(240)S11E3/8: The Curious Case of Benjamin Lay
Today's episode is actually a repeat from another season, a season I did on nonviolence. And actually, it's the second repeat for this particular episode because I repeated it for my my season, two seasons ago as well. And I was really debating on whether or not to do a repeat of this again. You know, it seems like maybe it's kind of overdoing it and and just, you know, repackaging it, I guess you could say. But I decided to go ahead and move forward with this anyway, and I did so for a number of reasons.
Derek:First of all, this is out of all of my episodes, you know, I don't have all that many listeners, but out of all of the episodes that I've ever done, this is the most downloaded episode because I guess people are just intrigued by the story of Benjamin Lay. And I think it's an interesting story, but it's also compelling. It's unambiguously relevant, and it's universally applicable. Again, in any day and age, even if our situation is slightly different, our particular circumstance, it doesn't matter because Benjamin Lay's life, an example, is applicable. And honestly, it's also convicting.
Derek:It kind of prods into the depths of our hearts and kind of unsettles us a little bit. So I think there's a lot to unpack in in the story of Benjamin Lay, and his story applies to so many different areas of life, hence, the third repeat here. But like I do with all interviews and all repeat episodes, I want to unpack this a lot because I'm not I'm not changing the original episode, I'm obviously repeating it. But what I would like to do is I would like to highlight some of the things beforehand for you to look out for since when I created the episode, I didn't have a season on propaganda in mind, I want to tell you how I feel this episode applies to this season. I thought this episode would also work really well, falling here in the season, because it's gonna be a setup for our next episode, which is our last episode in our section on racial propaganda, or propaganda and race.
Derek:It's and it's gonna be an episode about Hitler's book, Mein Kampf. One of the biggest ideas that you get when you get Hitler, you know, discussions about Hitler is, of course, there's a propaganda discussion, but then around that is this idea that most of us have, myself included, that, you know, we think to ourselves, I could never do that, and maybe even you think, well, my group could never do that, you know, my church, my denomination, my political party, my whatever, you say, I couldn't do that, we couldn't do that. We so often see evil as unique to some certain group of people, or to some time period, or whatever, but it's not endemic to us. We think that we'd be impervious to things like Hitler's propaganda. But Benjamin Lay, what he does here in his story is he gives us another touch point with reality, you know, to dig into a society wide evil and to see how that evil grows and festers even in the average person due to the mechanisms of injustice that we as a society, as individuals, so often ignore.
Derek:History is replete with examples of these types of people who are, you know, the lone voice crying in the wilderness, and but Benjamin Lay's story is just so compelling and so clear that I think it's worthwhile to share here in proceeding our episode discussing Hitler. So let me just briefly lay out a few of the things that I want you to catch as you're going through this season, a few ideas that are gonna stand out in this episode from Benjamin Lay that we're gonna hit on in our next episode, but as well as in episodes in the distant future as well. First, one of the most important concepts in this episode is the idea of a network of sins. So it seems like most of the time, people are really focused on big sins. Big sins as we identify them anyway.
Derek:And what a lot of people don't realize is that often these big sins are really the fruit of a tree with a sturdy trunk and deep roots that are are rooted in other sins that don't seem as big. You only get the fruit of big sins by having a bunch of smaller sins that are holding them up. As you listen to the story of Benjamin Lay, I want you to take note about how the society around him tended the soil and fostered the roots of what eventually led to the acceptance and the perpetuation of slavery. And primarily, these sins were the sins of greed and wealth. Now, wealth may not always be a sin, but if you know anything about the early church tradition and the Bible's warnings against wealth, then you'll know that coddling wealth is really playing with fire and tends to produce great injustice.
Derek:Greed, the desire for more or the desire to protect what one has with a closed fist, often leads to huge compromises and it is just one of the many roots of the network of sins that leads to great sin and great injustice. Now don't forget that this was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah that led to its destruction, or at least in part, right? Because Ezekiel sixteen forty nine says about Sodom, They were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and needy. I'll have two whole episodes on this when we get to our section on corporate propaganda, but it's an important thing to look out for here in this episode.
Derek:Great sins spring from sins which are seemingly small ones. The concept of networked sins leads us to the second item to look out for, And that is the idea, maybe we could stick with the theme of networking, right? Like that we are responsible for our participation, right? So we are part of a group, but we can't just say that, well, know, the the group does slavery or the the group enslaves child labor or the group, right? We we can't just always put things off on the group because we are a part of the group and our our actions in that group matter.
Derek:So I'm constantly justifying myself when it comes to my economic decisions. I justify why I spend all the money I do on unnecessary and wasteful things or why I refuse to spend money on more kingdom things. I justify myself all the time when I contribute to injustice with my purchases. Injustices in stewarding the environment and supporting slave labor with the technology that I buy, and the list could go on. I tell myself that I can't be too nitpicky about my actions because, I mean, the world is so complex.
Derek:How would I ever untangle the morality of any given purchase? While that's true to a certain extent, and there is a danger in being pharisaical and overly rule based, it's also quite often a convenient fairy tale that I tell myself and we tell ourselves a lot. Making the whole issue nebulous and gray might seem like a holy thing to do, right? A pushback against legalism and pharisaicalism. You don't want to be like those those hypocritical religious leaders, right?
Derek:And sometimes, that is true. But often, this pendulum swing away from legalism has brought us to a point where holiness and pursuit of justice is scoffed at and despised. And it's done so largely for our comfort and our convenience. The story of Benjamin Lay helps to highlight this complicity that we have with propaganda and injustice. We can see our complicity because we see how Benjamin Lay, a regular human being like you and me, chose not to comply.
Derek:If he could see the evils of slavery and injustice and if he could step out of supporting the system, so could have everyone else if they chose to. But most didn't. And it's not because the possibility wasn't there because Benjamin Lay shows us that possibility was. Rather, it's because we love ourselves and our sins more than we love justice for the oppressed, if that justice would mean inconvenience for us. I both love and hate the story of Benjamin Lay for this very reason.
Derek:It shows what justice looks like while simultaneously implicating me in perpetuating injustice. The third reason I wanted to repeat this episode is because uncovering propaganda has a very similar methodology with uncovering injustice through non violence, which is what the episode on Benjamin Lay was originally about. You'll see that Benjamin Lay used prophetic witness and confrontation through non violent means in order to fight the institution of slavery. Now what made his witness so prophetic was that not only did he push back against the status quo and the power, but he did it in a revealing way. Lay didn't just harp about how evil slavers were, he demonstrated it.
