Slavery is bad. Today this is an entirely uncontroversial statement. We are perplexed by how there was once a time when human beings did not recognize this truth.

Since people today hold such firm convictions about slavery, many bad things are likened to slavery, though simile quickly slips into metaphor. If there is something bad happening and you want to mobilize an audience to stop that bad thing, you might want to call it a kind of slavery: the treatment of workers (whether they be janitors or sports stars), the treatment of children by their parents, the treatment prison guards mete out to those incarcerated, the treatment of peoples in the global South by corporations and organizations from the global North. In recent years, as sensitivities around the trans-Atlantic slave trade have increased, the broad use of slavery in popular discourse seems to have decreased, but it remains familiar. The language of slavery particularly attaches to human trafficking for sex work and bonded labor—the starting points of Chris Gooding’s new book. These are very bad things, indeed.

As Gooding points out, there are sociological definitions of slavery (most famously Orlando Patterson’s) and there are theological definitions of slavery (often associating slavery with the demonic). Many approaches to slavery start with empirical examples of slavery and look for a common denominator. However, sometimes it is helpful to start from the other direction, to conjure a picture of slavery in laboratory conditions, so to speak, and then to see that paradigm case imperfectly instantiated in our messy world. In laboratory conditions, slavery looks like arbitrary rule: the capacity of one to exert his will over another. (This is also a classical definition of domination, i.e., mastery, which is also, importantly, confusing oneself for god.) In the laboratory, there are just two individuals. At any moment, the master wishes for this or that; the enslaved must respond to those wishes, must be ready to respond to potential wishes. 

In real life, of course, things are much messier. Desires are not purely arbitrary. There are forms of resistance, ranging from confrontation to slow-walking. And of course there are more people around, intermediaries and collaborators and co-conspirators. To make things even more muddy, there is an instinct toward mastery in all of us, even the most marginalized, and there are ways in which each of us must respond to the arbitrary will of others, even those of us with the most power. With all these complications, it may seem as if the paradigm case of slavery is altogether useless. Yet we can see certain empirical examples which are, in fact, illuminated by the paradigm case—in particular, the trans-Atlantic slave trade seems to approach slavery in laboratory conditions. As connections to language, family, culture, land, and religion are violently severed in the Middle Passage, what is left is an enslaved individual reduced to responding to the arbitrary will of their enslaver. I take this to be an animating impulse behind much recent work in Black Studies: that there is something distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade that produces lasting effects and that is unlike other bad things humans do to each other. In my formulation, what is distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade is its similarity to the paradigm case of slavery, understood as pure domination.1

I think there are both secular and theological reasons to adopt this account of slavery. There is a long history of associating slavery, domination, and arbitrary rule in European political thought, since the ancients. Theologically, this account of slavery makes it, in a sense, the paradigm of sin as such. It is a violation of the First Commandment, elevating a human to a god-like position, and it names an impulse that turns people away from God since the beginning, since Eden. 

If this is the account of slavery we adopt, it creates limits to how widely the language of slavery can be applied, and it cautions us about the metaphorical use of slavery. This is counter-intuitive because I have also suggested that we can find slavery-like dynamics everywhere, in all people, at all times. We are slaves to sin. But that does not mean everything is slavery. It means that using the language of slavery draws our attention to particular dynamics, those illuminated by the picture we can draw of slavery in laboratory conditions. 

Ought we to use the language of slavery in contemporary cases of human trafficking? There is no question this is very bad behavior, and we should marshal resources at our disposal to stop it—so, as a matter of political practice, there is probably no need to be fussy about the language we use. (However, the fascination, even titillation, of a particular strand of Christianity with sex trafficking, sometimes described as “white slavery,” is rather troubling.) On the other hand, as an analytical matter, and so as a matter of discerning the right responses to individuals involved in human trafficking—and as a matter of theology—it is important to reflect on how well the language fits the circumstances.

As you can surely tell by now, I have worries about whether slavery is an apt language to describe sex trafficking. My main worry is quite simple. In empirical cases approaching laboratory conditions, slavery takes place in public. Indeed, the public nature of slavery seems essential: mastery is recognized not only by one particular enslaved person but by a whole community of the enslaved, and by a whole community of masters. In the case of human trafficking, however, secrecy is essential. The world at large cannot know that a certain person is a trafficker, that another person is being trafficked. Put another way, part of the harm of slavery is that it involves public degradation whereas part of the harm of human trafficking is that it involves public silencing. I think human trafficking is more productively labeled a species of abuse than a species of domination (although the language of abuse, especially in recent years, is itself used in confusingly loose ways). 

The contrast I am trying to make becomes clearer when we attend to the level of the individual will. In slavery, the will of the enslaved is suppressed, nearly stamped out entirely; all the enslaved person can desire is to fulfill the wishes of the master. The word of the master is a law that must be followed. In human trafficking, as adeptly portrayed by Gooding, the will of the trafficking victim becomes entangled with the will of her trafficker. She is, in a sense, seduced into willing her own entrapment. The trafficker, paradoxically, becomes a source of comfort, a private space of security set apart from the supposed dangers of the world. As Gooding demonstrates, a particular challenge that is not uncommon to encounter around human trafficking is former victims who become perpetrators themselves, who take up careers as mediators between traffickers and their victims. In such cases, the will of the trafficker and the trafficked are so entangled that the two roles become one. This is not a dynamic we find on a large scale as we approach paradigm cases of slavery.

Why does making such a conceptual distinction matter in responding to human trafficking? Gooding’s book addresses a number of puzzles around human trafficking that put pressure on the slavery model, and in a sense the project of his book is to formulate responses that are needed because the standard responses to slavery fall short. To put it rather simplistically, what needs to happen in cases of slavery is to remove the master. Once there is no longer external pressure on the enslaved, the enslaved can regain her humanity, no longer subject to the whims of another. But, as Gooding points out, when those who have been trafficked are ostensibly freed, they often do not feel free. They feel scared. At a disconcerting rate, they return to those who trafficked them. They are often rejected by their families and communities. To regain their humanity, they need structure and stability—creating a poignant paradox that Gooding describes where freeing trafficking victims very nearly means enslaving them again, this time in highly-structured rescue homes.

