When did organized Christian churches admit their participation in the slavery of African people as sinful and when did they make a public apology?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

Evangelical Christians of the 19th century like William Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle were the people who got African slavery abolished in the English speaking world. Any apology by "organized christian churches" was subsequent to that movement, anticlimactic and almost irrelevant. The same is true of the "Civil Rights" movement of the 20th century, the "Scientific Revolution" of 16th and 17th century and the "liberation movements" of the 20th century (e.g, Lech Wolensa, Poland, and Nelson Mandela, South Africa.) Most "organized Christian churches" seldom if ever apologize for their sins until forced to by prophetic Christian voices who are willing to die for Christ and the Christian ethic.

In no way was recognition of the churches involvement in slavery irrelevant. It was because of the churches approval of slavery that the America's expanded so very rapidly. Free labor, no matter how immoral gave the America's an advantage over most other countries in their development and their financial success.

Answer 2

It should not be thought that African people were the only victims of the Christian slave trade. During the Middle Ages, slaves were traded openly in most cities, including Marseille, Dublin and Prague. Between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, the primary source of slaves for Europe and the Middle East were the territories of central and eastern Europe, although West Africa was an important source, via the trans-Saharan trade routes.

In the late 18th century Britain's great rival, France, enjoyed great spoils of slave labour from its colonies in the West Indies. C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins) says that as an anti-French gambit, the British and William Wilberforce sought to close down the slave trade to the West Indies to deprive the French of cheap labour. On this view, the abolition of slavery at the time was in the interests of British commerce, not the result of a new sense of Christian decency.

David Livingstone (1813-73) travelled extensively throughout East Africa, publicising the effects of the growing slave trade in this area, conveniently blamed on the Arabs, though its roots at the end of the nineteenth century were connected with the growth of European plantation economies of the Indian ocean. Meanwhile, Livingstone's contemporary, Ludwig Krapf, a Lutheran who worked for the CMS in Ethiopia saw Africans in terms of the fallenness which they share with all humanity, and thus a natural state of affairs.

The Society of Friends was the first group of Christians to express the incompatibility of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with a Christian view of humanity. Some theologians such as Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) also criticised the practice. However, the broader Church played only a small role in moving towards abolition.

By the 1830s, Southerners in the United States saw the institution of slavery as their 'peculiar institution' and southern religious figures claimed not only that was slavery a positive good, but that it was a Christian institution.
A close reading of Scripture demonstrated that the biblical authors seemed to accept slavery as an institution and nowhere explicitly condemned it, and this theological question became a troubling aspect of the American crisis. As the Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge (1797-1878) insisted, "nothing is obligatory upon the conscience but what [the Bible] enjoins; nothing can be sin but what it condemns."
In 2006, the Church of England voted to apologise to the descendants of victims of the slave trade for its role in the damage done to their ancestors. In 2008, the Episcopal Church joined other denominations, including the Southern Baptists, that have apologised for their past support of slavery.

The Catholic Church still has difficulty in accepting the importance of a sincere apology on behalf of the Church or those acting in the name of the Church. There have been qualified apologies for the 'sins' committed by Catholics, but not by the Church itself or by the popes. A common defence is to blame individuals rather than the Church itself or its leadership, or to divert attention to the sins of non-Catholics.