Slavery did not end in the nineteenth century—it persists today, hidden in global supply chains, religious justifications, and systems of power. Kevin Bales and Michael Rota join Evan Rosa to explore modern slavery through history, psychology, and theology, asking why it remains so difficult to see and confront. “It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785) “There are millions of slaves in the world today.” (Kevin Bales, 2025) In this episode, they consider how conscience, power, and religious belief can either sustain enslavement or become forces for abolition. Together they discuss the psychology of slaveholding, faith’s complicity and resistance, Quaker abolitionism, modern debt bondage, ISIS and Yazidi slavery, and what meaningful action looks like today. https://freetheslaves.net/ –––––––––––––––––– Episode Highlights “There are millions of slaves in the world today.” “Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things.” “They have sexual control. They can do what they like.” “Slavery is flowing into our lives hidden in the things we buy.” “We have to widen our sphere of concern.” –––––––––––––––––– About Kevin Bales Kevin Bales is a leading scholar and activist in the global fight against modern slavery. He is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham and co-founder of Free the Slaves, an international NGO dedicated to ending slavery worldwide. Bales has spent more than three decades researching forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking, combining academic rigor with on-the-ground investigation. His work has shaped international policy, influenced anti-slavery legislation, and brought global attention to forms of enslavement often dismissed as historical. He is the author of several influential books, including Disposable People and Friends of God, Slaves of Men, which examines the complex relationship between religion and slavery across history and into the present. Learn more and follow at [https://www.kevinbales.org](https://www.kevinbales.org/) and [https://www.freetheslaves.net](https://www.freetheslaves.net/) About Michael Rota Michael Rota is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he teaches and researches in the philosophy of religion, moral psychology, and the history of slavery and religion. His work spans scholarly articles on the definition of slavery, the moral psychology underlying social change and abolition, and the relevance of theological concepts to ethical life. Rota is co-author with Kevin Bales of *Friends of God, Slaves of Men: Religion and Slavery, Past and Present*, a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of how religions have both justified and resisted systems of enslaving human beings from antiquity to the present day. He is also the author of *Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence, and the Abundant Life*, an extended argument for the reasonableness and desirability of Christian commitment. In addition to his academic writing, he co-leads projects in philosophy and education and is co-founder of Personify, a platform exploring AI and student learning. Learn more and follow at his faculty profile and personal website [https://mikerota.wordpress.com](https://mikerota.wordpress.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) and on X/Twitter @mikerota. –––––––––––––––––– Helpful Links And Resources Disposable People by Kevin Bales https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281820/disposable-people Friends of God, Slaves of Men by Kevin Bales and Michael Rota https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383265/friends-of-god-slaves-of-men Free the Slaves [https://www.freetheslaves.net](https://www.freetheslaves.net/) Voices for Freedom [https://voicesforfreedom.org](https://voicesforfreedom.org/) International Justice Mission [https://www.ijm.org](https://www.ijm.org/) Talitha Kum [https://www.talithakum.info](https://www.talithakum.info/) –––––––––––––––––– Show Notes – Slavery named as a contemporary moral crisis obscured by twentieth-century abolition narratives – Kevin Bales’s encounter with anti-slavery leaflet in London, mid-1990s – “There are millions of slaves in the world today … I thought, look, that can’t be true because I don’t know that. I’m a professor. I should know that.” – Stories disrupting moral distance more powerfully than statistics – “There were three little stories inside, about three different types of enslavement … it put a hook in me like a fish and pulled me.” – United Nations documentation mostly ignored despite vast evidence – Decades of investigation into contemporary slavery – Fieldwork across five regions, five forms of enslavement – Kevin Bales’s book, Disposable People as embodied witness with concrete stories – “Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things. There’s gonna be something that breaks hearts the way it did me when I was in the field.” – Psychological resistance to believing slavery touches ordinary life – Anti-Slavery International as original human rights organization founded in U.K. in 1839 – Quaker and Anglican foundations of abolitionist movements – Religion as both justification for slavery and engine of resistance – Call for renewed faith-based abolition today – Slavery and religion intertwined from early human cultures – Colonial expansion intensifying moral ambiguity – Columbus, Genoa, and enslavement following failed gold extraction – Spanish royal hesitation over legitimacy of slavery – Las Casas’s moral conversion after refusal of absolution – “He eventually realized this is totally wrong. What we are doing, we are destroying these people. And this is not what God wants us to be doing.” – Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian defense of hierarchy and profit – Moral debate without effective structural enforcement – Power described as intoxicating and deforming conscience – Hereditary debt bondage in Indian villages – Caste, ethnicity, and generational domination – Sexual violence as mechanism of absolute control – “They have sexual control. They can beat up the men, rape the women, steal the children. They can do pretty much what they like.” – Three-year liberation process rooted in trust, education, and collective refusal – Former slaves returning as teachers and organizers – Liberation compared to Plato’s allegory of the cave – Post-liberation vulnerability and risk of recapture – Power inverted in Christian teaching – “The disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, and Jesus says, the greatest among you will be the slave of all… don’t use power to help yourself. Use it to serve.” – Psychological explanations for delayed abolition – The psychological phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” that shapes moral conclusions – “The conclusions we reach aren’t just shaped by the objective evidence the world provides. They’re shaped also by the internal desires and goals and motivations people have.” – Economic self-interest and social consensus sustaining injustice – Quaker abolition through relational, conscience-driven confrontation – First major religious body to forbid slaveholding – Boycotts of slave-produced goods and naval blockade of slave trade – Modern slavery as organized criminal enterprise – ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women – Religious reasoning weaponized for genocide – “They said, for religious reasons, we just need to eradicate this entire outfit.” – Online slave auctions and cultural eradication – Internal Islamic arguments for abolition – Restricting the permissible for the common good – Informing conscience as first step toward action – Community sustaining long-term resistance – Catholic religious sisters as leading global abolitionists – Hidden slavery embedded in everyday consumer goods – “There’s so much slavery flowing into our lives which is hidden… in our homes, our watches, our computers, the minerals, all this.” – Expanding moral imagination beyond immediate needs – “Your sphere of concern has to be wider… how do I start caring about something that I don’t see?” – “It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785) –––––––––––––––––– #ModernSlavery #FaithAndJustice #HumanDignity #Abolition #FreeTheSlaves Production Notes - This podcast featured Kevin Bales and Michael Rota - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Slavery did not end in the nineteenth century—it persists today, hidden in global supply chains, religious justifications, and systems of power. Kevin Bales and Michael Rota join Evan Rosa to explore modern slavery through history, psychology, and theology, asking why it remains so difficult to see and confront.
