There is a point to be made (and a good one at that), that religion, specifically Christianity, made the institution of slavery last much longer than it need be.
Read the writings of Jefferson Davis or other Confederates. They specifically cite the Bible as a reference condoning slavery. Christianity was quite late in the game when it came to finally eliminating it as an institution.
The simple fact is that while you see the coming of Jesus as the arbiter in eliminating injustice and forming new covenants, I see the lack of condemnation for slavery in the OT just another bit of evidence that it was written by men stuck in their own time, not by divine providence.
Jesus came to make ALL religion obsolete, AND DID..
Christianty is a renegade religion.. There has always been a core of "christians" that did not belong to any "religion" from day one.. Christian religions are clubs.. as any religion is..
Being born again does not enroll you in a club..
Read the writings of Jefferson Davis or other Confederates. They specifically cite the Bible as a reference condoning slavery. Christianity was quite late in the game when it came to finally eliminating it as an institution.
I will answer your point as follows. You make no distinction whatsoever between "religiosity" and "theology." The former assumes institutional form. The latter does not: it is the on-going search for God which has characterized the human race since time immemorial [as my friend hosepipe puts it, humans just naturally tend "to evolve toward God;" that is the essence of what it means to be fully human].
Theology is not a religious sect nor church. It is the intellectual, moral, divinely-informed foundation of the sects, of the churches. Christian theology, for instance, expresses through many different institutional forms, or particular churches. There is a distinction of category needed here.
When I speak, I speak as the observer that I am, who is Christian. I always try to speak in terms of Christian theology -- as inspired by the New Testament primarily, together with its root, the Old Testament -- not in terms of the doctrines of any particular church. My preference is always for unity, not dissociation, especially where the Body of Christ is concerned.
Jefferson Davis was not a theologian. A huge part of his motivation was States' Rights: The sovereign state is a covenant of its people who have the right to determine and manage their own affairs. Of course, the "affairs" of a goodly part of the Confederacy required at least acquiescence to, if not outright defense of, the morally reprehensible system of slavery. Their agricultural model was wrong-headed to begin with, to put it mildly (and ultimately could not have survived as an economic proposition, given the rise of the more efficient, industrial economy). As you know, America waged a civil war over these issues, the bloodiest war that Americans have ever fought in our history.
Slavery ended first in Great Britain, thanks to William Wilberforce and his associates.
In your last you said in so many words, why didn't God step in and change things?
Well maybe that's just exactly what He did, through the spiritual insight and Christian commitment of Wilberforce and his colleagues....
Just possibly, God prefers to work through such men as He calls -- enlightened by the Holy Spirit -- as His "stewards" and even "co-creators," with Him and in Him....
On these grounds, I wholly disagree with your statement: "Christianity was quite late in the game when it came to finally eliminating [slavery] as an institution."
Jeepers, GunRunner: Wilberforce and his friends were "the camel's nose in the tent" on the slavery issue. They drove the issue with such passionate intensity, as a profound moral and spiritual problem, as an appeal to Christian conscience (and their audience was Christian) until virtually no rational argument could be advanced against their (Christian) case.
That was the death-knell of slavery, right there.
Thanks for writing, GunRunner!