“Protestant Supremacy,” the phrase that evoked the majority of commentary in this forum, is a neologism. I began researching Christian Slavery in 2005, but I did not coin “Protestant Supremacy” until 2013. I have an audio recording of the first time I used the phrase. It was during my dissertation defense and I was explaining why I felt it was wrong to use the terms “pro” or “antislavery” to describe the slavery debates of the seventeenth century. “Spiritual equality does not equal antislavery,” I said at the time, when I refusing to draw a straight line from Quaker founder George Fox to later Quaker abolitionists. I needed a new way to frame the conversation. “I could call it ‘Protestant Supremacy,’” I said. “It isn't White Supremacy in the seventeenth-century. … [Instead,] you have a contest between the ideology of Protestant Supremacy and the ideology of Christian Slavery. … That's the conversation that's important.”
Origin stories can be helpful for understanding the stakes and contours of a debate. So, I want to begin my response to these four thoughtful comments by explaining how I came to use the phrase “Protestant Supremacy.” I will then address the probing and productive questions raised by the scholars in this forum.
My research on Christian Slavery did not begin with a study of Protestantism, or of Supremacy of any kind. Instead, I started my research by examining how antislavery ideas developed within the Quaker community. I focused on the first antislavery protest in North America, written by German and Dutch Quakers in Pennsylvania. As I looked closer, however, I became less interested in the protest itself than in the fact that it was rejected by the English Quakers who controlled the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. As I tried to understand why, I turned my attention to the Quaker community in Barbados, almost all of whom owned slaves. As someone who was raised in Philadelphia on tales of Quaker abolitionism, the very existence of slave-owning Quakers was a surprise.
Soon, another unexpected fact emerged from the sources: slave-owning Quakers on Barbados were attacked by other Protestants not only because they caused disruption in churches, or refused to bear arms, but because they sought to convert—or “convince,” in Quaker parlance—enslaved people to Christianity. Why was this controversial? The more I looked at the records, the more I saw it, and not only when I looked at Quakers. All of the Protestant missionaries who tried to convert enslaved people to Christianity—whether Quaker, Anglican, Moravian, or Dutch Reformed—were met with resistance from slave owners. This pattern—what I initially called “anti-conversion sentiment”—was widespread.
Most scholarly writing on the early colonial period acknowledged anti-conversion sentiment but did not focus on it. Instead, most literature asked whether Protestants were against slavery or not. This was especially true in the Quaker historiography, where historians debated whether George Fox, the Quaker founder, could be called “antislavery” or “proto-antislavery.” Only a few scholars, including Kristen Block, had moved beyond the pro/antislavery framing to look more specifically at the seventeenth century on its own terms.Footnote 35
In the seventeenth-century Protestant Atlantic world, the most important question was: should enslaved people be integrated into the same ethno-religious community as Protestants or were they a people set apart? This was not just a religious issue. It was a legal issue, an imperial issue, and a fundamental problem for Protestant nations like the Dutch, English, and Danish, as they constructed colonial governments built on slavery. Many Protestant theologians, and most Protestant missionaries, favored an approach that would introduce enslaved people to the True (that is, Protestant) church. I used the term “Christian Slavery” to refer to this belief that enslaved people should become Christian. Although proponents of Christian Slavery, like the Anglican missionary Morgan Godwyn, could be deeply critical of the practice of slavery as it existed in the colonies, they were not against slavery itself. The basic thread defining Christian Slavery was the belief that the enslaved could be fully integrated into Protestant society without becoming free. Supporters of Christian Slavery were also convinced that slave conversion would strengthen slavery as an institution.
Most Protestant slave owners disagreed, and they vehemently opposed the baptism of enslaved men and women. In order to understand this anti-conversion sentiment, I began reading through seventeenth-century colonial legal records, especially those of Barbados. During the seventeenth century, “Christian” was one of the most important legal terms in English colonial slave law. At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, the word “Christian” was gradually replaced by “white,” signaling the rise of White Supremacy. Several scholars have shown that the term “white” has Christian roots. Rebecca Goetz's book charted this shift in Virginia and Winthrop Jordan has written about it in the mid-twentieth century. There has been excellent research showing the intertwining and co-constitution of racial and religious categories in the wider Atlantic world.Footnote 36 I wanted build on this work and find a way to talk about what was clearly a larger pattern.