“It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)
“There are millions of slaves in the world today.” (Kevin Bales, 2025)
In this episode, they consider how conscience, power, and religious belief can either sustain enslavement or become forces for abolition. Together they discuss the psychology of slaveholding, faith’s complicity and resistance, Quaker abolitionism, modern debt bondage, ISIS and Yazidi slavery, and what meaningful action looks like today.
––––––––––––––––––
Episode Highlights
“There are millions of slaves in the world today.”
“Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things.”
“They have sexual control. They can do what they like.”
“Slavery is flowing into our lives hidden in the things we buy.”
“We have to widen our sphere of concern.”
––––––––––––––––––
About Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales is a leading scholar and activist in the global fight against modern slavery. He is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham and co-founder of Free the Slaves, an international NGO dedicated to ending slavery worldwide. Bales has spent more than three decades researching forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking, combining academic rigor with on-the-ground investigation. His work has shaped international policy, influenced anti-slavery legislation, and brought global attention to forms of enslavement often dismissed as historical. He is the author of several influential books, including Disposable People and Friends of God, Slaves of Men, which examines the complex relationship between religion and slavery across history and into the present. Learn more and follow at https://www.kevinbales.org and https://www.freetheslaves.net
About Michael Rota
Michael Rota is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he teaches and researches in the philosophy of religion, moral psychology, and the history of slavery and religion. His work spans scholarly articles on the definition of slavery, the moral psychology underlying social change and abolition, and the relevance of theological concepts to ethical life. Rota is co-author with Kevin Bales of Friends of God, Slaves of Men: Religion and Slavery, Past and Present, a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of how religions have both justified and resisted systems of enslaving human beings from antiquity to the present day. He is also the author of Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence, and the Abundant Life, an extended argument for the reasonableness and desirability of Christian commitment. In addition to his academic writing, he co-leads projects in philosophy and education and is co-founder of Personify, a platform exploring AI and student learning. Learn more and follow at his faculty profile and personal website https://mikerota.wordpress.com and on X/Twitter @mikerota.
––––––––––––––––––
Helpful Links And Resources
Disposable People by Kevin Bales
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281820/disposable-people
Friends of God, Slaves of Men by Kevin Bales and Michael Rota
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383265/friends-of-god-slaves-of-men
Free the Slaves
Voices for Freedom
International Justice Mission
Talitha Kum
––––––––––––––––––
Show Notes
– Slavery named as a contemporary moral crisis obscured by twentieth-century abolition narratives
– Kevin Bales’s encounter with anti-slavery leaflet in London, mid-1990s
– “There are millions of slaves in the world today … I thought, look, that can’t be true because I don’t know that. I’m a professor. I should know that.”
– Stories disrupting moral distance more powerfully than statistics
– “There were three little stories inside, about three different types of enslavement … it put a hook in me like a fish and pulled me.”
– United Nations documentation mostly ignored despite vast evidence
– Decades of investigation into contemporary slavery
– Fieldwork across five regions, five forms of enslavement
– Kevin Bales’s book, Disposable People as embodied witness with concrete stories
– “Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things. There’s gonna be something that breaks hearts the way it did me when I was in the field.”
– Psychological resistance to believing slavery touches ordinary life
– Anti-Slavery International as original human rights organization founded in U.K. in 1839
– Quaker and Anglican foundations of abolitionist movements
– Religion as both justification for slavery and engine of resistance
– Call for renewed faith-based abolition today
– Slavery and religion intertwined from early human cultures
– Colonial expansion intensifying moral ambiguity
– Columbus, Genoa, and enslavement following failed gold extraction
– Spanish royal hesitation over legitimacy of slavery
– Las Casas’s moral conversion after refusal of absolution
– “He eventually realized this is totally wrong. What we are doing, we are destroying these people. And this is not what God wants us to be doing.”
– Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian defense of hierarchy and profit
– Moral debate without effective structural enforcement
– Power described as intoxicating and deforming conscience
– Hereditary debt bondage in Indian villages
– Caste, ethnicity, and generational domination
– Sexual violence as mechanism of absolute control
– “They have sexual control. They can beat up the men, rape the women, steal the children. They can do pretty much what they like.”
– Three-year liberation process rooted in trust, education, and collective refusal
– Former slaves returning as teachers and organizers
– Liberation compared to Plato’s allegory of the cave
– Post-liberation vulnerability and risk of recapture
– Power inverted in Christian teaching
– “The disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, and Jesus says, the greatest among you will be the slave of all… don’t use power to help yourself. Use it to serve.”
– Psychological explanations for delayed abolition
– The psychological phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” that shapes moral conclusions
– “The conclusions we reach aren’t just shaped by the objective evidence the world provides. They’re shaped also by the internal desires and goals and motivations people have.”
– Economic self-interest and social consensus sustaining injustice
– Quaker abolition through relational, conscience-driven confrontation
– First major religious body to forbid slaveholding
– Boycotts of slave-produced goods and naval blockade of slave trade
– Modern slavery as organized criminal enterprise
– ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women
– Religious reasoning weaponized for genocide
– “They said, for religious reasons, we just need to eradicate this entire outfit.”
– Online slave auctions and cultural eradication
– Internal Islamic arguments for abolition
– Restricting the permissible for the common good
– Informing conscience as first step toward action
– Community sustaining long-term resistance
– Catholic religious sisters as leading global abolitionists
– Hidden slavery embedded in everyday consumer goods
– “There’s so much slavery flowing into our lives which is hidden… in our homes, our watches, our computers, the minerals, all this.”
– Expanding moral imagination beyond immediate needs
– “Your sphere of concern has to be wider… how do I start caring about something that I don’t see?”
– “It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)
––––––––––––––––––
#ModernSlavery
#FaithAndJustice
#HumanDignity
#Abolition
#FreeTheSlaves
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Kevin Bales: You know, it was an accidental thing for me. I was teaching in London. I lived in London for a very long time. I was at a public event. There was an elderly man with a funny beard, uh, sitting at a table outdoors, and he had leaflets on his little table. And the leaflet said there are millions of slaves in the world today.
Evan Rosa: This is Kevin Bales. He's the co-founder of Free The Slaves, an organization seeking to end modern day Slavery.
Kevin Bales: And this was like 1994, 95, something like that. I looked at that and I thought, look, that can't be true because I don't know that, and this is hubris. I wanna admit my hubris. I'm a professor. I should know that, right?
