In her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, Katharine Gerbner offers a rich history of Protestant planters’ efforts to tether Christian identity to free status and European descent in the American colonies, and missionaries’ answering attempts to reconcile African and indigenous conversion with enslavement. Gerbner's concept of Protestant Supremacy names the sociopolitical function and economic utility of “religious belonging,” specifically how Christian institutional, discursive, and ritual spaces demarcated boundaries between the enslaved and their enslavers, prefiguring race in the process.Footnote 24 In this history of Atlantic slavery, religion is not subsidiary to the punitive, legal, sexual, and economic systems that enabled the enslavement of African and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Rather, Gerbner argues that Protestant Christianity provided a metastructure for the race-based caste systems that emerged in Barbados and other British colonies in the Americas. Through an intense and extensive interrogation of correspondence, missionary accounts, and institutional records from across the Atlantic, she traces how Protestant emissaries established “Christian” as a “protoracial” term and hastened the legal and discursive codification of lineage-based American caste systems in the process.Footnote 25 The linkage of Christian identity and nascent whiteness not only exposes the Protestant architecture of American racial logics, but also sparks nuanced questions about how African, indigenous, and creole people oriented themselves toward Protestantism in early America. In this way, Gerbner definitively situates religion at the center of ongoing conversations about racial formation in the Americas, while opening up avenues for fresh speculation and imaginative intellectual trajectories in studies of American religion and Atlantic slavery.
Although scholars of race in the Americas have long acknowledged the relationship between religious categories such as “heathen” and “pagan” and the emergence of racial classifications, most historians of Atlantic slavery have treated Christian ideas and figures as tangential features of racial formation: aspects and actors that merely propped up more crucial social, legal, and economic structures.Footnote 26 Consequently, the sinews of supremacist orientations toward non-Europeans—the logic that substantiated hierarchical concepts of humanity and the networks through which such ideas were disseminated—have rarely been traced to Protestantism in the historiography. Rather Catholicism, with its centralized, bureaucratic structures, has generally functioned as the synecdoche for Christian policies of conquest and encounter in studies of racial formation in the Americas. Papal bulls such as Pope Nicholas V's Dum Diversas and established missionary orders like the Jesuits theoretically enabled the Catholic Church to formulate and carry out proselytization efforts among unconverted Africans and indigenous people that the ever-splintering Protestants could not replicate in the centuries that followed the Age of Exploration. As Protestant nations contacted and colonized parts of Africa and the Americas, economics, not religion, became the primary motivating force behind colonial policies toward non-Europeans, or so the story goes. Thus, histories of racial formation and Atlantic slavery have overwhelmingly prioritized theories of capitalism and commodification to explain the emergence of the genealogical sociocultural caste system known as race. The commercial exchangeability of African bodies and Western Europeans’ early adoption of insider/outsider paradigms in their engagement with non-Europeans have been cited among other ideas as explanations for the brutal race hierarchies that enabled American slavery and colonialism.Footnote 27
While these theories answer the question of why race materialized, Protestant Supremacy explains how it was propagated: by fusing with the preexisting structures of Western European Christian thought that delineated between the redeemed and condemned, Christians and pagans. As a methodological orientation and theoretical premise, Protestant Supremacy corrects the historiographical tendency to situate Protestantism as an ideal imperfectly practiced by historical actors, yet somehow ontologically opposed to the violence of race-making. Instead, Christian Slavery shows why Protestantism is a constituent of American whiteness. In the wake of this intervention, white Protestantism cannot persist in its existence as a ubiquitous, unnamed, universalized concept in studies of religion in the Americas. Scholarship on Atlantic slavery, race, and American religion must consider and name how proselytization, catechisms, and other religious performances functioned as acts of white racialization—attempts to contour the boundaries of white flesh by prescribing the boundaries of non-white souls—even after race was legally codified. Beyond its utility for understanding racial formation in the early modern Americas, the idea that Protestantism is constitutive of whiteness also elucidates how and why Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants of European descent disrupted the racial logics and hierarchies of Protestant countries in the Americas in later centuries.
Though focused primarily on how seventeenth century colonists’ use of “Christian” paralleled the function of “white” in the eighteenth and later centuries, Christian Slavery nuances the narrative of racial formation and religion in the Atlantic by examining how the pro-conversion strategies of and intellectual exchanges between missionaries forged ideas about the meanings and privileges of whiteness. According to Gerbner, Moravian, Quaker, and Anglican missionaries were more than peripheral characters complicit in the exploitation of African and indigenous labor for economic profit. Rather, many were architects of the cultural and religious ideas that would eventually form the spine of race-based, pro-slavery ideology. In their efforts to convince planters of the compatibility of Christian conversion and enslavement, they preached doctrines of redemptive suffering and divine hierarchy to their enslaved listeners, while advocating for laws that uncoupled material freedom and Christian identity for the enslaved.Footnote 28 In doing so, the missionaries formulated the discursive precursors to White Supremacy, even as they sought to dismantle the Protestant Supremacist ideas that rendered enslaved status and Christian identity mutually exclusive.Footnote 29 Reading prominent figures like George Fox through intersectional lenses—as European, male Protestants defining their places amid conquest and colonialism—exposes the Eurocentric, anti-African biases of missionaries that scholars often obfuscate on account of the missionaries’ seemingly magnanimous engagement with enslaved people.
