St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle is not exactly a plantation where one might be excused for feeling the "presence of slaves".

But Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the leader of half a million practicing Episcopalians said he did and it was accurately reported in a British newspaper.

Did he not know that the best example of anti-slavery was none other than William Wilberforce (1759-1833) who owned no slaves. In 1807, Wilberforce accepted the responsibility to stop the slave trade in England. Wilberforce continued his indefatigable work and helped abolish slavery completely in the British Empire in 1833.

As Episcopal Bishop C. FitzSimons Allison observed, "Here is an example of an endeavor of guilt, producing responsibility that stemmed not from mere law but from grace, guilt and gospel."

America paid for and repented of the sins of slavery and racism long ago. And a tenet central to the Christian faith--and, incidentally, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution--is that one is not tried twice for the same offense, wrote another historian.

Given the woke left and Black Life Matters movement's obsession with the architectural vestiges of the vile slave trade that was abolished in the 1800s in the west, you would imagine that they might be exercised by the existence of modern slavery.

It would appear not. Much easier to draw up lists of statues and street names of people who died 200 years ago, than deal with the fact that slavery is a common practice in countries which are largely beyond the criticism of the left, wrote one blogger.

They, of course, include China, which has slaves in prison camps, many of them like the Uighurs and others are there solely due to their ethnicity. Yet China's attack on the United States last week for its alleged racism was met with general approval or silence from the woke.

According to organizations like Walk Free, there are currently 40,000,000 slaves in the world. That is more than at any time in human history. Globally, some 25 million people are in forced labor, which means they are working against their will and under menace, while an additional 15 million people are enslaved in forced marriages.

Modern slavery is a multibillion-dollar industry with just the forced labor aspect generating US $150 billion each year. The Global Slavery Index estimates that with roughly 40.3 million individuals caught in modern slavery, 71% of those are female, and 1 in 4 are children. As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (8 million), China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64 million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Iran (1.29 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000). There are no reported slaves in the U.S.

Slavery is most prevalent in Africa where an estimated 9,000,000 people were in bondage in 2017, followed by Asia and the Pacific. Nigeria alone had over 800,000 slaves in 2014. It was estimated that 60% of prostitutes in Belgium and Italy were slaves trafficked from that country.

Are there leftie protests against the embassies and businesses of the countries which foster this abomination? Indeed, there are not.

Nor is there any recognition of the fact that the abolition of slave trading and slave owning in the west -- and the western democracies are virtually the only countries in the world that do not have slavery now -- was in large part due to the opposition of the various Christian denominations. Many Islamic countries still have slavery and there is a significant theological support for slavery among some schools of Islam, according to The Conversation.

There had been Catholic opposition to slavery even at the height of the expansion of the Spanish empire but it was not universal. Pope Innocent XI supported the Capuchin missionaries in the 1680s who opposed slavery. Opposition became more general in later years and long before states themselves moved towards abolition.

Opposition to slavery was also led by the Quakers and Protestant denominations. The foremost British abolitionist William Wilberforce, responsible for the 1807 slavery act, was an evangelical Christian. So, like much of the mythology of the left, the alleged white Christian support for slavery is similarly spurious.

Interestingly, one of the most prominent left "anti-racist" Democrats, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is from Somalia, where not only does slavery still exist, but from where black Somalians have been sold into slavery abroad, including to Libya. Many are then trafficked as sex slaves by the migrant boats to Europe, to the blind eyes of the open borders Care Bears. Omar herself is from the Majeerteen clan, which became wealthy through the enslavement of black Oromo people.

Perhaps it is time to cancel Bishop Curry.

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