How Many Slaves Does God Have?

Christians have often claimed that everyone is a slave of God. This is not a politically inert idea; abolitionists like David Walker argued from it that chattel slavery is inherently wrong. However, the origins and development of this idea are hazy. It has, for instance, no clear scriptural warrant. This article traces the idea’s provenance in Christian thought and thinks about it alongside one of its earliest proponents, Lactantius. It argues that the emergence of the idea of universal slavery to God was conditioned by a social imaginary wherein the Roman emperor was understood to be dominus and paterfamilias, and by the shape of Early Christian polemics against nonmonotheisms.