Gooding frames his argument as deepening a slavery framework to accommodate the particular example of human trafficking in India, but I wonder if it would be more productive to abandon the slavery framework and turn instead to a framework of response drawn not from slavery but from abuse. There are quite robust and quite practical literatures on responding well to abuse, though they often focus on just one form of abuse: substance abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, self-harm, or workplace abuse, for example. In each of these cases, there is an essential element of privacy. Morality and truth become distorted. And the abused victim’s will is twisted around another’s, or in on itself (in the case of self-harm and substance abuse), rather than suppressed. In each of these cases, we find dynamics similar to those Gooding identifies in human trafficking. That which causes harm also offers comfort, so ending abuse means a difficult separation and rebuilding new sources of community and so comfort. Similarly, in each of these cases it is widely recognized that there is something long-lasting about the way the personality is warped in abuse—as Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. 

Particularly important, in a theological context, is the way that abuse transforms care into something pathological. Self-harm is understood as care for the self. The abusive spouse acts violently in the name of care for his partner. The abusive priest—who is often portrayed as confusing himself with God, in the framework of domination and slavery—often presents himself as care-giver, particularly attentive to his victim, wanting the best for his victim. And so, too, in the cases that Gooding presents, something like care is part of the vocabulary of traffickers, but it is also part of the vocabulary of rescuers, of those who devote themselves to responding rightly to the evil that is human trafficking. 

Here is another point where sharpening our understanding of what is and what is not slavery pays off. Care does seem like the apt response to those who have been enslaved: we ought to identify and attend to their needs, to offer resources that open possibilities for flourishing. But in cases of abuse, where abuse and care are inextricable, a different orientation may be needed. The harm of abuse is confirmed and compounded by its privacy, so publicity is an essential element of response (rather than, say, the option to politicize harm once one is on the road to recovery). Publicity may mean public acts, but it may also mean building a community, a public, in which stories of abuse can be shared and recognized as such. All of these practices are mentioned by Gooding, but it strikes me as quite important to distinguish the practices and priorities that respond to slavery from those that respond to abuse—especially when we are thinking with Christian non-profits that default toward an easy embrace of care, because it seems like love.

Theologically, slavery is about false gods while abuse is about atheism, about eliminating the possibility of relating to the divine. As the will is warped through the dynamics of abuse, the sense of a stable normative universe, and of a source of normativity, fades away. The enslaved can imagine a master of her master; for the abuse victim, the dynamic of abuse leaves no room for imagining otherwise. This is a challenge that theologians have not yet fully confronted but that is becoming urgent as harm is increasingly privatized, increasing taking the form of abuse. We know how to think beyond slavery, which plots naturally around death and resurrection, but we struggle to think beyond abuse.

Humans enslaving other humans may well be one of the most heinous acts imaginable. For this reason alone, using the theological category of the demonic when engaging enslavement is certainly appropriate, and we owe Chris Gooding a debt of gratitude for spelling things out so clearly in relation to his work in India. 

Yet, “the devil is in the details,” as the saying goes, and it would be beneficial for us to take a closer look at what is going on here. Adding some perspective and looking at slavery throughout history, it looks as if things are getting progressively worse. The enslavement of Africans for labor in the plantation systems all over the Americas starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a new stage in the history of slavery, as the commercialization of the slave trade as well as of the use of slaves for producing profits for the masters was more destructive of the lives of enslaved people than ever before. So-called chattel slavery in the Americas existed for the profit of various players in the economic system, from the slave traders to the plantation owners, with little regard for the well-being of the enslaved beyond the maintenance of their labor power. Even the lives of the enslaved only mattered as far as they could be considered investments. For the slave owners this meant that slaves were subject to an economic calculation that determined everything else.

Slavery today follows similar trajectories, although experts have argued that the situation of enslaved people is now worse than it was even in the American plantation economy because slaves are no longer the sizeable investments they once were and thus have increasingly become even more expendable than ever. Economic desperation around the globe has become so great that there is a ready supply of people to be enslaved. This means that slaves have become even more subject to economic calculations than ever before, with lives being worth even less. Add to that the fact that there are now more enslaved people than ever in history, and we have a perfect storm brewing.1 While Gooding’s account does not mention this broader situation and its urgency, it should be considered if the goal is to search for solutions to the problem of slavery.

Before addressing what it might take to move beyond slavery, we need to take another look at the big picture. While Gooding does not investigate why things are getting worse, a realistic response to the problem of slavery depends on it. Could it be that humanity is somehow deteriorating, as some seem to be assuming? Does the problem have to do with moral failure? Elsewhere, I have argued that we find ourselves in the Capitalocene, the geological age when capitalist exploitation and extraction is shaping everything, not only economics, ecology, and politics but also communities, interhuman relationships, and belief systems. Even images of God are affected by the Capitalocene, as images of God as the slave master, which Gooding observes, may not be unrelated to images of God as the heavenly CEO. Taking a closer look at what is going on in this era may help develop a sense for why slavery keeps getting worse.

For starters, at the heart of the Capitalocene is the imperative to produce profit. In Gooding’s project, two forms of enslavement are highlighted, sex trafficking and bonded labor in India, driven by the profit they produce for the owners, if necessary even at the expense of human life. What remains to be done in response to this observation is to draw a connection to the established capitalist logic that profits are for the benefit of owners and stockholders rather than for the benefit of the workers. This may come as a surprise to many, but capitalism has followed this logic at least since the Dodge brothers successfully sued Henry Ford for failing to privilege profit for stockholders.2 What if the logic of slavery were not an aberration but merely the logic of capitalism taken to its very extreme? 