But I picked up the leaflet and there were. Three little stories inside about three different types of enslavement. And I walked away thinking, I don't know, three stories and there's millions in the world, and all this kind of thing, but it put a hook in me like a fish and pulled me. And the more I thought, the more I looked.
And then I called a friend in Geneva who was working at the United Nations. I said, do you guys have anything like data coming in about situations of slavery around the world? He said, oh yeah. Constantly. I have like 30 filing cabinets full of stuff, but nobody looks at it
and I begin to realize something is going on here that I really probably ought to devote some time to. And I did. And I begin to dig and dig and dig, and I've been digging ever since. And I'm like, you know, 35 years into it.
Evan Rosa: In 1999, Kevin wrote a book called Disposable People New Slavery in the Global Economy.
In it, he took a journalistic approach to cover contemporary conditions of enslavement in Moria, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, India, amounting to a new expose of a reality that not many Western people were aware of and perhaps were not prepared to admit, let alone address.
Kevin Bales: Well, d disposable people was basically put together around five questions, uh, which were about how do you come out of freedom? How do you end up enslaved? What kind of work do you do? Are you bought and sold this sort of thing. And I went to five different places around the world and looked at five different types of enslavement and, but I did it undercover and up close and tried to write the human stories out of it because I thought the stats isn't gonna do it.
I need to actually show people things. Is kind of break the hearts the way it it did to me when I was in the field, and that's what I was hoping to do.
Evan Rosa: Some figures. Data collected by freed the slaves suggests that more than 49 million people are currently enslaved right now working today for no wages in unregulated conditions, and often out of sight hidden from the public conscience.
Around 55% are enslaved to forced labor. And 12% of those are children. 44% live in forced marriages. Around 13% are involved in commercialized sex slavery in their work to date, they report having freed more than 10,000 people over the last 25 years.
Kevin Bales: When I tried to talk about it from bits of information before I wrote the book, people would say, yeah, but you know, but that can't happen to me.
You know, it, it was all. A little too easy to say, but when, when I was able to go out and come back with some of the real realities, some of the things that I saw and did actually messed me up a bit, it was that kind of strength and, and almost terror, but it wasn't at least hard in that. There was still a group in London called Anti-Slavery International, which had been founded all the way back in 1783 with a completely different name.
It was the original human rights group in world history and uh, uh, with a bunch of Quakers in it, but also a lot of other people in it, and a lot of Anglicans and all that they had had. Been the foot soldiers that that did the first abolitions, uh, you know, illegal slavery in Great Britain and then fed into the US and so forth.
And so that group called Free the Slaves was actually just me and, uh, several other people from Britain bringing anti-slavery international into Washington dc
Evan Rosa: Joining Kevin in. Episode is Michael Rota, professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas.
Michael Rota: I teach ethics and for many years I used a reader that had a number of articles. One of them was a little piece by Kevin, uh, which included little excerpts, I think from disposable people. This was the first time I came across.
The issue and I felt my students need to know about this. How can I help with this problem? This is terrible. Like there are a few things worse than some of the stuff that you read about in in Kevin's work
Evan Rosa: together. They recently published a unique. Book that integrates philosophical rigor, journalistic historical synthesis in a spirit of compassion and practical ethics in hopes of contributing to the kind of learning that might lead to the end of modern slavery.
The book is Friends of God, slaves of Men, religion and Slavery, past and Present.
Michael Rota: So I started as talking with students about it and you know, donating to Free the Slaves a little bit according to my means, but I felt like I should be doing more. And so I actually reached out to Kevin. I had a few ideas we.
Talked and realized, wow, there's excellent anti-slavery work going on in many different areas, people working on supply chains, people working on legal stuff. But maybe what Kevin and I could do together was something focused on religion, because on the one hand, in certain ways, certain religious beliefs actually pre.
Perpetuate slavery today, we should know that. We should know about that. On the other hand, the first successful abolitionist movements in the 18th and 19th centuries, a core driver of those movements were Christian beliefs, Christian groups, Christian people. Working together motivated by their faith. And what Kevin and I think is that we need more of that today.
So there are many religiously oriented anti-slavery groups, but there are many more religious people who we feel like they could get in on this. And this problem has not gone away. We want to see more of what we saw in history. Before we wanna see more of today, so we wanna tell that story
Evan Rosa: together. In this episode, we discuss the reality of modern day slavery, the interplay of power and conscience in the religious aspects of slavery as an institution, the psychology of slave, holding the extent of complicity or resistance by non-live holders, the history of Quaker abolitionism and what meaningful action to end slavery might look like today if you're interested in contributing to this work.
You can visit free the slaves.net to make a donation that will support on the ground work, education, advocacy, and policy change, and strategic movement building that will impact local communities where slavery is practiced. Thanks for listening today,
Kevin Bales: Kevin.
Evan Rosa: Mike, thank you so much for joining me on for the Life of the World.
Michael Rota: It's great to be here. Thanks for having us, Evan.
Evan Rosa: There's an interesting interplay between each of your work. Mike, you're a philosopher Kevin, a scholar of slavery, but more than a scholar. An activist as well. And some years ago you wrote an important text in the anti-slavery movement, and this intersection, in its theological context, provides an important contribution to contemporary discussions of slavery.
You begin the book, friends of God, slaves of Men. I was marked by the historical element here, and you of course, I think rightly claim that slavery and religion are linked from the beginnings of human culture. But it's a particular moment during the exploration of the so-called New World where Spain sent out a variety of these explorers and in that effort to colonize in that effort to expand and explore the new question of how to.
Interact, how to relate to these, uh, these new peoples emerges.
Michael Rota: So we need a little context, which is that slavery had in many ways waned, uh, not quite disappeared, but waned in Northern Europe in the late middle Ages, but it was alive and well, uh, in so many other parts of the world, including on the borders of Europe.
Where the Muslim countries and the Christian European countries, there was between 15 and hun 1800, there was something like 1 million Muslim slaves captured by Christian Raiders and 2 million Christian slaves captured by Muslim Raiders. So the Europeans could easily see themselves as being involved in a conflict with others.
Right. And slave taking was part of that. So then when the Portuguese, in the 14 hundreds, the 15th century, started exploring down the African coast. And they started enslaving people. Christopher Columbus was himself for, I think from Genoa, which was the center of slave trading. So when he goes to the New world, he's looking for gold among other things, and he's not finding as much as he hoped.
And his thought pretty quickly turns to slaves. And he writes back to Isabella and Ferdinand and says, Hey, many slaves as you want, I'll bring some back for you. You know, you're gonna love it, kind of a thing.