Derek:One of my favorite stories was when Lay allowed a local boy to hang out in his cave with him all day without informing the parents that the boy was there, even while they were looking for him. His parents were worried sick until Lay revealed the son's whereabouts at the end of the day. But Lay told them, now you know just a fraction of the despair felt by the families that you separate through slavery or your support of it. Belay had a knack for not only revealing the despicability of slavery through actions like these, but he also revealed to others the humanity of the slave by inviting slaves to parties and paying them for their services, actions which declared the humanity and worthiness of slaves to the chagrin of slavers. Now, non violent action and prophetic witness are forms of speaking truth to power.
Derek:They lay bare the true fabric, they lay bare truth that is reality by refusing to play along with views accepted society wide which are built on lies and injustice. This reminds me a bit of Vlakov Havel in his famous essay. Havel talks about some of the propaganda under communism. He talks about, you know, you've got this green grocer who's there in the corner and he's selling a bunch of stuff, and the communist party makes him put up this sign in his window, workers of the world unite. That's a harmless sign, right?
Derek:You just put up workers of the world unite. Wouldn't that be great if all the workers in the world were united? Wouldn't that be great if we were all united? Right? It's beautiful, it's not untrue per se but when you see that sign in every green grocer's window in every business that you go into, that sign is doing something more than just conveying this nice little thing that could be true, this nice little idea.
Derek:And what it's doing is infused with a support for the government that is telling you, hey, you know who makes the workers of the world unite? That's us. We're your savior. We're the ones doing this. Right?
Derek:You see everybody's on board. You see all the windows with that sign in it? And if you don't put that sign in it, you're in big trouble. And Havel talks about how doing something as simple as just removing that sign from your window is something that you can't have as the government. The government can't allow that to happen because you are you are pulling away the foundation of what they've created to propagandize everybody to believe that they're the saviors and that everybody's on board.
Derek:If you show that you're not on board, or if you show you have doubt in their capacity as savior, that leads to revolutions, and governments don't like revolutions. You see similar things in North Korea, right, taking down a poster of of the leaders or whatever can get you imprisoned or killed. So this idea that there are a lot of small things that don't really matter is just not true because when you're in a propagandized society or when there are institutions of injustice, the smallest things are often the biggest things because the smallest things are things that even a child can often do, And when a child does them and you you start this domino effect of people seeing the the quote savior revealed for what they truly are, the oppressor, it makes a big difference and those dominoes just fall and revolution occurs. So we're gonna get to the idea of the importance of truth a lot later in the season, but the story of Benjamin Lay and and the issue of non violence shows so clearly how the laying bearer of truth, even these small truths, is is something that is vital when it comes to fighting propaganda, and it's effective.
Derek:The fourth thing I I wanna point out here is that I wanna take another look at Benjamin Lay because his story has a bit of overlap with a topic that we're gonna be getting to much later in the season when I discuss government conspiracies and in relation to the the island nation of Haiti. While Lay's experience with slavery in The Caribbean came largely from Barbados, I think it was Barbados, that whole network in The Caribbean was really in the same boat in regard to colonialism and slavery. Our discussion here about slavery and empire is going to be pertinent for later discussions that we're going to have in the season. In particular, we are going to see how supposed benevolence by those in power is often much less benevolent than it appears. In this episode, I'll briefly touch on William Wilberforce, for example, and his fight to end slavery.
Derek:Now, Wilberforce made some pragmatic deals that a lot of people don't know about, deals with the devil, when it came to abolishing the slave trade. And he was seemingly responsible for perpetuating the British slave trade in Sierra Leone, making it the place of the last British slaves after slavery was abolished everywhere else. Something to that extent. It was pretty bad, right? He ended up, to a certain extent, perpetuating slavery in the British Empire, while he did was responsible for helping to push legislation to get it abolished overall.
Derek:Injustice, benevolence, and pragmatism often have a whole lot of overlap, especially when we get into the political sphere. The general consensus of most white Westerners today, especially Christians, is that slavery was ended on humanitarian grounds. That's known as the humanitarian hypothesis. But what we really find is that as the British lost its colonies, The United States was a big one of these of course, and then Britain also failed to seize the Pearl Of The Antilles, as Haiti was called, they failed to seize that from France. Well, we find that slavery ended simultaneously with this, with the Empire's loss of grip over their slave colonies, or with other economic factors making slavery not so beneficial to them anymore, and they wanted to abolish slavery worldwide so that the the people who still had slaving colonies didn't benefit from it.
Derek:Now, Wilberforce may have been a humanitarian, but he lucked out in his legislative attempt because it was in Britain's self interest for slavery to end for all, since it had already been essentially ended for Britain. This lack of humanitarian interest becomes more readily apparent when you recognize that Britain was paying on its debt to compensate slaveholders until very recently. And Haiti, likewise, only recently ended its tens of billions of dollars in reparations to France. Reparations for? Emancipating themselves from the French who owned them.
Derek:They had to pay France back for France enslaving them. The legislation that came about against slavery wasn't some enlightenment humanitarian Christian success. Of course, there were some Christians like Benjamin Lay and some enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire who were against slavery. But Christians in The Americas and revolutionary France, two groups of people fighting for freedom, they said, their own freedom of course, would have been happy to keep black slaves in perpetual bondage if it benefited them, just as Lincoln would have been content to leave slaves in bondage if it preserved the Union. As governments realized that slavery was on the way out for them and no longer beneficial, they saved face by co opting the humanitarian movement, secretly compensating the slaveholders to buy them off, and taking credit for their legislative love.
Derek:Now we don't really dig into all that too deeply in this episode, but there is a little bit, and it's going to be important to understand this and to keep it in the back of your mind as we come back to this concept more later this season. Finally, I wanna take another look at Benjamin Lay because his story is going to spotlight an issue that everyone seems to be talking about today, cancel culture. Should we cancel Thomas Jefferson because he had slaves or impregnated at least one of them? Dare we say raped her? I mean, if he was a good politician but an immoral scoundrel, can't we recognize his accomplishments in the political sphere while denouncing him in the moral sphere?
