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Notes -
...I think this might be using 'slave' in an idiosyncratic way, fully detached from any concept of slavery in the traditional sense, i.e. the owning of human beings.
I know this is just a riff on Nietzsche, but it bears noting that Nietzsche's master-slave morality is itself idiosyncratic to him and I'd argue a very implausible way of understanding the history of Western civilisation.
Not at all. Straightforwardly, the religion preaches slavery (to Christ). Politically, it accepts actual slavery and counsels christian slaves to uphold the institution. Early christianity was big among the slaves of Rome. And at the metaphysical level, it counsels submission to greater powers, both spiritually to god, and secularly to Rome. Top to bottom, at every level of analysis and description, Christianity is for slaves and those who aspire to slavery.
The wild Teutone women who hanged their children from their wagons and slew their defeated husbands fleeing the battlefield before committing mass suicide were not Christians. They at least preferred death at the personal and cultural level to slavery and assimilation. This is why there are no non-slave major religions.
What?
Let's take even just the first claim you made - that Christianity preaches slavery to Christ. Quick sanity check here.
John 15:15 - "I do not call you servants [douloi] any longer, because the servant [doulos]does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."
Galatians 4:7 - "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God."
(See also the entire allegory of Hagar and Sarah to follow, in which Christians are identified with the children of the free woman, not of the slave.)
Galatians 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
1 Peter 2:16 - "As servants [douloi] of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil."
2 Peter 2:19-20 - "They [the ungodly] promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
It seems pretty clear to me. I've recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Screwtape Letters, and its demon narrator's apt description of the natures of Hell and Heaven is, "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
I'm not sure how much more clear it could have been - the goal of Christianity is not subjection to God as a miserable slave, but rather adoption as co-heirs with Christ, sharing in the glory of Christ's own status (cf. Romans 8:29, Christians are "to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family"). This is explicitly contrasted with the image of slavery in the Bible. Thus St. Athanasius summarises (ch. 54), "He was made man that we might be made God". This isn't some hidden secret.
Where images of slavery or servanthood appear in a positive context (e.g. Galatians 5:13), it is reconfigured in a deliberately surprising way - "through love become slaves to one another". The image of a voluntary mutual 'slavery' where each person genuinely seeks the other's good is striking and noticeably not the same thing as the domination of a master over chattel.
Let's go on:
Does Christianity counsel slaves to uphold the institution of slavery? I can only assume you are referring to 1 Corinthians 7:21-24. But this does not at all tell slaves to uphold slavery, or to recommend slavery as a practice. Rather, it is the position I just described - that slavery is irrelevant. He doesn't even tell slaves not to become free, if they get the chance. Paul's counsel is that worldly status just doesn't matter. This is supported by, as I noted in that previous message, what we see in Philemon - Paul isn't an outright abolitionist (as indeed would be pretty impossible in the first century), but his advice to the Christian master is to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother".
It seems worth adding to this, well, the subsequent two thousand years in which Christianity and Christians seem to have been quite well-positioned as regards the abolition of slavery. Sometimes this was in the form of large organised movements, as in Britain, but other times it has been slower. Privately I find something inspiring in the history of slavery in the Byzantine Empire - there was no society-wide war against it, no great battle. Rather, they just... slowly... stopped. Laws were passed against abuse of slaves, and then reducing slaveholders' power, and eventually it just faded away. The tempering aspect of Christianity here seems evident. By contrast the Teutonic pagans you describe were much more enthusiastic slavers.
What's next? Does Christianity counsel submission to greater powers? Well, define 'power'. It certainly counsels obedience and love to God, who is naturally the greatest power, and from there it recommends peaceful coexistence with earthly authorities to the extent that it is possible without disobeying God. But when that is not possible, it recommends protest. I hate to invoke the stereotype here, but you are saying that the tradition that encouraged people to peacefully yet defiantly become martyrs, steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the compulsion of the Roman state even to the point of being torn apart by lions, is a tradition that "counsels submission... to Rome". Does that not seem even the slightest bit off, to you?
If you argue that Christianity counsels obedience to God, certainly. No one's going to dispute that. But this is hardly unusual. If you want to make the Teutonic comparison again, it is not at all clear that a Teutonic tribesman's submission to the chieftain is qualitatively different to that of a Roman citizen's submission to the emperor - not least because, in Christian Rome in particular, the emperor's authority was contingent upon being accepted by the citizen body. That was why there could be so many revolutions in Constantinople, for, while the emperor's power was at least partly theocratic, it was also something held from the republic and there could be revoked, should the emperor be a tyrant. You can see this kind of legacy also in English-speaking Christian traditions - in Britain, where parliament claimed the power to overthrow and replace the king if necessary, and even more radically in America. The evolution of Christian views towards autocratic authority is definitely complex. I'm not going to say that there are no Christian bootlickers, whether historically (de Maistre etc.) or today (the caesarism of someone like Stephen Wolfe, say); but I am saying that a view of Christianity as uniquely servile in its understanding of politics is absurdly mistaken.
And... that's it. Those are all the specific points you make.
You're just, well, wrong.
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I think it’s a reasonable framework for ideological thinking. A “slave” ideology would be one that places value on passively accepting fate, on not being assertive or demanding of other groups. A master ideology would do the opposite and be demanding and assertive and less concerned with helping others.
That’s different than Nietzsche's use of the term. “Slave morality” lionizes the underdog, but it doesn’t have to be passive at all.
Beyond Good and Evil, III.46
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