Two interrelated phenomena come together here. The first is that, according to this logic, working people count less and less, which can be observed in everyday economic life where benefits keep getting slashed, salaries are kept artificially low, and people can be fired with little recourse. While this increasingly affects even people in the middle class, these dynamics get amplified in the extreme in the lives of enslaved people. The second phenomenon is that those at the very top of the economy continue to increase their power and wealth in exponential fashion, seen in everyday economic life where top-level compensations and benefits keep rising, the most important decisions are made by a few powerful individuals (not only in economics but also in politics and religion), and even if things do not work out, golden parachutes are awaiting for the few while the many are left to clean up the mess. 

To be sure, the problem here is not greedy individuals but a system that not only sanctions but stimulates growing inequalities, not only in terms of wealth but also in terms of power. Gooding’s account of sex trafficking and bonded labor hints at the system briefly when he notes the profound difference between the beneficiaries at the very top of this system and all others, including those in the middle, but the system disappears when he talks about solutions. Granted, his concern is for the victims, but without addressing and engaging the overall system, it is hard to see how true change might be possible long-term, and even victim care seems to fall short. 

In order to get to the question of what true change might require, take a look at another group at the heart of Gooding’s account. In both sex trafficking and bonded labor, there are people in the middle who are both victims and perpetrators. In the case of sex trafficking, he is especially interested in the roles of the managers who are running brothels, because many of them were enslaved sex workers themselves when they were younger; as they grew older and less desirable to their customers, they were forced to choose between begging and starvation on the one hand and staying in the business on the other, to make ends meet. In the case of bonded workers in India, there are the so-called mestris, who are bonded laborers promoted to overseers acting in the interest of the owners and who often identify with the owners to such a degree that they control the other bonded workers more harshly than even the owners would.

Gooding notes that while there are many programs that seek to help the victims, there are no programs that seek to help these people in the middle. His quest for restorative justice for these victim-perpetrators points in the right direction, but this conversation could be strengthened by keeping in mind the drivers of the system and the class that usually disappears when the foundational parameters of class analysis are missing. What might we learn by looking at the bigger picture?

Class analysis, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is not primarily a matter of stratification, of status, or of income levels but a matter of power.3 How much power someone has at work is a prime indicator for someone’s class. The members of the working class, which is always the majority of the population (even in the United States), have little or no power over their work—this class includes the underemployed and unemployed. The ruling class, by contrast, is the one in charge and usually well connected and organized. This leaves those in the middle who, like Gooding’s victim-perpetrators, have some privilege but little power because they are not ultimately in charge. In the situation of sex trafficking and bonded labor, it is those in the middle who are responsible for making things run smoothly, who do the dirty work for those on top, and who are taking the fall and go to jail if brothels and illegal bonded labor sites are raided by the police. 

For the sake of developing the bigger picture, without losing sight of the differences, some of these dynamics are surprisingly similar to the situation of the middle class in the United States. Take the example of a manager of a Walmart store, who is the agent of the company when it comes to dealing with the employees but whose power is kept in check by clear directives from the top. The basic role of this manager is to make sure that the store makes maximum profits by keeping benefits and wages as low as possible, enforcing discipline for workers who are kept below full-time work to avoid having to pay for benefits, and keeping the public eye, critics, and protestors at bay when necessary. These managers make fairly decent salaries that may put them in the top 10 percent of US incomes, but their compensation is only a small fraction of that of the top executives and the major stockholders of the company, reflected in the limited power they hold. 

While in all these cases mid-level managers are closer to their workers than to their bosses at the top, they usually do not identify with their workers but with those at the top. In the case of sex trafficking and bonded labor, there is also the phenomenon of captive mentality, according to which victim-perpetrators often tend to identify closely with their victimizers, a matter that might be worth exploring in relation to representatives of the middle class who cater to the ruling class.

Gooding’s suggestions for addressing the resulting conflicts for mid-level staff in brothels and bonded labor sites draw on the methods of restorative justice in contrast to retributive justice. Instead of punishing, condemning, and demonizing them, he suggests guided encounters between victims and perpetrators, with the goal of developing or restoring empathy in the perpetrators, leading to restitution. As studies have shown, these efforts are often successful in the criminal system in the United States, where victims have a better chance of getting some justice and perpetrators are more likely to confess, change, and relapse less often. 

Applied to the middle class in the United States, this approach also might hold some promise. That mid-level leaders typically have more in common with the working class than with the ruling class can be shown by simple numbers based on compensation levels (even tenured full professor salaries at major universities are always significantly closer to campus cafeteria workers than to top university officials) but even more so by the level of actual power that people in various mid-level positions wield. What prevents many from seeing this is a faulty assumption that mid-level privilege translates into power.4

While developing empathy between those in the middle and those at the bottom is promising and can help develop solidarity, what is typically missing, both in Gooding’s restorative justice project and in the logic of the middle class in the United States, is a more profound awareness of the role of the ruling class. Put in terms of Gooding’s theological analysis, what is missing is a deeper encounter with he calls the demonic—in this case what is demonic about slavery, which mirrors what is demonic in the Capitalocene. To be sure, zeroing in on the demonic in these cases does not mean demonizing wealthy individuals or even individual overlords of slavery. Such widespread demonizing of individuals is usually due to the lack of class analysis, which overlooks that the demonic is manifest in distorted relationships that are systemic.

How to engage this demonic? Restorative justice has some good advice, but the systemic aspect is surprisingly absent. If profound problems like slavery cannot be addressed at the level of individual victims and mid-level perpetrators, as I am suggesting, justice will need to engage the system itself. Developing a systemic perspective, in turn, will also help address more appropriately restorative justice’s concerns for criminal acts from petty theft to murder. Note that what I am arguing for here is not some utopian notion of justice that promises complete liberation from enslavement but a different way of engaging victims and mid-level perpetrators in terms of developing bonds of solidarity in light of systemic entanglements. Here is where class analysis and the analysis of slavery can join forces. If we can figure out what solidarity might mean for the American middle class, we might be also able to figure out what solidarity might mean for the system of slavery. 