Derek:Aren't we able to separate and partition a person's life? Aren't we all complex people with successes and failures in life? One of the stories that that kind of made me think about this was Joe Paterno. So as I know the story, I don't know it all that well, but from what I know, right, Joe Paterno was coach at Penn State, Penn State College Football. And he had this this guy on staff who was over years, I don't I don't know, maybe even decades, he was molesting kids who came through the camp.
Derek:Well, Joe Paterno, from my understanding, heard about this and he he went to the board, like he he went up the the line and he said, Hey, we've got reports of this going on, can you guys take care of it? He reported it to the appropriate authorities, the people above him at the college. And so a lot of people were critical of him like, well, he should have gone to the police. But I don't know what the college rules are, but I know that me, when I was a public school teacher, it was I don't know if it was illegal or if it was just like I would have lost my job or or I don't know what all of the the ramifications were, but it was not okay for me to go to the the police and report suspected abuse of a kid that came through my classroom. I had to only inform the authorities at the school above me because there was some chain of command, I don't know what all they had to follow, liabilities and whatnot, but I had to do that.
Derek:I had to report if I suspected abuse, but I could not go to the authorities. So Joe Paterno, the police authorities. So Joe Paterno, he reports what's going on and he figures, okay, well, they, you know, they must take care of it, they must do their investigations and whatnot, and nothing came of it, And so, the guy continues on staff and the guy continues to molest people. Now, could Joe have had other other options? I don't know.
Derek:Again, I don't know the whole story. Maybe he could have fired him even if nothing came back. I don't know. But what ended up happening is Joe Paterno not only got ended up getting fired, but he, like, lost his hall of fame records, the the sports records that he had gotten, I don't know if it was like the most most wins as a coach or whatever it was, he he got it like erased. And in my mind, I was thinking, how stupid is that?
Derek:Terrible, and maybe he was morally culpable, maybe, like, let's just even assume that Joe Paterno knew what was going on and he didn't he did nothing. It's like, okay, but he still won all those football games. Like, those those are two different categories of things. You can say, he was a horrible guy, but yeah, he won all those games and he was a good coach, so I guess we recognize that he has the most wins or the most games coached or whatever. I mean, there are all kinds of really evil people, especially like in wars and in past societies that we recognize for their accomplishments even though we recognize that they were horrible, horrible people.
Derek:So in some senses, cancel culture seems kind of insane to me. But as easy as it would be to push back against some of the insanity of cancel culture and the seeming expectation of perfectionism, it does seem to me that humanity is less partitionable than we often like to think. I mean, just think of Ravi Zacharias that we talked about in our section on abuse. Now maybe I can learn some truths from Ravi, but should I? Should I have him as one of my teachers?
Derek:Now maybe I shouldn't mandate that his books be burned, but might I not be responsible in suggesting that you burn his works of your own volition? Surely there's some overlap with with truth and action, isn't there? And especially if one is a Christian and we believe that the God who created the world to correspond with truth and goodness, we believe that He exists, then we should expect that where we find disharmony in action and goodness, we will likely find disharmony with truth. And maybe we can still glean some good nuggets from people like but we're gonna have to sift through a whole lot of silt to get those nuggets. And wouldn't we just be better off going elsewhere for our teaching?
Derek:Wouldn't we be better off finding wisdom somewhere else besides with Ravi and spending our time there? I recently came across a Gospel Coalition article that I think summarizes the issue well, and in the article, think they're quoting Gregory of Nazianzus. But it says, quote, discussion of theology is not for everyone. Gregory says, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun's brightness.
Derek:In other words, Gregory stresses caution, it's not possible to do theology well in the abstract without attending to our personal piety. End quote. Now this goes back to our idea of a network of sins. Where you find great evils, you will likely also find great falsehoods. The story of Benjamin Lay starts to open this curtain for us a bit, and like I said, this is a question that we'll continue to wrestle with throughout the season.
Derek:If Benjamin Lay could see truth and he declared that truth to all around him, shouldn't those around him be held responsible for their beliefs? Doesn't Benjamin Lay make it clear that the slaveholders and abductors weren't really just men of their times, but men without truth and men without light? If so, how can we uphold some of these men as great teachers that we can learn from without great caution? Maybe we do read slaveholders from time to time, but why wouldn't we do so sparingly and with very cautious and critical lenses? If this is a concept that resonates with you, I wanna recommend a book to you written by a free black man in 1829 who expounds on this topic in a very clear and a very forceful way, but particularly towards Christians.
Derek:You should check out David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world. Now I don't have time to dig into that work here, but you can read my lengthy review on Goodreads, which I have a link in the show notes. Anyway, in the story of Benjamin Lay, I think you have to come face to face with this partitioning of humanity that we so like to do. While I think cancel culture goes way too far, I do believe it is a pendulum swing brought about because of a dismissiveness that we've long had of personal and historical accountability. To act as though people can be divided into parts and that we can make heroes of the people we want without considering the demons that they were is just dishonest and irresponsible.
Derek:As my wife and I have been thinking through this, this is one reason why my wife, in particular, likes Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. And Harper Lee is the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and we loved that book so much, we actually named our kid Atticus after that, and we did it like right before she came out with this Go Set a Watchman book, right before she announced it. And then of course, everybody started naming their kids Atticus, and we're like, oh well. But anyway, when the book came out, she she read it and she told me all about it, I actually didn't read it. But she told me about it and she's like, everybody hates this book but I I love it.
Derek:Because what what happens in it is Atticus is the protagonist in in To Kill a Mockingbird, and he's this guy that you just look up to and you revere, and he's he's just so full of integrity. And then in Go a Watchman, you recognize that, okay, well he fought for this black man, he fought to free him, to help him, to fight injustice, but then you find out in Go Set a Watchman that, well, he really Atticus has a bunch of racist ideas, like he's not really a great guy. I mean, he's he's good but he's got some messed up problems. And you're like, what do you do with that? People didn't like that book in part because it ruined their view of who Atticus was.
Derek:It filled in the gaps of of all the things, you know, Scout from, the first book. She's just this little kid who of course idolizes her dad, but as she grows up and gets to know him, she realizes that he's a human and he's more complex than that. And so that's a wonderful story of just kind of this struggle that we have with figuring out what to do with people. Okay, that was a really long introduction, and there was more that I could have pulled out. But I think this is an episode that you should listen to before getting into the rest of the season, and I think it might be an episode worth coming back to because you're gonna find so many themes in Benjamin Lay that I didn't even pull out here.