By the time I pondered these two core issues—first, the anti-conversion sentiment I found in the Protestant plantation colonies and, second, the relationship between Christianity and whiteness—it was 2013 and the national conversation around race was changing. In 2012, Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida. Protests spread across the nation and the Black Lives Matter movement was founded. It was still three years before the election of Trump and five before Charlottesville, but the resurgence of White Supremacy was already becoming apparent. I felt an urgency to trace, and historicize, White Supremacy.
We create neologisms for many reasons. The term “Protestant Supremacy” has two crucial functions: First, it emphasizes that the Protestant debates about slavery in the seventeenth century were not about whether slavery was legitimate or not; they were about whether enslaved people could be Christians—and specifically, Protestants—or not. Second, it shows that Protestantism was central to the formation of White Supremacy. Yet, if “Protestant Supremacy” allows us to make connections between White Supremacy and its antecedents, then why “Protestant” supremacy, rather than “Christian,” “Anglican,” or “English” supremacy? I have wrestled with this question. In some ways, “Anglican Supremacy” or “English Supremacy” would have been the most precise. As Michael Guasco notes, my most exhaustive research about Protestant Supremacy is focused on Barbados, an English colony with a mostly—though not fully—English Anglican ruling class. But both “Anglican Supremacy” and “English Supremacy” felt too narrow. In Dutch Brazil and the Danish West Indies, enslaved people were also restricted from accessing Protestant baptism. Protestant Supremacy illuminated similarities across imperial boundaries.
“Christian Supremacy” would have offered the broadest tent, opening up new kinds of comparisons. Christian Supremacy, as Rebecca Goetz suggests, could be used to think about “a generally shared attitude … that includes not just the Atlantic world but also the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds.” It could apply to Protestants as well as to Catholics; and indeed, it is not hard to find Catholic slave owners who tried to prevent enslaved people from accessing Catholic baptism. Catholic baptism bestowed certain (very limited) rights onto enslaved people and could be used for legal activism, as research by Herman Bennett, Rachel O'Toole, Michelle McKinley, and others has shown.Footnote 37
Similarities aside, however, there was no denying some major differences in the way that Protestant nations like the English, Dutch, and Danish created slave colonies in comparison with Catholic nations such as Spain, France, and Portugal.Footnote 38 In Catholic colonies, Christian baptism was part of the process of enslavement.Footnote 39 In Protestant colonies, it was not. There were also crucial differences in bureaucratic structure. Protestant churches were often weak, and they lacked missionary orders and funding. The development of religious toleration in the Dutch empire and the English Civil War weakened the coercive abilities of the church.Footnote 40 Within this context, slave owners gained the upper hand in determining and implementing slave law, including the relationship between slavery and baptism. What they did with this power was to create a legal foundation for slavery that was predicated on the stability of religious difference. In other words, Protestant lawmakers defined slaves as “heathens” and Christians as free. Slave conversion became a threat to society. Despite local circumstances, the broad differences between Catholic and Protestant empires were too important to ignore in my terminology.
In the end, while there were certainly some issues with the term “Protestant Supremacy,” I decided that it was the most accurate way to identify a pattern that I saw, undeniably, developing in Protestant empires. That said, there is more research to be done to flesh out the ethnocentric and nationalist dimensions of Protestant Supremacy, as Michael Guasco suggests. I also agree with Rebecca Goetz's suggestion that we would benefit from more scholarship on the relationship between race and religion across both Protestant and Catholic empires. Protestant Supremacy did not exist in a Protestant vacuum; it was self-consciously cultivated within the context of Catholic empires, as my chapter on the joint Protestant-Catholic island of Saint Christopher indicates.