A couple of suggestions by way of conclusions: If the middle class can break its deep-seated infatuation with the ruling class and realize that its fate is linked up with the fate of the working class (whether this relates to questions of climate change, the future of one’s children, or the viability of retirement), solidarity emerges that is not built on moral appeals but on the simple recognition that “an injury to one is an injury to all” (as the saying goes in the labor unions). Gooding observes how deep-seated infatuation with the masters also ties down the mid-level victim-perpetrators of slavery, so this is where some of the most important work will need to be done if solidarity is to be an option. Part of the work of solidarity for the middle class is realizing that what is happening to the most exploited and oppressed is ultimately happening to 99 percent of us as well. For the context of slavery, this means that those in the middle need to remind themselves that by moving up within the system of slavery they are still subject to its destructive dynamics and that ultimately this system is likely to lead to the untimely death of all involved, except for the bosses and owners. This opens the way to developing deeper solidarities among all the injured parties, not losing sight, of course, that some are much worse off than others. This also means that solidarity needs to be guided from the perspective of where the pressures are greatest, which is why I have coined the notion of deep solidarity in my work.

Solidarity, therefore, is necessary for overcoming demonic structures at all levels. For theologians who dare to engage the demonic in these ways, the gain is a new awareness of a God who is completely unlike “that which nothing greater can be perceived” (Anselm of the Canterbury) envisioned in the image of the slave masters or the ruling elites produced by the system.

Abuse of any type inflicts deep, traumatic wounds, which can cause severe difficulties for the victimized person in his or her ability to relate to others in healthy ways, including lasting difficulty trusting others and a subconscious tendency to reenact the trauma through relationships with persons similar to the abuser. Trauma studies experts point out that victim-survivors of abuse often have reduced agency/autonomy in their decision-making and find themselves making choices from a place of mental or physical distress or coercion instead of a place of freedom. This is exemplified in the “captive mentality” of survivors of human trafficking described by Chris Gooding in Beyond Slavery, wherein Gooding addresses the problem of rehabilitation from human trafficking in light of Christian theology. According to Gooding, “captive mentality” is “the state that results when a formerly enslaved person’s physical chains have been broken, but they are still bound by chains of the mind” (51).1 The four marks of captive mentality are: (1) Physical habituation to slavery that may lead to physical withdrawal symptoms, (2) A tendency to defer life decisions in favor of a direct command from a surrogate master, (3) A fascination with one’s former master that resists breaking ties with him/her, and (4) The implicit or explicit belief that one’s former master is god (52).2 

Such beliefs and the woundedness caused by such deep trauma can make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an abuse or trafficking survivor to truly encounter or relate to other human beings, much less God, and ultimately can significantly attenuate a victim’s ability to freely choose for or against God. Gooding circumvents this latter issue by advocating for universal salvation, which precludes an individual’s ability to freely choose against God and thus spend eternity in hell (125–28). However, in this essay I would like to explore the issue from the perspective of a Christian theologian who does believe that a person can choose hell eternally. Since, in such a view, free will, and especially the ability freely to choose God, is central to salvation and—according to Karl Rahner—is the ultimate purpose of human existence, the idea that a person may have his or her autonomy severely limited due to abuse presents an urgent theological problem. It is difficult to reconcile this attenuated autonomy with the theological principle that God gives each person the grace necessary to be able to freely choose Him and thus to choose salvation.3 If a person’s will and ability to choose freely can be so damaged by trauma as to be nearly non-existent, then how can such a person freely choose God and enact that choice through concrete deeds of neighbor-love throughout his or her life?

The problem becomes even more difficult when considering abuse perpetrated by someone with spiritual authority, such as the “masters” described by Gooding, who are frequently viewed as gods by those enslaved to them (52).4 Abuse committed by such a person often implicates God as approving of or even committing the abuse. Such spiritual abuse can seem, in the eyes of the victim, to have been authorized or even perpetrated by God Himself, and thus can prevent the victim from being able to encounter God as loving and merciful. This may prevent the sort of true encounter with God that could set them on the path toward enacting a fundamental option for God. 

In what follows, I argue that trauma-informed theology is a key part of any ecclesial response to trauma and abuse of any kind, and that a theological focus on grace as mediated through supportive, healthy, and caring human relationships is an important way forward. I propose that relationality itself is a channel—and perhaps even the primary channel—of God’s grace.  To be clear: I am not advocating for attempts at converting survivors of human trafficking or abuse as part of their healing process. I am merely outlining how a theology of grace as relational places a duty on Christians to have their relationships be occasions for graced healing for those who have thus suffered. To make this argument, I will first address Rahner’s theological anthropology and the problem presented therein for survivors of abuse and trafficking. Again, this problem is circumvented by Gooding’s belief in universal salvation, but theologians who do not accept that premise need a different way to address the problem. Following the presentation of Rahner’s theological anthropology, I will turn to the idea of grace as relational, since it is the divine life experienced in creatures, while divine life is intrinsically Trinitarian and thus relational. 

The context for abuse and the problem of attenuated agency lies within theological anthropology: for what purpose are humans created and how do humans achieve this purpose? According to Rahner, human beings are created with the purpose of eternally choosing for or against God (the “fundamental option”). Rahner states: “God wishes to communicate himself, to pour forth the love which he himself is … everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of Infinite Love.”5 In communicating Himself, God intends to come into deep union with each human person, enabling them to act well (thus choosing Him over lesser goods). Rahner believes that humans have the power to do something definitive, final, and eternal: namely, to actualize or to refuse to actualize oneself in one’s totality.6 For Rahner, this actualization (or refusal thereof) takes place over the whole of one’s lifetime. But in order to choose to actualize oneself or not, one must have free will—one must be able to make choices with sufficient agency or autonomy for them to be free. “By the fact that man in his transcendence exists as open and independent, he is … responsible for himself. He is left to himself and placed in his own hands not only in his knowledge, but also in his actions. It is in being consigned to himself that he experiences himself as responsible and free.”7

Spiritual abuse, however, as well as other types of abuse, can severely attenuate a person’s agency and ability to choose freely, both while the person is in the abusive situation with the abuser, as well as afterwards, even when there is no obvious connection with the abuse to the outside observer. This occurs because the abuse damages the very self of the person in ways that extend well beyond the mere moment or moments of abuse. Abused persons often continue to act out of the wounds caused by abuse for the rest of their lives, unintentionally reacting to situations as though it were the abusive situation, or subconsciously ending up in traumatic reenactments in future relationships. It takes a lot of work—usually with professionals—as well as some amount of luck or privilege to be able to get out of the abusive situation and to begin to heal.