Derek:If you listen to the rest of the season and then come back, I think it's gonna be valuable for you. So hopefully you have a sense of what to listen out for, and hopefully this will be an invaluable piece of our season. So without further ado, here is the episode on The Fearless Benjamin Lay. Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. Today, we have a special Juneteenth episode.
Derek:For those of you who don't know, Juneteenth is celebrated as the day in which the last slaves in The United States learned of their emancipation in Texas in 1865. I decided that I wanted to do a special episode on non violence in relation to American slavery. Now while I thought it would be best to highlight Black involvement in the non violent movement, I am not well versed enough in that aspect yet to be able to speak knowledgeably. I've been doing a ton of reading from the black community like from Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Thurman, King, I mean I and then moderns like Ja'Marr Tisbee.
Derek:So I've been reading a ton of books about Black history and from Black authors. But I haven't because I was I was I've been reading so much just to kinda catch up with things that I I never read or knew about growing up because of my environment and the priorities that my community have, I have not dug into the non violent niche within the Black community other than, of course, like in the civil rights era. And so, I just I would want to do a lot more justice to that before I am able to speak about Black non violence throughout American history. So if you can excuse the fact that this episode is not going to feature Black nonviolent activists, hopefully you can understand my reasoning for that and wait for a future episode that is able to do that in the next few years, hopefully. As my reading list is already really long, so and if you have any good resources to shoot my way that would help me with this, I could definitely bump it to the the top of my list because I would love to learn more about that.
Derek:But instead, at the moment, I am going to actually take a look at the origins of of abolition, particularly amongst the famous, maybe most famous, American nonviolent activists, which would be the Quakers. I'm aware that there were some abolitionist voices here and there throughout the centuries, even before the time that I'm going to talk about today. There are also very early humanitarian voices like De Las Casas, who highlighted the egregious evils done against Native Americans. So I recognize that my starting point on abolition isn't perfect, or on humanitarian ideas, it's not perfect. But I think that today's episode is going to be a pretty good place to start.
Derek:And I want to start by taking a look at the Quakers, and specifically, at the life of a man named Benjamin Lay. For this episode, I'm going to be drawing heavily from a book entitled The Fearless Benjamin Lay with the subtitle, The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. And I'm sure, I hope that the title has you intrigued already because it caught me like, you know, when I first saw it, I was like, have to read that. So you should definitely pause this episode and go read that book. It's it's a relatively short book, and it's it's worth it.
Derek:When you start delving into Christian pacifism, you'll be coming across the store story after story of Quakers. You get Quaker stories in England, in the American colonies, and you even get Quakers coming into play when you don't really expect Quakers to be on the scene anymore. Like I remember when I was listening to Waging Nonviolence or what's it called, like City on a Hill, I forget, City of Refuge, their podcast about Andre Tocquement and La Chambon, and it was surprising to me that I was coming across Quakers from The United States who were trying to do things to save Jews in France. I'm like, Man, Quakers are just like really connected. They're always they're always caught up in in like these great justice issues like the Holocaust or or slavery.
Derek:For as small as the Quaker sect is, it seems that they've more often than not been at the forefront of courageously attacking the worst evils that the world has to enact at the moment. And while most Protestants would take serious issues with some of their theology or ecclesiology, and admittedly, to me, some of the stuff sounds really strange, one has to admit that the fact that they continuously seem to find themselves on the side of justice and looking a whole lot like Jesus in that regard, and facing extreme consequences and social pressure for those things, and bucking against that, that says something pretty significant to me about them. Conversely, it says something pretty damning about my group that my group historically tends to find itself on the wrong end of a lot of these issues. Ideally, you'd mix word and deed, ideology with praxis, but that seems it seems like a difficult thing to find a lot of times when you look through history and you look into modernity as well. So as I was researching Quakers, my impression of the Quakers was very different than what I discovered them to be.
Derek:And I thought they were a pretty stoic, quiet sort of people, and maybe they are in general. I grew up in Pennsylvania and I remember sometimes when I'd sleep over at my grandparents, my grandma would have this saying, and I don't remember exactly how it goes, but it was something like, you know, when it was time for me to shut up and go to sleep as a young kid, she'd say, Quaker meeting has begun. No laughing, no talking, no chewing of gum. And then it would continue on something about like go to sleep. So my idea of Quakers was that they were a stoic bunch.
Derek:But as I read more and more about them, I realized that they could also be quite a fiery bunch. And I suppose that makes sense if they were born in the civil unrest of seventeenth century England. They only really came around about the year 1650, and largely they grew out of the lower and lower middle class. While there were a number of anti slavery individuals and known anti slavery pushes within the Quaker community as early as 1688, and among some of the founders like Fox, it wasn't something that they were particularly known by at first. In fact, by the early seventeen hundreds, as you get into third generation Quakers, you actually have a number of Quakers who have gotten pretty wealthy, especially in the colonies, you have a decent number of Quaker slave owners.
Derek:And even if one Quaker isn't a slave owner, chances are that someone who either has influence over them or someone with whom they associate is a slave owner. And of course, the slave owners tended to be the more wealthy, kind of for both reasons, right? If you're wealthy, can afford slaves, but also the people who got slaves tended to become more wealthy because they're getting virtually free labor other than their initial investment. So, the influential people within the Quaker community were wealthy and they had slaves. So to be somebody who speaks out against slavery would have social consequences, potentially.
Derek:Nevertheless, one thing I appreciate about the Quaker community is that they tend to have a solid prophetic stream, meaning that even if the status quo kept silent about slavery, there's enough of a prophetic tradition to raise up someone who would be vocal against it. That's one thing I appreciate about the Quakers which I think is lacking a lot of times in Protestantism, in part because we're so fragmented that we can just create new denominations when we have a problem. The Quakers seem to kind of hash things out and confront each other with things, which is something that ironically you find in non violent communities. You know, you look at somebody like Howard Wasson, he talks constantly about the importance of confrontation and conflict because that helps to resolve issues and work issues out and not allow sin to grow like yeast, spread like yeast. And so, conflict and confrontation are very important aspects of a lot of non violent communities.
