are present whenever sex is mentioned in many Christian circles, and the fact that two parties are always directly involved, the purchaser and the ‘purchased’, Carson helpfully steers a pathway through the contemporary debates around abolition, legalization and de-criminalization, and the prosecution of the (ubiquitously) male purchaser.
This is a book that will enlighten and reward the careful reader, particularly by exploring the treacherous gullies of religious interpretation when political or social mandates that are now taken for granted were being hammered out less than five generations ago. It will assist church groups wanting to understand some of the thematic ground rules emerging from Scripture concerning the ethic of ‘love and redemption [which] means that the church must look beyond itself, and reach out to others’ (p. 108), as they seek to respond to the multifaceted realities of contemporary human trafficking. Another cluster of books looking at themes relating to the socio-political project of countering human trafficking, the constitutive features of enslavement, and the economic and historical inequalities that create the conditions for multiple forms of exploitation will doubtless be on our shelves before long, but in the meantime Carson’s introduction will not steer the enquirer from the main journey that must be undertaken – in building a social intervention informed by the Scriptures, and tempered with the hermeneutic of empathy and justice.