Agreed - one of the other things to consider is that the vast bulk of i.e. abolitionist momentum in the US came predominantly from the church.
What slavery was doing, from an industrial and economic standpoint was wonderful for the owners, and very hard to quit - all of the objections to it were moral. I.e. "it's great apart from that pesky little detail where it's horrifically evil."
Quite a few antebellum churches desperately tried to plaster over this extreme cognitive dissonance between their teachings, and the practice of their society. You can find plenty of published material to that effect, but all of it has the same sort of flavor as Orwell's "some animals are more equal than others", wherein it has to somehow invalidate all of their core ideological principles, generally without a logically rigorous reason. ("All humans are equal" -> "well, what about them?" -> "oh well, uh, they're not really human" -> "because?" -> "reasons." )
You don't think holy books and holy leaders explicitly supporting those horrible positions had a negative effect? The Catholic Church still teaches their followers that gay sex is a ticket to hell.
What slavery was doing, from an industrial and economic standpoint was wonderful for the owners, and very hard to quit - all of the objections to it were moral. I.e. "it's great apart from that pesky little detail where it's horrifically evil."
Quite a few antebellum churches desperately tried to plaster over this extreme cognitive dissonance between their teachings, and the practice of their society. You can find plenty of published material to that effect, but all of it has the same sort of flavor as Orwell's "some animals are more equal than others", wherein it has to somehow invalidate all of their core ideological principles, generally without a logically rigorous reason. ("All humans are equal" -> "well, what about them?" -> "oh well, uh, they're not really human" -> "because?" -> "reasons." )