As mentioned above, I believe that a theological focus on grace as mediated through supportive, healthy, and caring human relationships is an important way forward, and that relationality itself is a channel—and perhaps even the primary channel—of God’s grace. The core of the problem seems to be a collision between Rahner’s theology of grace (which is predicated on the idea that humans can freely choose for or against God) and a psychological lens that appears to deeply delimit grace (whereby trauma impacts a person’s ability to choose freely). Thus, I believe we need to start with a revised theology of grace. The theology of grace that I propose—one that views relationality as a vital channel of God’s grace—is rooted in both Thomas Aquinas and Rahner. 

Thomas is clear that grace is not a “thing” that God gives us which we passively receive. Instead, for him, grace is intrinsically relational. God continually offers His love and mercy, but it is only when it is accepted and reciprocated that it is called “grace” properly speaking. Thus, grace is relational between God and the human being.8 Grace is defined, for Thomas, as “the participation of the rational creature in the divine goodness.”9 However, we are not merely saved as individuals: we are saved in community. Thus, we can experience grace through human relationships too. As Thomas says:

Since grace is ordained to lead men to God, this takes place in a certain order, so that some are led to God by others. … thus there is a twofold grace: one whereby man himself is united to God, and this is called sanctifying grace; the other is that whereby one man co-operates with another in leading him to God, and this gift is called gratuitous grace, since it is bestowed on a man beyond the capability of nature, and beyond the merit of the person. But whereas it is bestowed on a man, not to justify him, but rather that he may co-operate in the justification of another, it is not called sanctifying grace . . .10

This relationality of grace reflects the relational nature of the Trinity. As Rahner says, “God does not cause and produce something different than Himself in the creature, but rather … communicates his own divine reality and makes it a constitutive element in the fulfillment of the creature.”11 This not only makes God the absolute being who constitutes the creature’s sole fulfilment, but also makes relationality with Him and with others constitutive of the life of grace. 

These ideas about relationality match up with the findings of trauma studies, where severely traumatized people almost exclusively find healing through supportive, healthy, loving relationships. Thus, relationality seems to be a place where the door can open for trauma survivors, including survivors of human trafficking, to experience God’s love and grace – which also opens them to the possibility of a positive response to the fundamental option, despite their attenuated freedom due to trauma. The interpersonal harm of abuse causes limitations on the person’s freedom that might prevent them being able to effect a fundamental option, so it is precisely interpersonal help (i.e. supportive relationships) that can provide the ability to say yes to God. God, after all, is mercy itself, and takes the entirety of a person’s circumstances—including limitations on freedom due to abuse—into account.

A final note on the ecclesiological ramifications of this view of grace as relational: One of the Church’s functions is to reveal God to others not just in words, but also deeds. We as Church are called to occasion those positive relationships that open people up to God—we are called to have our relationships be occurrences of grace and not of harm. This understanding of grace as relational is a call to have our relationships be loci where survivors of abuse and human trafficking can experience God’s love, even outside a church building proper and regardless of survivors’ own religious beliefs. The call of the Christian is to mediate God’s love and divine life through one’s relationships: to provide avenues for grace in the world. This means we must provide opportunities to encounter God as mediated through the supportive, caring human relationships that we cultivate with others. Donald Gelpi relates the power of communities made up of people cultivating such graced relationships: “When grace informs the social processes that create a community, it functions as an environment of grace for its individual members, even though it could never exist apart from their collaborative efforts.”12 Healthy relationality is the graced counterpart of abusive relationality. Recovering a theology of grace as relational thus provides a strong response to the devastating effects of spiritual, sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

This idea of graced relationality supplements Gooding’s arguments for organizations like Advaith and NGO X that provide stable support for survivors of slavery (168). Gooding argues for a “core group of individuals giving care who commit to investment in the community for the long-term, ideally some form of live-in caregivers that are themselves part of the community” (168). Such communities, he argues, would better help survivors transition, in comparison to communities like Devnar where no commitment is expected of the social workers and social workers do not live as part of the community (168). Furthermore, Gooding believes that “stable intentional communities made up of both survivors and non-survivors” later in the aftercare chain, like NGO X, would help survivors transition and would help normalize communities that are not based on family ties (168–69). All of this points to the importance of relationality and stable communities, especially with those with whom one does not share blood or marriage ties. Since captive mentality develops as a result of abusive relationships, it makes sense that stable, healthy, graced relationships would help to overcome this devastating effect of slavery. It seems to me that graced relationality is the theological rationale for stable communities and relationships and helps to explain why they work so well. 

In light of all of the above, I look forward to hearing from Gooding about his thoughts on grace as relational, as well as the alternative approach to human freedom I presented based on Rahner’s fundamental option.

Slavery is legion. Chris Gooding alludes to this apt biblical metaphor in Beyond Slavery: Christian Theology and Rehabilitation from Human Trafficking to describe slavery’s multifaceted legal, sociological, and theological dimensions. As Gooding further demonstrates, slavery is also legion in its lingering effects on those supposedly liberated from its grasp, as evidenced in the psychological (and, as Gooding shows, deeply theological) phenomenon best described as “captive mentality” (5). Gooding does well in uncovering the complexities of life “beyond slavery,” both for victims of sex trafficking and bonded labor and for those working to rehabilitate these victims. Life in the aftermath of slavery is messy and nuanced: liberation is merely the beginning of the difficult path of rehabilitation. While, as Gooding notes, there is not much evidence-based research on the societal reintegration of former slaves (4), I see Gooding’s venture to analyze life after slavery as cohering with related topics of research, such as recovery from trauma and, more recently, moral injury.1 The latter could be an especially rich conversation partner for Gooding’s treatment of justice for the “victim-perpetrator” in the final chapter of the book (chapter 6, “Justice”). Slavery muddles categories. Captivity impacts how one conceives of freedom. Encounters with inhumanity influence one’s understanding of the divine. Abuse shapes what one believes to be love. Gooding illustrates these points and more. Moral injury could be a touchstone for thinking about the way slavery also muddles moral analysis, a reality Gooding already points to in his treatment of the victim-perpetrator.