Although constructed vis-à-vis theories about African and indigenous bodies, cultures, and practices, Protestant and eventually White Supremacy were largely self-making projects. They were Western European colonists’ and missionaries’ ways of gaining and solidifying power and redefining their identities in the Americas. Parsing the Protestant and White Supremacist strains of thought not only shows how “white” emerged as a religious, genealogical, and social category but also tacitly acknowledges the divergence of Eurocentric constructions of Africanness from African-descended people's formulations of their identities. Like ideas about indigenous peoples, Africanness and blackness were heuristic devices meant to define the privileges that accrued to European Protestant and later white identities. By foregrounding whiteness and its precursors in a study of race and religion in the Atlantic world, Christian Slavery renders the intellectual project of becoming white, and its attendant Protestant roots, visible. Most significantly, it does so without recourse to the methodologically faulty premise that European colonists’ and their descendants’ definitions of whiteness and Christianity also defined how African, African American, and indigenous inhabitants experienced racialization and religiosity.
Gerbner's argument instead invites questions about how non-Europeans oriented themselves toward Protestantism in the afterlife of Protestant Supremacy. In Barbados, as in other Protestant colonial contexts, Christian conversion was relegated to a few, favored classes of Africans and natives in the early modern period, due in large part to African and indigenous people's rejection of Protestant doctrines and planters’ fears of the legal and economic ramifications of enslaved Christians.Footnote 30 The marriage of Protestantism and European identity—not only in the colonial metadiscourse about enslavement but also in everyday institutional rites and missionary sermons—names, at least in part, non-Europeans’ intellectual objections to Christianity. Their suspicion of and resistance to the religion were more than functions of planter resistance, sporadic exposure, linguistic challenges, and other environmental and cultural conditions.Footnote 31 Understanding the relationship between the religion and the emergent caste hierarchy, many rejected the Protestantism wielded by planters and missionaries on the basis of its philosophical and cultural claims about African and indigenous bodies, cosmologies, and practices.
Their rejection of Protestant Supremacist ideologies affirms that African and indigenous Protestant experiences housed racial logics and points to the importance of religious phenomena for apprehending non-Europeans’ early understandings of race. Given that the Protestantism preached by missionaries was a part of the supremacist structure that sustained slavery and the social caste system, on what terms did African, indigenous, and creole people engage with white Protestantism, and how was the religion reconstituted by those who chose to convert? More specifically, did they dismantle the hierarchical metastructure that shaped American Protestantism, replace it, or simply repopulate it in accordance with alternative sociocultural constructs? Although it goes without saying that most African and Native brands of Protestantism challenged White Supremacist doctrines, identifying the ethnocentric logic of the iteration of Protestantism non-Europeans inherited elucidates the divergent function and ontology of Afro- and Native American Protestantism. More than just responses to oppression, the elements of Protestantism that people adopted, adapted, and added provide insight into how Africans, Natives, and their descendants apprehended the whiteness of Protestantism, racialized European-descended colonists, and defined the cultural meanings of African and indigenous Protestantism—racial, ethnic, and otherwise.
Finally, by implicating Protestantism in racial formation, Gerbner methodologically deprioritizes belief as the central definition and operation of Protestantism and instead situates Protestant Christianity primarily as a tool of sociopolitical power. In doing so, she acknowledges the epistemological distinction between the missionaries and their prospective converts that granted African and indigenous Protestantism their distinctive cosmological and ontological characters. Particularly for African-descended people whose ever-increasing numbers paralleled the increasingly ominous meanings of their Africanness and the restrictiveness of their existences in the Americas, conversion to Protestantism was not solely or even primarily a private matter of belief but rather an iteration of and means to power. In her discussion of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Gerbner shows how many enslaved people attended religious meetings to gain access to literacy and mitigate their vulnerability in the colonial structure.Footnote 32 Yet their adoption of Protestant practices and declaration of Christian identity is unburdened by questions of whether or not they believed the doctrines espoused by the missionaries. That is, the “authenticity” of conversion is not determined by Western European Protestant epistemologies that centralize faith convictions and outward expressions of these personal beliefs; conversion is no less authentic if done to gain access to power. Indeed, belief was, to a great extent, an illegible category for the majority of non-Muslim and non-Christian captives from West Africa and remained tangential to most enslaved people's religiosity, even as its intelligibility increased. As evidenced by the persistence of conjure, obeah, hoodoo, and other spirit power protocols in the Americas, access to and exchanges of power governed how the majority of African-descended enslaved people oriented themselves toward the cosmos.Footnote 33 Bracketing belief in favor of power inspires more nuanced questions about how Christian symbols, rites, narratives, and artifacts drew upon West African, creolized, and situational power cosmologies to imbue Afro-Protestantism with a distinctive ontology.Footnote 34
Despite using a number of sources authored by European, Caribbean, and colonial North American missionaries, Gerbner successfully critiques the problematic compromises and discourses that characterized the fraught history of race, Protestantism, and slavery in the Americas. Protestantism was not a tangent of the sociopolitical and economic configuration of race, but rather a constituent of it—an axis upon which Western Europeans and their descendants constructed racialized ideas and Africans, Natives, and their descendants reconfigured them. In the wake of Christian Slavery, scholars can neither ignore Protestantism's culpability in the cultivation and maintenance of American whiteness nor the racial ontologies housed within Afro- and Native Protestantism. As Gerbner shows, the movements and interactions of historical actors prohibit the relegation of critical race studies and religious history to neat theoretical and methodological categories. Race and Protestantism were (re)made in the Americas, and scholars require refashioned tools and questions to access the perilous fluidity of these categories.