Derek:And that's also a loving thing, to not let brothers and sisters not only diminish the light of Christ that you're sharing to the world, but also to not allow sin to reign within them because you care for their souls. So, at this time when Quakers have many have become wealthy and slave owners, enter prophetic Benjamin Lay. Now Benjamin Lay was under four feet. He was a hunchback and a dwarf and a Quaker abolitionist. His early life as a sailor was particularly influential in convincing Lay about the horrors of slavery.
Derek:He spoke with slaves from all over the globe and he was horrified by how terribly they were treated. He was especially appalled at how the women were treated, hearing stories of how the trip across the Atlantic involved the captain and sailors keeping women in their quarters and raping them several times a day. And that's with slavery, just like with the Holocaust, it's it's like the more I read, I I feel like I I know at the the utter depravity that humans have. But then you hear stories and you're like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense that the captain and sailors would rape women across coming across the ocean. But man, I never really thought about that as being just another aspect of the horror of slavery.
Derek:Something similar happened the other week when I was reading Night by Elie Wiesel and he talked about how some of the boys in his camp ended up being better fed, the young boys being better fed than anyone else. And, you know, you come to find out, well that's because one of the commandants has an affinity for young boys and so he uses them for sex in the holocaust camps. And you're like, Man, for as bad as the holocaust is, the starvation, the sickness, the colds, the death, the separation, you just throw in being sexualized as a boy, being raped by by a man over and over and over again throughout your stay. It's just one more horrible thing that you throw into the mix that, like your mind thinks that it's already maxed out the horror of such an event, but there's always more. There's always something that adds adds more complexity and evil to how terrible it was.
Derek:And that's what, you know, reading this and discovering what the captain and sailors did to slave women on the journey, that's what that did to me. You know, my wife brought up a good point because I think a lot of times, the reason I would have never thought of them sexualizing slaves is because you hear people even today just saying, you know, they were men of their times and they just didn't really realize, you know, they thought that they were animals, they thought that they were subhuman, and they were wrong, but you know, that's what they really thought. But my wife brought up a really good point when I told her about this new discovery of the horrors of slavery, and she said, Well, that seems to really undermine the idea that whites thought slaves were subhuman, and because you're kind of they back themselves into a corner here when they sexualize their slaves because either the whites had to think that they were raping a human, which is horrendous and evil and they know it, or they had to think that they were engaging in bestiality which is despicable and evil and horrendous. So like, what is it?
Derek:Were you having sex with an animal? Is that what you thought? Or did you think that you were raping a human being? What were you doing? And it just shows you that people were so screwed up and there was no justification for these things.
Derek:And that's something that Benjamin Lay saw. He's like, There was there is no justification. People in my time, we know better. And Lay discovered some other things, you know, he discovered that the slaves of so he worked with some slaves at times while he was on his ships, and he discovered that slaves in Muslim countries were often treated way better than slaves of Christians, and that just didn't comport for Lay. How is it possible that Christians aren't treating their slaves better?
Derek:When Lay spent several years of his life living in Barbados, placed with approximately a nine to one slave to white ratio, he made friends with a lot of slaves and he and his wife, his wife who is also a hunchback dwarf named Sarah Lay, they would throw parties and they'd invite slaves to their parties, almost like a Saturnalia of sorts, but more frequently it seems. And the masters of their slaves often didn't want them to come, you know, because you don't affect the hierarchy, like you don't want the slaves to feel this freedom because especially with a nine to one ratio, you need to keep the slaves under subjection and knowing their place. But through these parties and just because he treated slaves as human, Lay befriended this one slave who told him that he just couldn't take his master's weekly beatings, a Christian master at that. And eventually, not too long afterwards, the slave ended up committing suicide, and there was nothing that Lay could do about it. Now Lay's first hand experience coupled with the stories he heard from slaves on his ships that he was working on, that convinced him that slavery had no place amongst Christians.
Derek:Lay would spend the rest of his life fighting slavery, not at the legislative level, but at the level of the church. Now, Benjamin Lay was a really interesting guy, not just because of his unique physical appearance, but Lay also engaged in what the author of the book calls guerrilla theater. The craziest guerrilla theater that Lay did was when he hollowed out a book and he put a bladder filled with red liquid inside of it. He then, in the middle of a meeting, stood up and pronounced judgment on slaveholders and he pierced the book with a knife, which the Quakers weren't supposed to have, or a sword I guess, and he declared that judgment was coming on them if there was not repentance. Lay also did some other things that weren't guerrilla theater but more of just, you know, taking stands, like he would refuse to eat with slaveholders or be served by slaves.
Derek:If he was served by slaves, you know, he'd pay the slaves, which subverted the hierarchy and the owners didn't like, made a statement against them. One of the boldest things that he did was he confronted a couple about their slaves, and he told them that it's horrendous what they were doing, that they were willing to separate families. And they ignored him of course, and they dismissed him. But later, one day he found their child, a young child, I don't know how young, but, you know, young. And he had the child come to his cave, of course, because the hunchback, dwarf, abolitionist Quaker guy lived in a cave, right?
Derek:Where else would someone like that live? So he's just this super interesting guy. But he invites this boy to this cave where he, you know, which was his house and the boy spends all day there. Well, the parents, by the end of the day, they're looking frantically for him and finally Benjamin's like, Oh yeah, he's been in my cave all day, you know, he's safe, he's fine. But he told the parents, now you know just a momentary feeling of the pain and anguish that you are causing to other human beings who are your slaves.
Derek:Don't you forget that. So yeah, he did some pretty strange things and some pretty courageous, stupid, I don't know, depending on how you want to look at it, did some pretty crazy things. But he was nothing if he wasn't consistent. He saw the justification of slaveholding as an outworking of greed for wealth. Because when you look at it, the original Quakers were lower or lower middle class, and Quakers were now becoming very wealthy.
Derek:Benjamin didn't have much nice to say about wealth and greed, and as Benjamin would argue, and seems to me the more I read it, the New Testament and the early church fathers don't have anything nice to say about that either. So, the compromise of slavery was a natural result of what lay identified as greed and the allure of wealth. It's a chicken and an egg thing. Slavery came because people are greedy and because wealth had a hold on their lives, not the other way around. Desire gives birth to sin.
Derek:And of course, the Quaker assemblies that lay assaulted were run by none other than the most wealthy who in turn were slaveholders. And these slaveholders gained their position because of their wealth, in part because, right, that gives you a lot of influence and you can give people things and it's comfortable for people to treat the wealthy nice and to give them influence. And nobody wanted to offend them because they would eat at their houses and they would benefit from them. So, these individuals, these slaveholders kept their positions because of the cowardice of people and the greed of people below them. It was easier to justify greed and slavery than it was to confront it and lose one's comfort and the influence of, the most powerful in society.