I will preface that I knew little about modern-day slavery before reading Beyond Slavery, but I was struck by the similarities between Gooding’s findings on the topic and what I know about trauma recovery in the contexts of war, immigration, and sexual abuse from my own research. This is not to say that all trauma is the same, but I do think there are some connecting threads. Trauma of any kind has a propensity to distort the victim’s core beliefs about God, the world, and their place in it.2 The pursuit of safety often becomes the victim’s primary concern. There is the ironic and troubling drive to make sense of that which makes no sense.3 In the context of rehabilitation from slavery, I see these realities manifest in the dimensions of captive mentality that can lead the formerly enslaved person to return to bondage (the familiarity of which can feel safer than freedom), to consider their master as God, and to struggle to recognize their treatment as abuse (chapter 2, “Chains of the Soul”). While Gooding emphasizes that slavery is not merely a type of trauma but deserving of treatment in its own right (52–54), I am excited by the book’s potential for interdisciplinary conversation. I do not presume to know the intricacies of modern-day slavery and its effects, but I do believe the common threads between how Gooding presents the topic and insights from other areas of research are undeniable and worth exploring in mutually informative ways. In particular, I think the category of moral injury can shed further light on the complexities of slavery, and slavery’s susceptibility to create victim-perpetrators can shed further light on the nature of moral injury.

It will be helpful briefly to situate Gooding’s treatment of victim-perpetrators within the book’s overall trajectory. In his presentation of a thoroughgoing definition of slavery on legal, sociological, and theological levels, Gooding highlights the “legion” components of the practice, such as constrained freedom of movement (20), violent control (23), natal alienation and social death (25), and a “demonic” power to morph in the face of threats to its existence (38).4 Gooding then unpacks the persistent hold slavery can have on those who are liberated as manifested in captive mentality. Key markers of such “chains of the mind” include enduring connections to slavery’s daily rhythms, deferring decisions to a surrogate master, fascination with the former master, and belief that the former master is god (51–52). From here, Gooding details a theological response to these experiences rooted in commitments to the non-violent nature of love and a critique of God as merely all-powerful. Gooding then treats two practical issues in work rehabilitating former slaves: providing daily structure and combatting social stigma (particularly that of the Indian caste system). Both prove crucial in fighting captive mentality yet are nonetheless tricky to navigate, as a well-intentioned monastic structure can easily lapse into the logic of a prison, and reintegrating former slaves into society can become escaping one danger to enter another. Gooding’s treatment of these manifold issues of rehabilitation from slavery culminates in his appeal to restorative (rather than merely retributive) justice, especially for victim-perpetrators, i.e., enslaved persons who acquired a managerial role that left them in charge of other slaves. As Gooding notes, victim-perpetrators are especially vulnerable, as they are often the ones prosecuted rather than the leaders of the trafficking networks. This group of people sticks out to me as the height of slavery’s logic: a confusion of love and violence, the misconstrued view of a seemingly all-powerful master as God, and the elimination of social support leave enslaved people defenseless to a system in which enacting violence, seeking power, and further alienating others seem like their only options—a system that fosters the conditions for moral injury.

Moral injury is an emerging category within psychology that has only recently garnered attention from theologians and ethicists.5 Much like the term “slavery,” moral injury is defined differently depending on a particular scholar’s context and aims. The term emerged initially among psychologists working with combat veterans to describe a phenomenon not quite captured by the diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).6 While those suffering from PTSD typically had an intense experience of physical harm or threat to their physical safety, psychologists found that veterans were also sometimes subjected to a different kind of harm, one that instead threatened the state of their soul. The nature of war can leave soldiers in morally challenging positions: taking out a known terrorist while risking harming or killing innocent civilians in the process; moving a group away from danger but having to leave behind a wounded soldier. Even when the laws of just war theory are followed, the decisions soldiers face can be morally fraught.7 Psychologists coined the term “moral injury” to describe the lingering intense feelings of guilt, confusion, and lack of agency veterans experienced in the wake of such impossible situations, even when the veterans had acted in what they believed to be the best way possible at the time. To be clear, moral injury is not a blanket term for any guilt soldiers feel over their actions in war; it refers to a specific kind of guilt that arises from a situation where the moral agent’s experience was such that they had no option but to act against their deeply held moral values.8 Whether situations where there is no morally viable option actually exist or not is a question for another day, but at the very least, psychologists are finding that the experience of being in such a situation leaves the moral agent wounded in a unique way. Feeling forced to act against one’s own moral values creates a sense of self-betrayal: if the situation were otherwise, the agent would not have acted as they did (but the situation was not otherwise). This kind of moral experience came to mind as I read Gooding’s description of slavery’s victim-perpetrators.

The questions arise: do slavery’s victim-perpetrators fit the criteria of moral injury, and why does it matter if they do? If anything, I think slavery’s victim-perpetrators, as described by Gooding, would be more susceptible to something like moral injury, even more than soldiers. While moral analysis of war is fraught, there is something to be said for the fact that soldiers (at least in theory) voluntarily agree to go to war, whereas enslaved people do not typically voluntarily agree to be enslaved. Perhaps one could argue that an enslaved person voluntarily agrees to take on a managerial position, but as Gooding points out, “A mestri or brothel madam will likely feel they have no choice but to accept the promotion within the trafficking organization if the only other option they perceive is risking starvation, homelessness, or the organization’s wrath” (250–51). In other words, left with the options of scaling the ranks of the slavery system or immediate physical threat, an enslaved person might feel as though they have no choice but to take on the managerial role, even if they would never do so under normal conditions, even if to do so feels like a violation of their deeply held moral values.

