Answer:
The answer is Religious leaders.
Explanation:
This is directly from PF reading material.
In addition to Europeans' economic reasons for enslaving Africans, they also justified slavery because of religious reasons and ideas of "civilization." Because so few Africans were Christian, Europeans claimed that they were morally justified to buy them and force them to work. The Catholic Church supported slavery and stood to profit from both the slave trade and the rising prosperity of colonial powers like Portugal and Spain. By equating Christianity with humanity and portraying non-Christians and non-Europeans as less than human, the church reasoned that Christian Europeans could own Africans. They saw anyone who wasn't Christian as a candidate for slavery because they believed that Christian moral principles didn't apply to non-Christians.