Derek:But Lay didn't let that get to him because he lived a consistent life that shunned wealth and greed, and so he wasn't influenced by those things, he wasn't compromised by them, and he could speak truth to power because he didn't grasp at that power. So in this throwing off of the grasping of power, Lay ended up spending the last third of his life living in a cave. He consumed pretty much only what he grew himself. He made his own clothes and he lived an extremely, extremely simple life. And when he did die, he ended up bequeathing the money that he had earned early on in life and just not spent because he had no needs.
Derek:He bequeathed that to the poor in the congregation and the community, And also, he gave it to people who spent much of their lives attacking him as an eccentric. Some of the people who threw him out of meetings, not the people he identified as as greedy, but you know, just some of the the regular people who he just had run ins with or who enforced the congregation's decision to throw him out, he ended up bequeathing them money as well. So that kind of gives you an idea of the character of Lay. So Lay did some pretty crazy things and he did some things that make me cringe. If someone did stuff like that today, I'd I'd probably write them off as, oh, that's so embarrassing.
Derek:But at the same time, when I look at things in retrospect, knowing that Lay was absolutely right about this issue of slavery, it makes me wonder if his methodology wasn't legitimate most of the time. Because of Benjamin Lay, the groundwork of abolition was laid. Lay influenced later Quakers like Woolman, who was considered responsible for bringing abolition to Quakers and for that being finally accepted and becoming standard, because it was Woman who got the Philadelphia Convention to ban slavery in 1776, and they began to censure Quakers that didn't get rid of their slaves. Woman and the Quakers also advocated that slave owners reimburse their slaves for all of their back pay, which is crazy, like that's a crazy expectation. Woman like Lay also did some cool things, like when he visited slave owners and he was served by slaves, he would pay the slaves for their services that he received.
Derek:And that way, he sent a message to the slave owners as well as to treating slaves with dignity, and that was really subversive to overthrow this hierarchy. But Benjamin Lay didn't just influence Quakers like like woman, he also rubbed shoulders with people like Benjamin Franklin, the man who published Lay's infamous book All Slave Keepers Apostates, which is probably the most influential anti slavery book ever for the abolition movement. It influenced the future abolition books and thinkers. He influenced the likes of famous patriot Benjamin Rush, and thinkers like Voltaire. Lay was hugely influential in birthing and growing the abolition movement of the next generation.
Derek:So I don't know, it makes me wonder if I, we, are just cowards and this Old Testament prophetic sort of witness stuff is good, and I just don't have a strong enough conviction to proclaim the truth as they did. I'm too comfortable and I rub shoulders with the people who I need to call out, or maybe I'm one of the people that needs to be called out. Or was Lay right in ideology but wrong in his methodology? Is what he did to uncouth, is that is that not winsome? Regardless of how you look at it, I do think Lay did one thing right.
Derek:His attack wasn't on legislation. He was calling out the community which claimed to be the Light of Christ. That's who he was pointing fingers at. He was calling for Christian consistency. And it's interesting that as the Quakers came around to abolition officially ending it in 1776, thirty years before Britain's first move to end it, and sixty years before Britain completely abolished it in the Empire, it's interesting that their indirect influence on others seemed to be a contributing factor in abolition's rise.
Derek:So by Benjamin purifying the church, I don't know if you can directly link it, but it seems like the purification of the Quakers actually ended up rubbing off on the broader community. As the Quakers began to live out abolition consistently, it helped to change the culture around them as they rubbed shoulders with others and influenced others. As far as this episode goes, I'm not going to go into a ton more detail on Benjamin Lay. I highly recommend the book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay, to fill in more details if you'd like. You can find it on Scribd as an audio or digital book.
Derek:I haven't gotten to Lay's book, All Slave Keepers Apostates, but I hope to do that one day as well, and you can find it on Kindle for 99¢. So I have it ready to go when I get around to it, but it'll probably be a while. Instead of going into Lay's life, which the book will be better for you anyway, what I do want to do in this episode is make some observations that tie in a lot of what we've discussed throughout the season on non violent action, as well as to set up our final two episodes in the season. So let's make some observations here. First, this story of Benjamin Lay helps me to see the importance of a willingness to self sacrifice.
Derek:Benjamin Lay was a voice in the wilderness. He took a lot of hits for preaching the right thing. Now we could say that he took the biggest hits for being so forceful in the way that he proclaimed the message, but then we have to ask in what other way a message of such importance could have been proclaimed. I mean, you're talking about keeping people in bondage, raping them, selling their families and splitting them up, beating them. Like, in what other way was this message to be proclaimed to the deaf?
Derek:How do you do it other than yell? This problem of slavery was ever before the colonies. Everything one touched, visiting church members who owned slaves, going to the docks, eating sugar. No matter what you touched, slavery was everywhere. If a culture is so numb to such an egregious evil, maybe what Benjamin did was the only sane and moral thing to do.
Derek:But then, of course, that makes me evaluate my life and our current issues. Should I be more vocal, even seemingly crazy, about certain egregious injustices? I'm becoming more and more convinced that God calls me to less and less cowardice, but I still struggle figuring out where the line is between winsome courage and insane fanaticism. I don't know, something to ponder. Number two, the issue of prophetic witness leads to a second point.
Derek:It's impossible for us to be prophetic witnesses, at least effective ones, if our lives aren't consistent. Lay realized that he couldn't possibly make the extreme calls he made on the lives of others if he benefited from slavery himself? If he dined with slavers and was served by slaves without paying them, or if he used the goods that were products of slavery like sugar which he saw produced en masse by slaves in Barbados, then how could he preach against the ills of slavery when he benefited from it? It's easy not to own slaves, but it's a whole lot harder to not be tainted by a system that makes our lives easier and more comfortable, whether that is direct comfort of products that we purchase or the indirect comfort of refusing to socially ostracize oneself from the wealthier and more influential who are engaged in slavery. Either way, it all boils down to greed.
