The harlot daughters of the mother church begin to spread across the American colonies and carve out individual paths to eventual separation from the old world. Slavery, meanwhile, thrives as a result of increased trade created in a new market system, which, with the establishment of the United States, gives rise to capitalism, a new and far-reaching religion.

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Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

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Part 30: Capitalism: A New Religion

The American colonies were all commercial ventures on the part of England, intended to prop up their burgeoning empire through slave labor. To facilitate this expansive endeavor, forests were cleared, and the fields they yielded had to be tilled. That required settlers. Christians of various denominations were attracted to the new world and therefore migrated to different colonies, spreading their European culture and custom, which subsequently established the foundations of what would become America. The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Maryland, and the Dutch Reformed in New York. Lutherans from Sweden, Huguenots from France, Baptists from England, and Presbyterians from Scotland later settled the colonies as well. What is little discussed today is that each and every one of these Christian groups were steeped in the barbaric culture of colonial slavery. They each depended on Israelite slaves in order to eke out an existence or else thrive on American soil, including the Puritans, who sought to establish a “new Zion” in the New England wilderness, and failed.

With all of these various Christian groups clustered throughout the colonies, denominationalism began to emerge as a way to define the church as it then existed. The term denomination was popularized around 1740 at the time of the Evangelical Revival, spearheaded by men like George Whitefield and John Wesley, but the concept was well-cemented by Puritans of the mid-seventeenth century. The term differed from sectarianism, which implied that a particular sect was authoritative and enjoyed direct access to the Redeemer, and that sect alone. Sectarianism was exclusive, whereas denominationalism was inclusive. The argument that was eventually proposed (which amounts to conformity) was that a Christian group, being called by a particular name, was merely part of a larger group that comprised the entire church. And the church held all denominations. Of course, this view has since changed, and what Christianity has reverted to is sectarianism, even though each group still refers to itself as a denomination.

While Christianity was sorting itself out in the colonies, England was digging its heels into the slave trade and growing into a behemoth thereby. Author Gerald Horne wrote a book titled: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century America and the Caribbean. In that book, Horne wrote:

“[I]t is the seventeenth [century] that stands out conspicuously as the takeoff for London’s involvement in the nasty business of enslavement, which simultaneously delivered bounteous profits that set the stage for a racializing rationalization of inhumanity, while setting yet another stage for the takeoff of an enhanced capitalism. A recent study revealed that before 1581 there were no enslaved Africans brought to what was referred to as the ‘British Caribbean’ and ‘Mainland North America.’ From 1581 to 1640 there were scores brought to each. But from 1641 to 1700, 15,000 Africans were brought to North America and 308, 000 to the ‘British Caribbean.’ Similarly, trade from Dutch forts in Africa amounted to about 700 of the enslaved yearly between 1600 and 1644 but would increase sixfold by the late 1660s. Europeans generally enslaved some two million Africans during the seventeenth century, half of them from West Central Africa and most of the rest from the states abutting today’s Ghana and the Bights of Benin and Biafra.”

Highlighting the subtitle of his book, Horne makes a further point that what has been praised as modernity actually bears the stain of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. “The bloody process of human bondage,” he stresses, is “the driving and animating force of this abject horror.”

For many centuries, Christianity in its various forms was dearly held by commoners, nobles, and other elite citizens. But with the “discovery” of the new world, and the expansion of various empires to the Americas, trade and capitalism overshadowed the religious ideals of those in power. Political pursuits also ranked high among the leading colonists, who desired a new republic that was free of monarchs. And those monarchs were able to fill their treasuries with spoils from the new world. The Roman papacy too, which held the power to initiate the slave trade, and did, benefited greatly from slavery. In fact, between the years 1573 and 1826, publications that were critical of slavery were placed on the official List of Prohibited Books, or, as it is called in Latin, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Author John Francis Maxwell, who published his book, Slavery and the Catholic Church, in 1975, says that writers who were critical of slavery were placed on the index prohibiting their works without any particular errors being specified. All of their opinions were simply condemned.

While the Papacy and the Spanish Empire reaped rich rewards through slavery and their devastating conquests of the sixteenth century, England eventually superseded them both, not only in terms of conquest, but through their control and expansion of the slave trade as well. But this too would not last.

“London was a prime beneficiary of this [systemic] cruelty.”

Writes Gerald Horne.

“England had a 33 percent share of the slave trade in 1673 and 74 ...