FROM SLAVERY’S CHAINS TO CORPORATE CONTRACTS: THE UNPROTECTED SOUL IN AN EMPIRE OF GREED

Jesus Christ Setting Captives Free

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.” 

- Romans 8:14-17

INTRODUCTION

From the vantage point of our Western Orthodox tradition, rooted in the apostolic and patristic understanding of the human person as an image-bearing creature made for communion, freedom, and participation in the divine life, it is clear that the loss of protection - be it familial, tribal, ecclesial, or civilizational - results in enslavement. Across the long arc of human history, the unprotected are not merely ignored - they are exploited and abused. As the Christian Scriptures declare, “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness… that useth his neighbour’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work” (Jeremiah 22:13). Whether in antiquity or modernity, those without a shield of family and friends around them become tools in another man’s empire.

ANCIENT SLAVERY AND CIVILIZATIONAL ORDER

In the ancient world, slavery was not merely a feature of economic life but of civilizational hierarchy. Slaves were often captives - foreigners, orphans, or debtors - cut off from their ancestral protections. In Israel, the Law recognized the vulnerability of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, precisely because these were those without tribal covering. The early Church’s pastoral letters similarly command care for widows and orphans, for those outside the normal social bonds are always the first to suffer systemic abuse.

The pre-Christian Greco-Roman world institutionalized this: the slave was not a person but a possession. The Stoics may have argued for a natural equality of souls, but Rome, like Babylon and Egypt before her, crushed such ideals beneath the gears of empire. Slavery in these cultures was the logical end of a world where human value was not intrinsic but conditional. Without the Church’s sacramental anthropology and the moral imagination that sees every soul as an eternal icon, civilizations inevitably turn men into means.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF SLAVERY

When Christianity entered the world stage, it did not begin with violent revolution but with ontological reorientation. St. Paul writes to Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus, declaring him “no longer a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philemon 16). This is not rhetoric; it is a tectonic shift. The Church’s doctrine of adoption - the idea that one is not just redeemed, but brought into a divine family - replaces the old structures of bondage with the koinonia of the Kingdom. The ability to adopt people into a divine family meant that no one had to be alone, that no one could ever rightfully be subjugated or abused. 

Yet this only worked where there was Christian civilization, when kings and emperors saw themselves as “Defensor Fidei”, where protection extended to all through the life of the Church, the local parish, the guild, and the village. As long as these intermediary institutions stood, they formed a moral wall between the individual and the machinery of power. A man was not left naked before empire; he was clothed with the identity of kin, creed, and culture.

MODERNITY: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF PROTECTION

The modern world, in the name of liberty, has stripped men of their coverings. In the Enlightenment project, the human person is reimagined as an autonomous individual, abstracted from history, family, and tradition. But man as a lone individual is not stronger - he is, in fact, significantly weaker. Once the Church and village were dismissed as superstitions of a bygone age, corporations and bureaucracies eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum.

Thus began the new slavery.

Modern man is no longer shackled with chains; he is enchained by contracts, credit scores, click agreements, and algorithms. He is told he is free, but he cannot opt out of the systems that dominate his life: the employer that determines his schedule, the insurance company that denies his treatments, the university that burdens him with lifelong debt for the privilege of accreditation, the multinational that harvests his data and sells it back to him in the form of manipulative advertising.

DEBT, DEPENDENCY, AND THE NEW BONDAGE

Today’s slavery wears a different mask, but the bondage is real. Consider the so-called “American dream,” a fantasy now denied to entire generations. Young adults burdened with university debt cannot afford homes. They cannot marry, or delay marriage until fertility declines. They cannot afford children. They cannot afford to fail. The nuclear family has collapsed not because the ideals of family are unconvincing, but because the economics of modern life have made success impossible without two incomes, birth control, and government aid. This is the economy that a hubristic and vampiric elite class desired to create for the lower classes, which both stripped religious values on one side, and financial and cultural security on the other side, all in a quest to disempower and obligate other humans as eternal subjects, servants, and “workers.” The inability to launch - so common now in younger generation - is not laziness, but paralysis in the face of rigged and intentionally destructive system.

Meanwhile, multinational corporations use lobbying to write the very laws that regulate them. Forced arbitration clauses protect these entities from legal consequence, while the healthcare industry sets prices without transparency or recourse, ensuring that a single accident can enslave a family to debt for a generation. This is not freedom. This is usury. This is not love for every human made in the image of God, but abusive dismissal and opportunistic harm foisted upon those who are weak, alienated, and unable to fight back. It is the systematic oppression of the weak by the powerful, now scrubbed clean with HR-speak and branded logos, chained by a governmental monopoly of violence, rather than by the chains and stocks historically used to subjugate captive peoples. 

THE DISSOLUTION OF INTER-GENERATIONAL BLESSING

Scripture repeatedly blesses the man who leaves an inheritance to his children’s children (Proverbs 13:22). But the modern financial system ensures the opposite. Real estate is monopolized, wages are stagnant, savings are consumed by inflation, and retirement has become a myth. What was once common for even the working class - land, marriage, children, cultural continuity - is now the privilege of the protected few. Just as in ancient slavery, the masses are bred to work, not to build.

THE PATH TO RESTORATION: TRIBAL REBUILDING AND ECCLESIAL IDENTITY

The only way forward is backward - not to primitivism, but to the integrated vision of pre-modern Christian civilization and interdependence upon the large, multi-generational family. The Church must become a true household once again. The family must be reclaimed as the first church. Local economies must be rebuilt. Land must be valued. Vocations - not just careers - must be restored. We must reject the gospel of consumerism and embrace again the Christian anthropology that sees man not as a utility, not as a consumer, not as a data point - but as a liturgical being, created for worship, community, and legacy.

For “ye are bought with a price,” says St. Paul, “be not ye the servants of men” (1 Corinthians 7:23). This is not a metaphor. It is a commandment. Christ alone is Lord, and to be His servant is perfect freedom.

CONCLUSION

In every age, the unprotected are enslaved. But in every age, God calls His people to rebuild the walls of protection, to offer shelter to the alienated, and to resist the empire with the liturgy of holy life. The answer is not politics, but piety. Not revolution, but restoration. Not escape, but incarnation. Let the Church arise once more as a culture, a village, and a tribe - so that the lonely are not enslaved, but enfolded into the divine family of God. The only way forward is backward. The only way to become fully realized and happy individuals is through community. The only way to be Christians is through radical interdependence and love for one another, living with one another, and making the Church the foundation for a powerful culture of interpersonal, inter-generational, inter-cultural transmission and communion that binds us together as one. If we a bound together through the power of the Holy Spirit, it becomes impossible for us to be bound, used and abused separately as individuals. And when we are oppressed and beaten, persecuted and killed as martyrs, in the context of the Church’s love, this is transformed into something unimaginably powerful to the world - rooting up, transforming and replacing this present darkness and the princes and principalities of this fallen age! 

COLLECT

ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD, who hast made man in Thine own image, and hast called us into the liberty of the children of God; Deliver us, we beseech Thee, from every bondage wherein we are ensnared - whether by debt, deceit, or the dominion of ungodly powers - and grant that, being restored by Thy grace to the fellowship of Thy Church, we may walk as sons and daughters of the Kingdom, bearing one another’s burdens, and building again the walls of righteousness, justice, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.