Derek:I want to be connected to power, or I want cheaper goods, or I don't want to stop enjoying sugar, right? And Benjamin saw that first hand. Greed made you complicit with the system. In small ways or big ways, it doesn't matter. As Sultanizen talked about the importance of small truths stripping away the facade of evil, it doesn't matter whether you're complicit in small truths or small lies or big lies, it's all part of one big system of violence.
Derek:And so Lay withdrew from that system of violence so he could preach consistently. I think part of the reason it's hard for me to be a prophetic witness about injustices today is because I'm too selfish to bring myself to disconnect from the indirect benefits I gained from that injustice or from going along with an unjust system. It's I'm too comfortable and it's hard to be so prophetic because I know that I'm a hypocrite, and I'm complicit in the system myself. And I think point number two rears its head in a different way that I'll make my third point. Where you fail to see prophetic witness, you tend to see complicity with injustice to some degree.
Derek:And where you see someone engaged in open injustice, you tend to see a network of sin. The roots always go deeper than the surface shows. You see this in the story of Benjamin Lay in that he identified greed and a lust for wealth as a growing problem in the Quaker community. Quakers had once been simple people, but now many were accruing great wealth and and using that to gain influence. Lay realized that the acceptance of slavery wasn't just some moral compromise that came out of the blue.
Derek:It ended up being justified and perpetuated because of a network of sin with greed at its center. Riches are often an indicator in the Old and New Testament that something is morally amiss. It may not be inherently wrong to have wealth, but the Bible and the early church show us that Christians should consider it a very hot potato and try to get rid of that pretty fast. If we hold onto it for too long, we'll inevitably get burned. I was listening to a podcast a few months ago, and the individual on the podcast made a statement that resonated significantly with me, and I've mentioned it in previous episodes.
Derek:But he said that he did work in like slums overseas with his family, and he's like, Working with those organizations and working with the poor, you tend to get people who don't go in as pacifists who end up coming out as pacifists because they see the great amount of violence that is done primarily to the poor. Violence is generally done against the poor because they don't have access to the system, but also because the people who are wealthy by and large have greed at the center, and because when you have a sin, have a network of sins. When when you see greed, you will get other sins, and violence tends to kind of come out of of greed at some point, whether that's violence directly harming somebody or whether that's the violence of creating systems that oppress. And I found something very similar when it was me being in our church's diaconate and working with the poor that helped me to see we're not living the right way at all in regards to how we treat the oppressed. Then when I went back to see Jesus' words in the Beatitudes, and I started to realize that I think Jesus is more radical than we've made Him out to be because we've made Him out to be like us, then I was able to reevaluate all of His words, including the non violence and enemy love.
Derek:I'll link a great article about the embezzlement of the church, which talks about the early church and their view on poverty and stuff. I'll post that in the show notes, and I could go on and on about this topic, and I think I'm gonna have a season on this, on poverty and such at one point. But for now, go ahead and read that article, and I'll I'll just drop drop this concept here and not not go down that rabbit trail anymore. Anyway, it's interesting how at the end of Lay's life, when some of the main culprits that he pointed out for their greed and for slavery, when they ended up dying, he found out that their greed and power mongering, in all of that, they'd actually engaged in other moral issues like embezzlement embezzlement of government funds. Soleil's observation and critique that, look, when you see something like slavery and that's justified, you keep digging.
Derek:There are roots all over the place, and you're not just going to find one problem, you're going to find a network of problems. And that's part of what Lay was trying to get rid of when he lived a simple life, he recognized how one thing leads to another. But that's not how most of us see it, right? We see wealth and therefore influence, and we give those people leadership positions which you see in churches all the time. It's a certain type of person that gets leadership, which it isn't bad that people of a certain type, like businessmen type, get leadership, but you just don't see like early church types of things where you have fishermen and poor people in leadership at all, just doesn't happen.
Derek:Lay recognized that as a problem, and I would even say in, you know, the twenty twenty election when Piper came out with an article against Trump, at least, Ellie's saying, Hey look, pride's a big deal too. Our Christian community couldn't grasp that concept of this network of sins, and they just kind of looked for a one to one ratio and saying, Well, abortion is absolutely terrible, and now you're talking to me about this kind of esoteric pride thing that, you know, everybody has pride, what's the big deal? But, you know, the point is, I just read an article about, President Trump, because this is what, almost Thanksgiving twenty twenty, when I'm recording this, but President Trump just, you know, was trying to consider bombing Iran because Iran now has more nuclear it's amassed more nuclear, not weapons, but material, and he's like, Hey, can can we bomb them before I leave office? And it's like, he backed out of a nuclear deal, so Iran starts to they don't they're not held accountable for that anymore, so they start doing what they were gonna do, and now he's considering bombing them. And it's like, you know, your pride knows no bounds.
Derek:Like, order to look tough on something, or in order to accomplish everything that you said you wanted to accomplish, or whatnot, the things that you're willing to say and do in order to look good, like not denounce Saudi Arabia for chopping up a journalist because they make you a lot of money and it'll make you look better to have all that money in because they're whatever. Like pride just you're gonna find a network of sins, and pride is one of the biggest issues that you're gonna see in something like the book of Proverbs about rulers and stuff. So this network of sins idea is is very huge. You're it's like an iceberg, you're only gonna see something, and Benjamin recognized this, like when I see the issue of slavery, I bet as you uncover more and more of somebody's life, you're gonna find a lot of really big problems. And that at least worked out with the individuals that Benjamin was critiquing.
Derek:Alright, number four. I love getting a glimpse of Lay's work in the church. My impression was that Lay wasn't really trying to go outside of the church at all, though I don't know that 100%. It didn't really talk about pursuing legislation. I don't know if Lay would have been opposed to that.
Derek:But Lay seemed to realize that the primary issue was getting his community, the church, to live lives of purity and consistency, which they eventually did by and large. Now, it's amazing to see how rather than leave the Quaker community when when they tried to push him out, he fought to stay in it. He loved the majority of the people who were against them and repented where he needed to, but he kept pushing where he needed to as well. You see a community that continued to wrestle with each other, to censor each other where they felt they needed to, and to repent. It's a beautiful picture of what the Church ought to be rather than the denominational consumerist framework that we have today in many Protestant denominations.