Allowing the possibility for victim-perpetrators to occupy the space of moral injury is important because the category can help nuance how we think about justice. Moral injury forces us to pause as we ponder the line between victim and perpetrator because the perpetrator is also the victim of an unjust system that gave rise to the morally troubled situation in the first place. In a morally injurious situation, luck plays an unfortunate role in making someone into a perpetrator. Such a reality is lamentable and should incite a desire to abolish the sinister forces that prey on the unlucky in the first place. Considering slavery’s victim-perpetrators through the lens of moral injury highlights yet another effect of slavery: victims are often coerced into becoming perpetrators. Gooding does an excellent job of providing practical suggestions for how victim-perpetrators can both take responsibility for the harms they have caused while also being rehabilitated through restorative justice means. Both are necessary. Taking responsibility for one’s actions can be healing for both the agent and those they have harmed. Moral injury is not an excuse to skirt responsibility for harms caused but an important context for determining the root of injustice, in this case, the system of slavery itself. Until the day this demonic power is truly abolished, moral injury should be considered when responding to those unlucky enough to be caught in slavery’s grasp. Naming the kind of moral trauma that slavery can create could go a long way in combatting the lingering societal impulse to punish formerly enslaved people.9 Beyond Slavery does an excellent job of getting the ball rolling in such considerations. I am curious if Gooding came across the category of moral injury in his research and his thoughts on its merit. Does he feel it could augment the conversation surrounding life after slavery—whether through consideration alongside other trauma-informed care, as a way of framing the moral analysis of slavery, or perhaps in some other way?

I read Chris Gooding’s Beyond Slavery as a Christian social ethicist with expertise in U.S. mass incarceration and restorative justice. Because of this academic background, I learned a great deal from Gooding as I do not know much about human trafficking in India, or frankly, in the United States either.1 While I found many touchpoints for discussion with Gooding throughout the text, I will focus my response on some connections I found between his discussion of slavery in India with mass incarceration in the United States. In addition, I would like to raise some questions that I hope will further his thought experiment about using restorative justice in response to people who are victims of human trafficking and who have helped perpetuate human trafficking, often in mid-level positions in trafficking rings. 

In addition to learning more about slavery in India, Gooding’s book provided space for me to think anew about related aspects of mass incarceration in the United States. For example, Gooding’s use of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death in his first chapter led me to consider the usefulness and limitations of Patterson’s “social death” for understanding dynamics and experiences of incarceration.2 Considering Patterson through Gooding’s discussion led me to ask how the social deaths inflicted by slavery and mass incarceration compare, as an analogy between the two is frequently employed in rhetoric concerning the latter. Such is the case in arguments about the roots of mass incarceration in the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which holds that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”3

With the social death of slavery, Gooding notes that “the master gains honor and recognition from the degradation of the enslaved” so that the surrounding community no longer recognizes the claims to freedom of enslaved persons as legitimate (28). Freedom then requires the community to recognize the dignity of enslaved persons and to restore their honor. With mass incarceration, the dishonor of being convicted of a criminal violation provides the justification for taking the freedom of incarcerated persons. One of the difficulties of challenging mass incarceration, in contrast with human trafficking, is that the dishonor of incarcerated persons is legitimated by the State, which determines through various legal mechanisms that certain persons are rightfully dishonored (that is, convicted and sentenced) and ought not be free. Freedom is complicated by communal acceptance of the determinations of the State, and working against mass incarceration requires not only asserting the dignity of incarcerating persons but also questioning the legitimacy of the State. The role of the State in mass incarceration and not in slavery presents some different dynamics in working for freedom with each phenomenon. Gooding’s discussion of Patterson helped to clarify for me how understanding slavery can help understand mass incarceration as well as where the analogy between the two is inexact. I am curious about other connections and disconnections Gooding might see here between mass incarceration and slavery, as he often notes parallels between the two in his book. 

From mass incarceration, I turn now to restorative justice. In his final chapter, Gooding considers the challenges of responding to people who have been both victims and perpetrators of human trafficking. He is concerned with a “middle class of enslaved person” that often manages the “day-to-day operations of slavery” (220). These people have perpetrated harm against other human beings (typically at the behest of people in higher positions in a trafficking ring), but they have also been harmed by their own enslavement, often at the hands of those people in higher positions who benefit most from slavery. This “middle class” population is underserved by rehabilitative organizations and often becomes the focus of efforts to break up trafficking rings through criminal legal systems, bearing the brunt of punitive responses while the people in more powerful and lucrative positions are insulated from prosecution. Gooding suggests that restorative justice offers possibilities for rehabilitating “survivors of trafficking who have assisted in trafficking others” (221). 

With respect to Gooding’s discussion of restorative justice in his final chapter, I appreciate his humility as he writes, “[R]estorative practices are untested with this population, and so all proposals here should be taken with the expectation that quite a bit of tweaking will need to occur” (250). He notes that readers ought to “hold [his proposals] as suggestions rather than dogmatic pronouncements” (ibid.). Among his challenges are that he could not find any organizations working with victim-perpetrators of human trafficking and that he had difficulty speaking with any victim-perpetrators himself (221). Nonetheless, he suggests that restorative justice could address “the severe shortcomings of the operative retributive justice model” (221). As I write the next few paragraphs, I also want to assume a humble position: I know very little about Indian contexts or programs working with survivors of human trafficking. My hope with asking the following questions is that I might draw on my understanding of restorative justice in other contexts and in response to other harms to invite Gooding to further and clarify his proposals.