Evan Rosa: Wow.
Michael Rota: And uh, he actually in his first landfall. He got to know the natives. He talked with them.
Then he grabbed seven of 'em and put 'em on a ship and sailed off. Two of them jumped ship and were able to get back. The other five ended up in Spain. So Columbus gets back from his first voyage and he goes back for a second, and this time he sends 500 slaves back, but the Queen is not sure. She's into this.
She's not sure. This is listed in her views. Slavery can be okay. It's been accepted for centuries. The Christian view is that under the right conditions it's allowed, but she's thinking these conditions don't quite look right, and the Spanish monarchy, after a few years actually looks into this. They end up ordering those 500 slaves free that Columbus.
Brought back and they later organized a debate and it's between, this is many years later. This is Dela Casas was a Spaniard who ended up in the New World as a colonist. He had what they called, uh, in income andro or something. It was a farm area. Maybe they did some mining for gold entrusted to him. He had natives under his control and he was at the same time a priest.
But he was, that wasn't his main thing, like he was, well, he was doing both, I guess. And at a certain point, some visiting Dominican priests refused him absolution. So they said, you cannot be involved in this. We're not accepting your confession. And he had this moral struggle and he eventually realized this is totally wrong.
What we are doing, we are destroying these people, and this is not what God wants us to be doing. He became an absolute lead. Dynamic anti-slavery Activist Sepulveda was back in Spain. A Renaissance scholar loves to read Aristotle, who accepted slavery. Probably pretty raw Spain. Look at all the gold we're making.
This is good. You know, this is good stuff. We are the natural. They're less than us. We should enslave them. That's the way the world should be. So Sepulveda and Cut. Las Casas at one point have this debate. It lasts several days. The sad part of the story, I mean. You give, gotta give some credit to Spain.
They banned some of Sepulveda's books and they tried to make things a little better, but they didn't really get it done. And this I could go on, but they tried to make things better here and there. But at certain points, I mean, most of the conquistadors in Spain, they didn't care about this, these moral strictures.
I mean, at one point the. King Charles of Spain was trying to tell one of his, you know, the people running Peru, I think to like tamp down on the slavery and the colonist killed the king's. Viceroy. Spain didn't have full control. I mean, it was like another planet, the new world. It was so far away.
Evan Rosa: What I'm hearing you narrat it as a sort of struggle, a kind of moral struggle of conscience happening in Spain.
But I would, I would wonder and, and suspect that that happens in a variety of slaves where. There is some kind of awareness at a level of moral conscience that it's in fact wrong, but the taste of power as so intoxicating trying to enter into the dark psychology of the slavery is I think an important thing to, to at least appreciate in the effort to eliminate slavery.
I would like to have each comment on power quite a bit because that is the religious connection to power that I find, uh, compelling. Element here that's happening.
Kevin Bales: Let me jump over to India for a moment and into the present and point out that, uh, for many, many years now, I've been working with an NGO and I've been part of an NGO that sends people into villages in Pradesh, which are.
All in slavery. Virtually everyone in the village is, is enslaved in hereditary slavery, a kind of debt bondage, slavery, often in agriculture, sometimes in mining. And the person who controls all this, the person who owns the village will be a Brahman. Family who have over time accumulated not just lower caste people, but people who are below the lower caste, right?
So they're even, they're lower than the caste system itself. They're often ethnicities that have migrated from the mountains or whatever. And now they've been living in that type of hereditary slavery for generations and the power. That Drummond family has, which is especially ugly. And it reflects all the way back to, you know, Mississippi in 1840 is that they have sexual control.
They can do what they like, they can beat up the men, they can rape the women, they can steal the children. They can, you know, they can do pretty much what they like. And breaking that system is actually a. We now have a very successful, uh, mechanism to do that, but it takes about three years to go through the process to where that ends.
But where I'm going with that is just to point out what you're pointing out, which is men who achieve situations of. Hierarchical of power, uh, whether they're Spanish by counts or whatever, or there are Brahman g landowners in India today. That's part of that whole sexual dynamic as well that has to do with masculinity and you go on and on across the different parts of that.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: You said that there was a three year process.
Kevin Bales: Yes, it's, we've done it so often now that we've got, you know, over a hundred of these villages have come to freedom and like that, it's very simple. A teacher and a teacher's helper is sent into the village. Now, what the people in the village don't know is that the teachers and the teacher's helper are not just teachers.
They're actually people who had grown up in a village in slavery. Hereditary slavery and they'd come through the help of others out and then they'd gone off to university and they've had do the training, but they know how to go back in and to teach. And the first thing they set up is a lunch program.
So all the kids get to eat for free a vast amount of food, which the. Slaveholder doesn't have to pay for. And so that's why he usually says it's okay. And then as they cook together, these women and the teachers and the women of the village who are brought in to do the cooking, they start a conversation and the conversation usually lasts about two years as they, because they've been born into hereditary slavery.
A two year conversation with the sisters and the powerful, the, and the teachers who they look up to and they say something like, but like a year and a half in, they'll say, you know, we grew up in a village just like this one. And that's when the moms say, well, how did you get, how did you get out?
Evan Rosa: Wow.
Kevin Bales: And then they begin to talk.
That process and how you organize the women to all say no on a particular day when you've also arranged for Honest Police to show up that day and a lot of other things. So there's a group called, uh, voices for Freedom based in California that does a lot of that, and there's a whole bunch of subunits of that.
And we actually have one on this little tiny. Place where I live, we have a unit that also supports villages coming out like that. So it's, it's, it's, it's not hard to find out how you, how they do it when, if you know where to look on the web.
Evan Rosa: Mike, one of the places my mind goes with this, it just shows where I'm personally coming from is That sounds an awful lot like Plato's allegory of the cave where a freed individual
Michael Rota: Yes.
Evan Rosa: Experiencing the goodness of that freedom now for whatever other, um, problems that we need to need to bracket for Plato and ancient Greek philosophy.
Michael Rota: Sure.
Evan Rosa: That entrance into the cave is part of the process of. The goodness of being free.
Michael Rota: Yeah,
Evan Rosa: and I'm hearing that in this Voices of Freedom conversations that lead to freedom, and it is related to power because it, it seems like both in the allegory of the cave and in the case of these breaking up the generational slavery in these Indian communities, there's a reinvestment of power in the individual to inhabit their freedom.
Michael Rota: Yeah. So much of what's important in working with deliberate modern slaves is what happens after, after they're liberated and supporting them to find a life that they can sustain because it's easy to get recaptured in some of these places.
