When Jesus was preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, he referred to this passage by Isaiah—with its clear Christological overtones—and applied it to his advent on earth (Luke 4:16-21). When John heard from prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to question Jesus, who replied “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt 11:2-5).
The Kingdom of God has always consisted in message, relationship, truth, grace, justice, and mercy. Spiritual dedication without action is not spiritual dedication (James 2:17). The horizontal relationship and vertical relationships are inexorably linked. Scripture often speaks woe to those who praise God with their lips but ignore justice and righteousness (Isaiah 29:13; Amos 5:18-27). Likewise, it speaks woe to those who feed and clothe and care in Christ’s name, but do not know Christ Himself (Matt 7:21-23).
The church in America over the last two centuries has suffered this dichotomy. As certain churches became more liberal, the gospel for them became social justice and mercy. In reaction, those churches that retained the historic gospel message rightly emphasized the personal, spiritual dimensions of righteousness, but—intentionally or unintentionally—further defined their uniqueness by the unfortunate dichotomy between message and act. The evangelicals of the 1950s criticized this dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual worlds; the heritage of Trinity lies in the efforts to bring together gospel with engagement in the world for the sake of Christ. The evangelical impetus is not only to contextualize the unchanging gospel message for the world, but to bring justice and mercy to the world in Christ’s name.
Slavery is not Dead
Picture with me, if you will, a village in the sweltering summer heat of southeast asia. you are a girl in your early teens and have known much of poverty and hardship. No one has quite enough to eat, though starvation has not visited your village in a generation. Work in the fields is long and arduous; the only other life you can conceive is told in stories and shown on the television in a nearby village. One day, as you fetch water for those working in the fields, a man approaches you, dressed in finer clothes than you have ever seen. He offers you an opportunity: come work in a restaurant in a nearby country. What would you do?
If you accept this recruiter’s hope-inspiring invitation, shortly after you arrive, a man will enter your room and rape you. In the midst of the aftershock, he will tell you that you can never go home; it would bring shame upon your family. You know it is true. You will then be forced into prostitution to “pay back” the cost of bringing you to this new “opportunity.” You are told that once you pay the money back, you will be free to go and work in that restaurant, but your captors talk of interest accrued and fees added. The system is designed for one purpose: false hope. You will make money for them; they will never let you go. Not until your body is used up. If you have not died by your late twenties, they will quite literally kick you out of the brothel you have been trapped in for over a decade. As you lie huddled on the ground, they do not even bother telling you to fend for yourself. They scream at you like you’re a cur.
This is the reality of modern-day slavery.
Slavery today is not the slavery of our forefathers. Evil is evil, and though one cannot say slavery in the 1800s was better, in many ways matters have gotten worse. There are more slaves today than ever before; more people are enslaved at this moment—27 million1—than the 13 million taken from Africa during four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bondage and beatings were appalling back then, when the value of a slave, in adjusted dollars, was around $40,000. Today, slaves are worth closer to $40. As happens with any “commodity,” as the price decreases, the “product” becomes disposable. Today, people in slavery are disposable.
But Trinity International University is in America! After all, here in the United States we dealt with slavery. We defeated it in the bloodbath known as the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves. Didn’t it? The reality: we have an estimated 50,000 slaves in the United States today. It is as if we lived under the rule of a tyrant until the people rose up and deposed him, only to find out that he now rules in another land and secretly controls hidden pockets within our own country. We thought the evil-doer was dead, but we have been blind behind the walls of prosperity and peace that we have built around us.
But certainly this happens “somewhere else” and “not in my city”? Slaves in the United States come from sixty countries; they have been found in all fifty states and in ninety different American cities. In October of 2009, three women from Thailand were rescued in Schiller Park, a few blocks away from O’Hare.2 They had been brought into the country, their passports were taken, and they were told they owed their captors $60,000. After that, they were forced to travel around the United States and work as prostitutes, until the Cook County sheriff’s office conducted a sting by answering an online ad. Though the news outlets did not supply such details, it is likely that they were tricked in what has become a very normal occurrence: they were promised jobs or education in the United States. When they got here, the situation was radically different.
Continue: What is Human Trafficking?
1 Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Rev. ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 8.
2 http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/10/sheriff-investigateshuman-
trafficking-ring.html