Derek:It was by purifying the Quaker movement that they were able to be a voice and a framework for the abolition movement that came after them. In the same year and in the same city that the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group that ended up writing slavery into the new nation they would form, the Quakers in the same city, same year, wrote slavery out of their presence. To my knowledge, they were the first major European group in this era to end slavery, to even talk about it to the extent that they did, and that set some precedents and influenced future abolitionists. Yet we, you know, July 4, we commemorate what our founding fathers did in their breaking off of Great Britain, which then allowed for westward expansion and genocide of the Native Americans and which wrote slavery into eventually wrote slavery into our constitution. But we don't celebrate the fact that the Quakers wrote slavery out of their presence in that same year in Philadelphia.
Derek:So purification of the church was the focus, and I think we've argued a lot that that should be our focus as Christians. Number five, One thing you see in many non violent movements is that class is vital to change sentiment. Lay and many abolitionist Quakers were lower or lower middle class, and they were often fighting against the upper middle class or the wealthy. However, what we see in many modern non violent movements is that revolutions occur when the middle class and intellectuals get on board. Iran is a prime example of this from their revolution of seventy nine.
Derek:The same thing happened in the story of Benjamin Lay. While Lay and other Quakers had to push against the wealthier Quakers and many of the wealthy in society, their ideas eventually did catch on. But it was only when men like Wilberforce and Voltaire, more well-to-do men or intellectuals, when they came on board, that things really started to change for abolition. Nations tend to respond to influence and economic interests, and a movement that isn't diverse enough to include those with money and influence often ends up falling short. Sixth observation here.
Derek:This brings up another point that we've talked about before, which is that legislation is often only implemented once it doesn't hurt the nation that implements it. So why was Britain able to make its first act of abolition in the early eighteen hundreds? Well, they no longer had a huge group of colonies which heavily used slave labor. It didn't hurt them as much anymore to abolish slavery. However, Britain didn't fully abolish slavery until 1833, and when it did, it paid the slave owners for their slaves.
Derek:It didn't compensate the slaves as far as I'm aware. The only group who did that, who compensated their slaves to a large extent, were the Quakers, and that was self imposed, that was voluntary, that wasn't government enforced. In fact, if you look at it, and I'll I'll post this in the show notes, but Britain was paying on their slave debt, their debt to slaveholders from 1833 all the way through 2015. So the legislation that abolished slavery cost Britain 180 years worth of taxes. Of course, the slave owners didn't mind giving up their property at that point, right?
Derek:If you're gonna get paid a bunch of money to do it, sure, go ahead, write that legislation, pay me, that's fine. That legislation was hugely lucrative to them. Plus, the slaves weren't just disbanded, they were phased out. And even then, slavery wasn't made completely, absolutely illegal. Every now and then, illegal slaves would be seized and they'd be taken to, I think it was Sierra Leone, where they were forcefully enslaved for up to fourteen years.
Derek:So it wasn't technically, you know, life slavery. Well, one of the leaders of Sierra Leone, he was, you know, appalled by this and and he was given governorship of of the of that district, I don't know, part of the empire for Britain. And he balked at the fact that they kept getting shipments of slaves in, and he was promptly dismissed by none other than William Wilberforce, the great abolitionist. Now, Wilberforce was against slavery, but he had helped to make a deal that, you know, he thought he needed to make in order to mostly abolish slavery. And so when this guy came into Sierra Leone and tried to upset that system, that deal that Wilberforce had made, Wilberforce was like, Nah, you know, we got to keep slavery around this small way so that I can keep my word about about slavery, about not completely ending it, but allowing the people of Sierra Leone to continue to profit off of it.
Derek:So Wilberforce took this lesser of two evils approach, and thus, he prevented the full abolition of slavery by the new governor of Sierra Leone, and actually dismissed him for attempting to do so. So even the full abolition of slavery is way more complex, and there's a lot more to go into with people like Wilbur Force and assessing their actions and such. Now at the same time, the colonies went full force into slavery. It was too lucrative to give up. It may have even been a part of what drove them to rebellion, I don't I don't know.
Derek:We know westward expansion was one reason they wanted independence, and perhaps they knew that abolition was coming down the pipes as well, who knows? But as it was with Britain, so it was with The States. Slavery was only abolished once it was already going out of style, and it was more lucrative to do so. And we addressed that in our CRT episode last season. Now it doesn't mean I'm not happy that legislation was eventually put in place, just means that I think the cultural shift is the most important, and that always precedes legislation, and hearts need to be changed.
Derek:It doesn't follow legislation. Legislation to us seems like where the power is at, but it's not. Trying to lead with legislation is the dog chasing its own tail. It's putting the cart before the horse. Benjamin Lay realized that, I think, and his focus was on the Quaker meetings and the Christian community.
Derek:And that brings me to my last point. Benjamin Lay's Gorilla Theater is brilliant. Sure, it was also abrasive, but I think Lay shows us what Solzhenitsyn was getting at when he talked about exposing lies. Lay put the immorality of slavery ever before the people. They couldn't ignore it or forget it.
Derek:The parents of the child Lay took to his cave knew what it meant to keep slaves every time they worried about their son from that day forward. Those who dined with Lay thought about their comfort and consumption as complicity with slavery every time Benjamin paid slaves for their wages or refused to take sugar. While these seem like very small steps, Benjamin Lay was able to bring the evil of slavery to the forefront of everyone's mind through his demonstrations. He shined light on the darkness, and quite honestly, I wonder if that's not why God had Benjamin Lay be a dwarf hunchback. Benjamin couldn't walk anywhere without being noticed, and when he did his antics, you couldn't erase that out of your mind.
Derek:Because his life was so centered on abolition, when when you did think of Lay or when you did see him, slavery was going to be the first thing that would have come to anyone's mind. One couldn't get the image of Benjamin out of their minds, and in some ways, his twisted figure was a perfect reminder of the twisted evil of the slavery he preached against so vehemently. Benjamin himself was maybe the best object lesson, a walking object lesson of slavery and abolition. Lay helps to encourage me to understand the importance of speaking truth, even small truths, or big truths in small ways. Daily unmasking lies is the greatest non violent action we can all participate in.
Derek:It is through the life of Benjamin Lay that so many others realized the truth, and within a generation, we're changing public sentiment and national policy against slavery. Go read the fearless Benjamin Lay and thank God that he uses people like him to do great things. And this Juneteenth, recognize that one of the main reasons Quakers were so prominent in rescuing runaway slaves and joining in the abolition movement, and why the world's sentiment shifted against slavery, is because of a dwarf hunchback Quaker abolitionist named Benjamin Lay. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