Evan Rosa: Oh, certainly.
Michael Rota: But about power and religion, I mean, I think it's human nature.
Uh, GK Chesterton once equipped the original sins, the only doctrine of Christian theology that can actually be proved. The idea being that look at history, look at human beings and how they, even when they say they're committed to higher ideals, what do they do? So there's this passage where the disciples are arguing about who's the greatest, and Jesus says.
The greatest among you will be. It's often translated servant, but the Greek is just, slave will be a slave, and the greatest among you will be the slave of all. So Jesus tries to flip the dynamic a bit and don't use power to help yourself use it. Use it to serve. Mm-hmm. Unfortunately, another thing I think Chesterton said was looking at the history of Europe, said it's not that Christianity was tried and found wanting, it's that it was found to be difficult and not really tried.
So in so many ways, what you see with the history of, of Christian reflection on slavery is it's just taken so long to put the dots together. Love your neighbors yourself. Treat others as you would have them be treated. Pretty easy to go from there to realize, well, I really should not be enslaving these people.
But it takes a long time and part of it has to do, I think with psychology.
Um, so you asked about the psychology of Yeah. Slave owners. Shall I speak to that a bit?
Evan Rosa: Please do.
Michael Rota: Alright, so distinguish between now in which slavery's illegal, right. And, and. Almost everyone's gonna at least give verbal ascent to the idea that it's wrong. Compare that to a place a long time ago. So 3000 years ago, when slavery's a fact of life.
And while some people have moral qualms about it, almost everyone accepts it as morally permissible. It's gonna be a lot easier to be a slave holder in those circumstances without being a terrible person. And, uh, there's a whole area in psychology. It's a concept called motivated reasoning. So here the idea is that the conclusions people reach aren't just shaped.
This is just how human beings are. The conclusions we reach aren't just shaped by the objective evidence the world provides to us. They're shaped also by. The internal desires and goals and motivations people have
Evan Rosa: certainly,
Michael Rota: and abolitionists noticed this was part of what was going on. So there's a, there's an abolitionist named George Lawrence in the early 18 hundreds who said, he looked at the southern states.
He said, they're so biased by interest. They have become callous to the voice of reason and justice. Their economic interest, their social status was built on the system. Lincoln actually says at one point, you know, and he is talking to the northerners, you know, if we were reversed. If we were the slaveholders and they weren't, probably our views would be reversed too.
Like have some humility here to the Northerners. So a little more on motivated reasoning. So. Psychologists who study this have identified some very specific biases that people have. One sometimes gets called the lake woe boon effect, which is that we want to think well of ourselves, and this is why if you ask people, like 80% of people think they're above average drivers, like 90% of college professors think they're above average, that kind of thing with their work.
So that's one thing to hold onto. Then there's cognitive dissonance research, which is that we want our beliefs to match our actions, and when they don't, we get uncomfortable. If we have to change the belief, 'cause we wanna hold onto the action. People do that a lot, right? And then there's the influence of other people.
So way more than we might think. Our formation of beliefs is influenced by the consensus that we see around us. So an early Quaker abolitionist, John Woolman, who I hope we get to talk more about later. He said at one point. Customs generally approved and opinions received by youth from their superiors become like the natural produce of the soil, especially when they are suited to favorite inclinations.
So Woolman, just great abolitionists is recognizing that people have been raised thinking that this is okay and it puts money in their pocket and makes them. Successful in the eyes of the world, it's gonna be real hard for them to see. Otherwise, we could say more, but I'll, I'll leave it at that for now.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, sure. Like the, the, the common human psychology that's exhibited through Lincoln's point about the tables being turned. If we're not on guard for our own inclinations and the elements of our own unconscious. Whether it's sinfulness or a proclivity to violence or a proclivity to injustice, or a desire for power or working against our own, past trauma, past down generations, it is human beings who are slave holders and they get to that point somehow.
And I think that's an important aspect of both bringing, bringing ourselves to the question and the work with humility, but also by appeal. To the common humanity that we share to the slaveholder.
Kevin Bales: It's interesting that you put it just that way because when I've met slaveholders Yeah. You know, some of them are like,
Evan Rosa: I need to say that's an, that's amazing thing to utter when you have met slaveholders
Kevin Bales: that Well, that's true.
Yeah, that's true. And often when I've met them, I've actually been slightly dishonest in that I was pretending to be someone I wasn't necessarily
Evan Rosa: for good reason.
Kevin Bales: Right. So, so. When I spoke with Slaveholders, for example, who were running brick kilns in Pakistan, and, and they thought I was a reporter for the Economist who was looking into the brick industry, that kind of thing, and I would talk to them, but, but it, it very much reflects what.
You and Mike have both been talking about it in the sense that there are those people who in, in a sense, inherit their slave property. And that still happens around the world, like the village I talked about a moment ago. But I'll say the people in these brick kilns who they were owned by their dads and their granddads and I, so, so it sort of flows in and it's hard for them to shake it away in the same way that.
You know, when I grew up down south and lived in Mississippi for a long time, there were old folks there who just had a hard time getting away from the fundamental notions that they used to be in charge of everything. And it was a little, they didn't like it. Not now that people, uppity people could come and say straight things to them and like that, but then there are criminals and there and in a sense.
To me in my life, working and meeting slaveholders, sometimes it's about that hereditary control. Sometimes it's about political control based on very often the hatred between ethnic groups. So I would, I've met people in parts of Eastern Europe who say, well, but those people aren't like real people.
They're like insects. So you can do what you like with them, but they're like livestock. Or there are criminals, or there are these people who have hereditary and like that. All of those have to, in some ways, I feel often require a different type of approach to first understand them and then to second, maybe find if you find a way if possible, to pry them out of their position.
Michael Rota: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I wanna highlight when I bring up all these reasons from psychology to help us try to understand why so many people might have held slaves in the past. I don't mean to apologize for slavery. It's rather of trying to understand the question, why did it take so long for us to see how that this is wrong?
Evan Rosa: Absolutely.
Michael Rota: And so. As for the current context, I like Kevin's point about we need different attitudes or approaches might be applicable in different situations. So much of modern slavery is just criminal activity. It's criminal groups using humans as inputs. Okay. And then, you know, and then maybe some of it's more, it's Kevin's described, you know, it's a little more nuanced either way.
It's wrong, but what's the best way to oppose it might be a little different in those cases. Going back to. John Woolman. So this is mid 17 hundreds. The Quakers really tight, internally cohesive religious group. You know, they're kind of outsiders to the main culture. They're really close with each other.