One of the difficulties of describing restorative justice in any context is figuring out what restorative justice is. Do we understand restorative justice in terms of a set of practices, such as victim-offender dialogue, truth-and-reconciliation commissions, or sentencing circles? Or do we define restorative justice according to the outcomes that it produces, such as reparations and apologies as opposed to convictions and punishments? Or is it a combination of practices and outcomes? Many people in many contexts are doing restorative justice in many different ways. Also, many people claim to be doing restorative justice, and yet their practices and outcomes often seem quite nonrestorative. Our definitions of restorative justice often direct our focus for identifying it in various contexts, and our definitions shape our recommendations for restorative justice in different situations.

Gooding follows Daniel Van Ness and Karen Heetderks Strong in identifying restorative justice according to “three focal concepts: encounter, repair, and transformation” (225). These concepts are not quite a definition, but they provide the core for how Gooding goes on to describe restorative justice. Note that these three key concepts cover both practices (encounter) and outcomes (repair and transformation). The main form of encounter Gooding highlights is Victim-Offender Conferencing (VOC), although he recognizes that other practices (which he does not engage in much detail) can also facilitate encounter among victims, offenders, and community members (227). Transformation, he goes on, looks like accountability (vs. punishment), and repair looks like “taking action to make things right” (vs. incarceration) (229). So far so good: definitions of restorative justice that attend to both practices and outcomes tend to provide the most clarity in identifying restorative justice and developing proposals that are responsive to particular contexts.

In applying this interpretation of restorative justice in response to victim-perpetrators of human trafficking in India, however, Gooding tends to emphasize outcomes much more than practices. I think he needs to attend both at the same time. That is, he focuses primarily on discerning the pitfalls and possibilities of reparation plans (outcomes) for victim-perpetrators with relatively little attention to how reparation plans would be arrived at through practices of encounter (see especially 250–54). While he discusses some aspects of what an encounter might look like, particularly in light of the difficulties that the “captive mentality” of many victims of human trafficking would present to VOC, I do not see him drawing the connection between how practices of encounter relate to and inform the outcomes of repair and transformation (see 254–55). How people encounter each other in determining the outcomes shapes the outcomes; the three focal concepts of encounter, repair, and transformation are fundamentally interconnected. What a group of stakeholders determines is necessary to “repair the harm” of a crime depends on how they conducted the conversation to identify what the harms were, who was impacted and how, and who is accountable and why. Before getting to the validity and viability of reparation plans for victim-perpetrators of human trafficking, we need more clarity about how the content of those plans was arrived at through restorative justice practices in the first place. 

To further and clarify his proposals, I invite Gooding to discuss more fully what sorts of restorative justice practices might be appropriate to this context. In my view, there are a few pathways for him to consider. First, he might consider a broader array of practices beyond VOC, especially practices that have been used to address community capacity building and reintegration of individuals into community. It would also be useful to consider practices that have more fully developed strategies for handling instances in which victims might be revictimized in a face-to-face encounter or in which there are serious power imbalances among participants. One possibility might be Restorative Circles, which emphasize communal involvement more robustly than VOC often does.4 It seems that circles might also supplement the work of community organizing that Gooding discusses in his fifth chapter because they can contribute to the recognition of shared interests among participants as well as provide a setting for “cutting” the issues relevant to the community (see especially 199–201). Another relevant practice might be Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA), which were first developed in Canada to assist with the reintegration of people convicted of sexually based offenses from prison into community.5 CoSA has usually been used with people who are at high risk of reoffending and in high need of support. While a victim-perpetrator of human trafficking (even if the trafficking involved sex) is not necessarily best understood as having committed a sexually based offense, I wonder whether the practices of CoSA might still be useful because it seems victim-perpetrators are often in high risk and high need situations. CoSA also tends to balance attention to the harms caused by their “core member” with commitment to reintegration in a community with a primary goal of “no more victims.”

Another pathway Gooding might consider would be to examine justice practices indigenous to India that have restorative features. Here, I am definitely out of my depth for recommendations, but I think it is worthy to note that many restorative justice practices arose from indigenous communities such as First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and Maori peoples in New Zealand. Are there analogous sources for developing restorative justice practices rooted within Indian contexts? In many ways, India’s criminal legal system is shaped by its colonial history and British rule. But in his fifth chapter, Gooding references the practices of village panchayats: “The panchayat system existed in India prior to the presence of Western colonial power, and Gandhi stressed the reestablishment of the panchayat system as a method for local conflict resolution once India regained its independence” (212). Does the panchayat system offer some possibilities for restorative justice in India? What are its limitations (and I am certain there are limitations to the panchayat system, as Gooding notes that there is the risk that some panchayats may cast survivors of sex trafficking out of a village)? Can there be such a thing as a restorative panchayat, and if so, how might its practices be tailored to respond to victim-perpetrators of human trafficking? If not panchayat, are there other indigenous practices that could shape a contextually appropriate model of restorative justice in India?

Third, Gooding notes that he “could find no organizations even reaching out to” victim-perpetrators of human trafficking, let alone employing restorative justice practices with them (221). That may be the case, but are there restorative justice programs in India reaching out to other populations that could provide some guidance about practices that could be appropriate in an Indian context? It would have been helpful for Gooding to provide some description of the landscape of restorative justice in India more broadly so that readers would know that these practices are not entirely new to this setting. Unfortunately, most of his sources about restorative justice are written by North American scholars or practitioners (me included). What sorts of practices might arise if Gooding looked to Indian scholars and practitioners of restorative justice? R. Thilagaraj and Jianhong Liu’s collection of essays, Restorative Justice in India, may provide an important starting point.6 Enfold India or the Ashiyana Foundation could provide guidance from practitioners.7

In the spirit of Gooding’s effort to imagine possibilities, I look forward to hearing from him what of these practices might be of use in the circumstances of human trafficking, and I hope my questions spur his imagination. It would also be helpful to connect ideas about these practices to the outcomes he hopes for with reparation plans. How might certain practices address the pitfalls that he identified with reparation plans for victim-survivors of human trafficking—or not? Finally, how might he relate his theological discussion of love to the norms that ought to shape practices of restorative justice in this context?