The consideration of its religious aspects gets us closer to the real “problem” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in modern eyes. Stowe’s themes are that slavery is absolutely incompatible with Christianity, and that while slavery may deny people their freedom, nothing can deny people’s right to freedom. Our age (including many of the religious) abhors anything that smacks of an absolute; Stowe’s absolutism gives no quarter. However, she is too smart a polemicist to show only the Simon Legree―type of slaveowner tyrant. First we see “kind,” slaveowners, regularly churchgoers, treating their slaves well by the standards of the day. Stowe uses their stories to skew the era’s convenient “gray area” thinking and rationalizations, some of which cite the Bible. Nothing guarantees that such slaveowners will not run up debt and have to sell slaves and break up their families, or that such slaveowners will not die before they fulfill their promise to free a slave, and that that slave will not then be sold to an owner like Legree. Just because there may be “good” slaveowners does not mean there are not evil ones. Only towards the end of the book do we see the moral abyss and horror of Legree―slaveowners who, under color of law, could and did do anything they wanted to their slaves, their “property.”