Mm-hmm. And main know there's tight relational networks, but the Quakers would travel around and visit. Quaker preachers would go like from one area and preach in another area with a lot of social connections. So woman's going around different parts of the US, including into the south, where Quakers own slaves and he's talking to individual Quakers.
One by one and he writes in his journal how I'm riding on the horseback to place and I do really do not wanna bring this up with this guy. I'm really, he doesn't use the word stress, but you could tell like, you know exactly how we would feel. Yeah. Because we don't like to make people, we in relationship with angry.
Right. I'm going to broach this issue with a slave holder. Right. But what was amazing about woman was he met people where they are. But he was tough and he pushed them and he just must have had a great balance because the Quakers as a group end up being the first religious body, well, maybe a few minor historical exceptions.
First re major religious body in the 1700 to say, if you wanna be a Quaker, you can't own his life. So that approach of woman is one thing, but with modern criminal slavery, I mean, it's the approach that's gonna look a lot different, at least in many cases. Does that sound right, Kevin?
Kevin Bales: Yeah, it does. It does.
Absolutely. Mm. Yeah.
Michael Rota: Yeah.
Kevin Bales: But I suppose if there's something I'd say about the Quakers in particular, 'cause that's my team, right? I'm a Quaker. So, um, is the, is the, the thing that we actually did the first big campaigns, you know, the things like, uh, boycotting slave made goods and, uh, the enormous work done by literally.
Several thousand Quaker women in England who were the ones who did the boycott campaigns and said, we can't wear that kind of cotton or drink that kind of tea, and all that kinda stuff. The political side of it, which then led to. Remarkably, the largest anti-slavery campaign in human history that nobody ever talks about, which is the British Naval Campaign that lasted over 30 years, cost the lives of hundreds and hundreds of British sailors.
But to interdict the transatlantic slave trade, particularly between South America and Africa and like that, which I think somebody needs to write a better book about that, that particular thing. 'cause in terms of even modern anti-slavery. Campaigns or projects or whatever. Nothing touches the size, the depth, the length, the power of that naval blockade idea.
Evan Rosa: I think an appreciation and a, a little look here at how Quaker is, was uniquely disposed at the time and the way you put it in the book, what enabled the Quakers to reject slavery in a world that accepted it? Because I think. This is a very instructive set of principles for any individual faced with a matter of conscience about contemporary slavery.
So, I mean, you speak to this in the text and I'd love to hear both of you, you know, maybe not just only from the Quaker position, but what is, what would that be to go so deeply against the grain and act so counterculture.
Kevin Bales: I, I'll just say briefly two things. One is Quakers, were against the grain. You know, when they said, no, there is no hierarchy.
We can't, we're not gonna accept hierarchy, we're not gonna doff our hats to anybody because we're all equal. Right? We're all of us are equal to this. And if you've committed your idea that every human being is equal to the another as God's gift to the planet or whatever, then that's your responsibility too, to make that happen and to do something about that.
Mm-hmm. So in some ways it was fairly simple, but it was also. Very brave. There were those times when like the Quaker meeting in Bristol was raided by the police, and we're talking about in the 17 hundreds or 1916 hundreds, and they took all the adult suit to prison. And left the children behind, but the children kept the meeting.
They stayed in the meeting house and lived there and worshiped there until some of the parents got to come back and people would bring them food to eat and like that, but they just kept at it. And that's one of the things I like about my outfit is that, you know, they just keep at it. It's like over in Britain when they have the really big demonstrations in front of.
Parliament and it has to do with how people are treating the immigrants or nuclear weapons and all that kinda stuff. You know, the front line is always this group of Quakers who are over the age of 75 to 95, because that's one of the inside things that we do, is the old folks go up to get arrested because they don't have jobs, and they, they form that front.
They form that front line, uh, and, and so the police carry them away very gently, right.
Evan Rosa: I want to ask though. I mean, there's this element of silence though, right? Like that this your point that yes, Quaker's waiting in silence for God to reveal himself inwardly. Yeah, please. But I would love to hear from both of you as now as a Quaker and as a moral philosopher.
Michael Rota: Kevin can speak to this more, but the Quakers had an institutional practice of listening to God and attending to their conscience. Yeah. Where, 'cause they had the belief that we can become more holy and we should be right. Which was not in all strains of Protestantism, do you see that? But in the Quakers, they were really motivated to try to figure out how to follow God's will better.
And they had this institutional. Way of doing it when they would meet. Maybe Kevin can describe a meeting where there's silence.
Kevin Bales: Well, the, the one thing I'd immediately do though is just correct one word in what you just said, Mike.
Michael Rota: Okay.
Kevin Bales: Which is, you said they had it. You know we have it.
Michael Rota: Okay. Ah, yeah, we
Kevin Bales: still have it.
I mean. I'm doing it all the time and I'm doing it all every Sunday. You know? Yeah. We all, we still have that, right. We, it's not something we used to have. It's something we still gotta
Michael Rota: Yeah. Good. Sure, sure.
Kevin Bales: And it's why those little old ladies go up and say, arrest me if you think I'm doing something that's of injust, or, you know.
Mm-hmm. And because I've linked to my conscience to what I believe God is wanting me to do. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Mike, you brought up the New Testament teaching, which. Uses language of slavery to describe both our relationship to God, Christ's relationship to humanity, and then our relationship to each other. I say this with a kind of a dual awareness of the neither slave nor free. Teaching of the New Testament, along with other questions around the, and here we'll get into some of the religious responses to slavery, which seem permissive at times and seems permissive in some elements of the New Testament.
And so that's a fascinating moral and psychological headspace to be in, right, to willfully become the slave. In a spiritual sense and perhaps in a moral sense, a relational sense to the other, and yet very importantly, fighting for the freedom of that individual who you are related to, and of course one's own.
I find it personally fascinating at a, a kind of spiritual level to try to understand what those relationships might be.
Michael Rota: I hear at least two sort of important things to talk about. One is how to understand Christian. Spiritual theology that talks about, you know, being enslaved to Christ or being in certain other religious traditions, a slave of God.
So this one issue, and then the other issue is what do we make of the long Christian history of permitting slavery?
Evan Rosa: Yeah, that, those are the exact two things I'm trying to put together.
Michael Rota: Good. Well, let me speak to one and the other and then maybe we can try to put 'em together. So with about the first one to speak about, God requires analogies.