Significantly, Protestant Supremacy provides a crucial context for understanding “conversion,” the second major topic of debate in this forum. Frequently, when I describe my research, I am asked a version of the following question: why would an enslaved person want to convert to the religion of his or her enslaver? The implications of this question are clear: Christianity was a religion of oppression, adherence to African religions was a form of resistance, and conversion was a sign of accommodation to slavery. There has been a great deal of research that has shown why this is a problematic approach to understanding black Protestantism. For decades, scholars have demonstrated the complex and important relationship that enslaved and free black men and women cultivated with Protestant theology and Protestant churches.Footnote 41
Still, the word “conversion” remains suspect, as Kristen Block writes in her response. Block suggests that the language of “lived religion” is preferable, since the word “conversion” suggests that we can access the subjective beliefs and identities of those living in the past. While I agree with aspects of Block's argument, including her endorsement of “lived religion,” I use the word conversion not because I believe I can determine belief or identity, but because conversion is always about power.Footnote 42 Specifically, it is about who gets to define conversion. Who, in the past, got to define who was a “true” convert and who was a “backslider”? Who was a “nominal” Christian and who was an “authentic believer”? As Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh writes in her comment, “the ‘authenticity’ of conversion is not determined by Western European Protestant epistemologies.” In other words, we should not allow missionaries to define “conversion” for us, or for the people we study. We need to acknowledge the choices of the enslaved and free people of color who chose to become Christians, for whatever reason. While their efforts were frequently undermined or disparaged by white Christians and missionaries, retaining the word “conversion” in these cases can prioritize the narratives of people of color.
Furthermore, conversion had widespread consequences throughout the Atlantic World. When free and enslaved people in the African diaspora converted to the Protestant Church, it challenged Protestant Supremacy, which reserved Protestant belonging for free people. The flurry of laws passed in the late seventeenth century that desperately aimed to separate Protestant baptism from manumission were evidence of the extremely important consequences of slave conversion in the Americas. In this context, it is crucial to retain the terminology of conversion because it was, specifically, the conversion of enslaved Africans to Protestant churches that challenged the status quo in the first place.
Perhaps “Protestant Supremacy” will have staying power as a term; perhaps “Christian Supremacy” will prove even more useful as scholars make comparisons across religious and imperial boundaries. My personal hope is that “Protestant Supremacy” will be recognized as a significant seventeenth-century ideology while the phrase “Christian Supremacy” will be used to refer to the more general use of Christianity (Protestant or Catholic) for White Supremacist means. Either way, I hope that all readers will recognize the central role that Christianity played in creating White Supremacy. Acknowledging this history helps to explain why many (white) Christian churches continue to struggle with racism and segregation.
At the same time, it is crucial to emphasize that Christianity is never just about “supremacy.” Evangelical Christians and Quakers were central to the abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many scholars have demonstrated.Footnote 43 Most importantly, when enslaved and free people of color converted to Protestantism, they challenged both Protestant Supremacy and white missionary theology. In Christian Slavery, I describe the theological debates that took place within mission churches, showing how both missionaries and Protestant slave owners tried to control the interpretive power of Christianity. As black Christians read the Bible for themselves, they challenged white Christians on everything from the definition of freedom to the meaning of marriage.
The early history of black Protestantism is often difficult to access, since white Christians created the vast majority of the written records, but the glimpses we do have are instructive. In some cases, black Christians used their literacy skills to write to European authorities, arguing persuasively for their right to worship as Christians. Take, for example, the letters that black Moravians wrote to the Danish monarchs in 1739 after they were beaten for attending worship services. The white slave owners “burn our books, [and] call our baptism the baptism of dogs,” they wrote.Footnote 44 Another letter, written by the freed African woman Marotta, argued for her right to “serve the Lord Jesus” by describing her Christian practice as integrated with her memory of vodun in Africa.Footnote 45 It is only by acknowledging the existence of Protestant Supremacy, with its violent “anti-conversion” sentiment, that these forceful petitions can be placed into context.
Protestant Supremacy began as a way to describe the slavery debates of the seventeenth century, but its most important implications relate to later history: to the roots of black churches, to the use of Christianity to support White Supremacy, and to the long, tangled, and deeply complicated relationship between religion and race.
