No Soul for Sale

If you’re anything like me, maybe you paid 30 bucks in the clearance section. But that’s not what they really cost. Adding it up in your head, you might think: 5 bucks for materials, 2 for shipping, 5 for labor. Maybe you’re even thoughtful enough to add in the social costs of carbon.

But you’re still missing something—something so vast there isn’t enough paper in the world to tabulate its price, something so precious that St. Gregory of Nyssa declared there is nothing in existence worth as much as it.

What’s missing is the cost of a human soul.

Slavery in America was abolished in 1865, but the Thirteenth Amendment did not eliminate the perverted and corrupt forces that sustain slavery. It is an institution as old as human society, and it persists today. More than 27.6 million people are trapped in forced labor, which is more than at any other point in recorded history.1

In China, Uyghur Muslims have been relocated to factories under surveillance and coercion. A Washington Post investigation revealed that the Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co., a Nike supplier, used Uyghur labor as part of the government’s so-called “Xinjiang Aid” initiative. Workers live in prisons behind fences, purported to be dormitories by the Chinese government.2

In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs” has produced authoritarian control rather than justice. More than 85,000 people have been arrested (often without trial), filling the CECOT mega-prison, where detainees are forced into labor under the guise of repaying a “debt to society.”3 This state-run system transforms incarceration into coerced production, turning captives into commodities. What’s more, the United States has entered into a secretive deal, paying El Salvador millions to house deported migrants in CECOT, in what has become a grim modern revival of the international slave trade.4

These are not isolated incidents. From garment factories in Asia to cobalt mines in Africa, seafood boats in Southeast Asia, and agricultural labor worldwide, forced labor undergirds much of what we consume. The U.S. Department of Labor regularly flags goods such as footwear, textiles, and minerals as being produced through forced labor.

The arrogance of these systems is nothing new. Long before the rise of sweatshops and mega-prisons, St. Gregory of Nyssa denounced the same lie at the heart of slavery: that one human being could claim ownership of another. In his homily on Ecclesiastes, he dared to say that slavery was open rebellion against God Himself. For Gregory, the cost of slavery was not measured in wages stolen or years lost, but in the blasphemy of putting a price on the image of God.

For St. Gregory of Nyssa, slavery was not simply a social evil but a tearing apart of creation itself. God made humanity united as free, rational, and bearers of His image.

“By dividing the human species in two with ‘slavery’ and ‘ownership,’ you have caused it to be enslaved to itself, and to be the owner of itself.”

St. Gregory pressed the point even further. If humanity is created in the likeness of God and given authority over the earth, he asked, who is his buyer? who is his seller? To God alone belongs such power, and even God Himself will not use it. “His gracious gifts are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). God does not enslave the free. When humanity was in bondage to sin, God acted not to tighten the chains but to break them, recalling us to freedom through Christ.

The arrogance of the slaveholder, then, is nothing less than an attempt to set one’s power above God’s. It is a blasphemous imitation of divine sovereignty, corrupting the very image of God in both master and slave.

And this is the same division we see in our modern world. Supply chains split the globe into producers and consumers, the imprisoned and the free, those whose bodies are reduced to tools of profit and those who profit from their labor. Slavery in every age creates a divided humanity, a fracture that only Christ can heal.