So one of the Psalms says. Mighty as your arm, the Lord, and strong as your hand. But wait a second, God in his divine nature, doesn't have a arm or a hand. What are we doing? We're using an analogy. All analogies are apt in some aspects and not in others. So the New Testament, the relationship between God and human beings is described as well.
The love between a husband and his new bride, or between a father and his children. Wait a second. I don't wanna marry my own father. What's going on here? Well, this, that's a silly question. It's obvious to see this is an analogy, and the part of it is about this great embodying love. Similarly, I think the analogy with being a slave of God or enslavement to Christ or a slave slaves of one another is about service, in God's case, total devotion, maybe also recognizing authority.
So I think when the New Testament authors. Talk about slavery. They're using concepts that their audience will understand and the picture of a slave as being totally devoted. That is the proper approach to God. You know, we should have total devotion to God. That's how I view that. Recognizing that they may make us uncomfortable, but remembering these are historical texts written along.
Go, let's look for the core and the analogy that's, that's true. What do you think about that so far?
Evan Rosa: Yeah, that's, that's very helpful.
Michael Rota: Yeah. Okay. So's one way to look at those and then, yeah, as for the permission, so for much, for most of Christian history, Christians suppose that. Slavery is morally permissible under certain conditions, and some of the texts they point to are slaves obey your masters.
And that God allowed the Jews to enslave non-Jews in the Old Testament, he explicitly permits it in Deuteronomy, including war captives buying from other nations. So they're thinking, yeah, I guess this is fine. There are a few contrary voices. Let's start with the Enes in like 200 BC to 100. AD there's this group.
Basically of Jews that says basically, wait a second, we should not have slaves. And they're actually against all sorts of greed. And they see the desire for slavery as a manifestation of that. And so they don't have slaves. They serve one another. They think it's against the law of nature and it's quote ungodly to hold slaves.
Gregory of Nisa may have read those folks, maybe not, but he's writing, I forget, four hundreds, and he really comes down hard and says, human beings, why would you think you have the right. To control other human beings like animals. These people are made in the image of God. You don't have that right. God made them free.
You need to respect that. But almost nobody listens to 'em. So most of the Christian theologians are talking about slavery, are talking about have fewer slaves being nicer to them. To me as a Christian today, it's an interesting question. Do the New Testament texts entail that slavery is permissible? 'cause then it looks like they entail something false like as a philosopher.
That's the sort of question my mind goes to, and I actually think, and are we argue in the book that it's not obvious that the New Testament implies that slavery is morally permissible? What Paul says is, slaves obey your masters. Jesus says, if someone strikes you in the face, turn the other cheek. Does that mean Jesus is implying that battery is morally permissible?
Well, no, he, it's one thing to say if you're in this situation, this bad situation, here's what you should do. And that's different from saying it's just fine that you're in that situation. That's an okay situation. So not okay for the person to strike me in the face, but I should respond in this nonviolent way.
Similarly, it's one way to interpret those New Testament text is to think, okay, that was the advice at the time. Maybe it was good prudential advice at the time, but doesn't mean that the slavery was okay. So that's one argument we make.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, certainly Kevin, you suggested a, an exploration of a more contemporary example of slavery in the ISIS treatment of yazidi women in a form of sexual slavery, and using faith, exploiting faith to justify enslavement.
Kevin Bales: Yes, and that's wonderfully complex, and yet it's such a tight, small story on one level because it occurred over a short period of time with a particular group of ISIS and so forth. There were two or three parts to this that I found. Fascinating. Even though it's horrific, it's fascinating to me. One had to do with the way that ISIS felt very strongly in a spiritual, religious way that they had to find their way to a clear.
Theological Okay. To what they were going to do with the Yazidi Peter. So when they begin to move into that part of Northern Iraq, they were saying, now, wait a minute, this group here, they're not like these other Muslim groups around us and or like US Muslim groups. So they actually, you know, basically set up a group of.
Religious specialists and leaders and so forth to go through a procedure of like, who are these people? Are they people of the book? Are they in any way fallen Muslims? Are they this, that, or the other? But what basically they ended up with by saying, deciding was that, well, no, they don't actually. They're so, their faith tradition is so old.
It predates. Islam. It predates Christianity and or seems to, I mean, one of the things that turned out to be a real death sentence for Yazidi people was that they have a, something like a Trinity, but the Trinity is made up of two known Yazidi men who were s very spiritual men, but then above them in this Trinity is the peacock angel.
And the peacock angel is like God's emissary that actually runs the universe because God is so aloof, but the peacock angel can read everyone's minds and can see the future. It can help you to deal with things and and so forth as part of that faith tradition. And it was that point that in a sense, the harsh and radical is Islamic approach of ISIS was, oh, these are devil worshipers.
There's
Evan Rosa: a heresy in it.
Kevin Bales: Yeah, there's a heresy that, you know, a peacock angel that's a witch, so they should be exterminated. Right, and that was fucked in led to not just, you know, the immediate killing of all older men and women, but also, you know, the separating out of children, the forced impregnation of women so that you could turn those them into bearers of Islamic babies as opposed to you seedy babies and so forth.
And it led to that horrific genocidal approach because it was, you know, beyond just an assault. It was a genocide. They said for religious reasons, we just need to eradicate this entire. That's it. And then there were also these. Strange, very modern touches, like the fact that they would sell young women in online auctions all around the Middle East and that particular subpopulation of the Yazidi population are now lost because they were literally spread around in ways that where they were never able to find where most of them went, and a very significant pro of the uc population were killed outright when ISIS moved in.
So there was. A lot to do. I learned a lot about what Yadis believe as well and the importance of that place where they live and that their home space, which they regard as holy and how they try to spend time there every year with a great gathering of yadi people from Europe and the US and so forth.
And it's a fascinating sub-story, but it's one that certainly illustrates a lot of the particularly. Tricky, but also heartbreaking, uh, ways that religion and enslavement and conflict can all be rolled together in ways that are particularly deadly today.
Evan Rosa: And what about abolitionism in Islam? What is the shape of that in today's society?
Michael Rota: I mean, there are arguments from within the Islamic tradition. You should be an abolitionist. We go over three of the most powerful in the book. I haven't done a study, but I'm, I'd be confident that the vast majority of Muslims that you surveyed would agree that slavery is wrong. Times have changed. It was harder for the Muslims theologians to come to this conclusion than with some other faiths, and that might be because Moha himself had slaves and there's more sort of explicit.
Permissions in the Koran, it looks like, and, and from early Muslim teaching, like it was just an early teaching in Islam from the early leaders that if the Muslims were attacking another group, they could, if they wanted to kill the men, or they could, they could enslave them or in their, they could let them go if they wanted, they could take them for ransom.
So there's this stuff in the historical tradition, which made it difficult in some ways, harder for. Muslim theologians in like the 19, early 19 hundreds to come to established position. But there's actually resources within the tradition to do so. One of them is what's restricting the permissible it's called.
So one sort of view is like, maybe this was, or this was permissible then, but times are different now 'cause it's not for the common good of Muslims to do this. So we can restrict this thing, which even though Muhammad thought it was permissible. Or said it was permissible, then it's different. There's ways that they can argue this.
And, um, a great book on this is by Bernard Freeman. Yeah. An Islamic abolition.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, and it's worth pointing out that American democracy has a its own version of this, where the founders have this kind, this kind of element, and then those who inherit American democracy or those who in inherit Islam from generation to generation have to deal with the discrepancies there.
For those whose hearts are touched, or perhaps through this conversation have been touched by, by the presence of modern slavery and want to do something about it, how do you suggest religious people approach this question? The fact is there's all sorts of efforts going on, but with respect to acting from within a religious environment or acting from within NGO en environment or other mechanisms to take action.
How do people get involved?
Kevin Bales: That's a good question, and it's one we actually take up toward the end of the book and we list, uh, different religious groups that might have established programs or ideas and like that. So there's Jewish groups that meet and often devote. Parts of the time of Passover to saying thank you for not being slaves of Egypt.
Egypt in a sense, as part of the whole Passover ritual and like that, and they linked that to, within Judaic practice, organizations did try to address it, but it's, that's a very interesting question because there's all of these different subunits of religious responses from. Real Bible bashing. You know, fundamentalists on one hand who will still say yes, but you know, the devil's doing this.
So we need to do something about that. Two people on the far in from that, which I'll say could well be Quakers, who say, oh, this is meat to us. We know all about this, but we, we will continue to keep working on this. Which I have to say, there's still a lot of people who are still on the boards of directors of anti-slavery groups from my particular team, but that's just that.
Side of it. And of course, as we talk about in the book, the largest number of people who are doing anti-slavery work on the planet are Catholic religious sisters.
Michael Rota: I would add in, so let's say a listener to this podcast was thinking about this issue, I would give, give two next steps.
Kevin Bales: Oh, good.
Michael Rota: One is to inform yourself, and honestly, if you're a reader, just get a copy of disposable people and read it.
That was really the book that moved me the most. If you're less inclined for that approach, get on the internet and. Look at the free the Slaves website. Look at the Voices for Freedom website. Some of the pictures and videos they have. Look at the International Justice Mission website. There's a organization of Catholic religious sisters called Talitha kmb, which is KUM.
So there's plenty on the net. That's reputable sources. So to inform and then to act, I think, I mean, the easiest way to act is donations, right? But I think. Action is sustained in community. So if you can link up with other people who care about this issue, maybe your spouse will care about it too. Maybe your friends, maybe you wanna get your children involved.
Hey guys, let's have lemonade stand and give the money to free the slaves, or whatever. There's many organizations, so I would say inform and then act in community.
Evan Rosa: I think it's, it's important to acknowledge the state of moral awareness. Around slavery, particularly in America. So I'm just speaking to the mostly American context or perhaps the context of listeners to this podcast, that the clarity of the end seems to be so available, right?
That that slavery is wrong and that that people need to be free. And yet, I wonder if either or both of you could disclose with one final comment about beyond awareness and then action and community. Beyond, you know, reading texts and just informing themselves and then donation at the mindset level. Are there certain meditative practices or, or particular ways of describing the situation that you want to leave folks with?
Especially in light of the fact that, as you pointed out, we're talking about some of the more horrific things that might happen to a human being at all, and so. This is to lay some kind of groundwork for hopeful progress and, and what's at stake?
Kevin Bales: That's a good question. There are probably two things that spring to my mind about this, and one is that.
We haven't talked about necessarily the, the, the, the things that are made by slaves and, uh, all the things that, that, that are in our homes and in our house and in our watches, in our computers, the minerals, all of this, there's so much slavery flowing into us, which is hidden. And most of the laws that have been passed in most of the rich countries that are supposed to be managing.
And overseeing the flow of goods and products to prevent slavery working. They've almost all been gutted by major corporations that find ways around it and like that. And so I just, I'd say if you're so self-centered that you're really more interested in what you put in your own mouth, you can even start right there.
And say, what types of things do I end up eating that might have actually come from the hands of somebody who's been caught up in slavery or the things that I bought, the small and easy things that would I buy the things made of cotton and things made of wood, and things made of cocoa and so forth. So there's all of that.
Right, and there are certainly groups and organizations who are thinking about that and are saying, these are the things you that you could, if you believe like a lot of Americans do, in terms of voting with the dollars in the marketplace of your life, right? That might be one thing you want to think about.
Michael Rota: The problem we're dealing with here, we're asking about motivation or spiritual practices that would, might be helpful for most of us in developed countries. This is a question of how do I start caring about something that I don't see? Um, I mean, what do I care about? My 8-year-old who wants a rabbit 'cause she's in front of me and we're gonna get a rabbit.
And my son's math homework is, we need to do the math tonight. And oh, we gotta fix this thing that we care, you know, our relationships that we're in and our projects. It's good that we care about the relationships we're in, obviously, but it takes a certain vision. I mean, certainly in the Christian religious tradition, it's not okay to only focus on those.
Right here who we're with and the material goals we have. Right? So a shift in awareness from thinking about, I just, my, what I need to do is save up for retirement and get ready for that sweet vacation this summer, and yeah, we should buy, you know, this and that for the kids. And to shift from that to a mode of life where your sphere of concern is wider would be what's needed.
How do you get there? That's a good question. I don't have a great answer for that, but clearly. The informing yourself is part of it. So it becomes something you do see. And again, I find that actions are sustained so often in community. So, so somehow being partners with others on this journey is can help us stay on the track.
Evan Rosa: I think it's fitting that you both end the book with the, the words of Thomas Clarkson. Uh, it's time. Some person should see these calamities to their end and, um, I can only say amen to that. And thank you to each of you for the ways in which you are trying to draw attention. And action. Thanks for joining me.
Michael Rota: Thank you so much for having us, Evan. It's been a delight.
Kevin Bales: It's been great. Thank you so much
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Kevin Bales and Michael Rota to contribute to ending modern day slavery today. Visit freetheslaves.net. Production assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show.
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