John W. Catron's well-written and admirable account of the spread of evangelical Protestantism among African and African-descent peoples in the Atlantic world makes a thoroughly researched case for its importance in the development of what he terms “Atlantic African” identity. He cogently counters the work of influential scholars, such as, for example, James Siddons (Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, Oxford University Press, 2007) and John Thornton (Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, Cambridge University Press, 1998), who, among others, have argued for an African-derived sense of culturally black Atlantic/American identity (4). Catron instead posits an Atlantic identity explicitly born of an evangelical Protestantism rooted equally firmly in the African, European, and American continents.
Hence, he claims that “African Atlantic Christian identities”—a moniker he uses interchangeably with “Atlantic Africans”—eschewed “rigid political boundaries that whites were then forming” (4) and instead were formulated into transnational African-Atlantic Protestant networks that included Afro-Methodists, Afro-Baptists, and Afro-Moravians. For Catron, the development of a Protestant Atlantic African identity was most fecund on the “littoral” Atlantic world, and he argues that on these shoreline locales in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, the people he calls Atlantic Africans “spurned the racially exclusionary tendencies of the rising nation states and did not initially become African Americans: they were, instead, Atlantic Africans who used the skills they acquired while living and working along the Atlantic littoral to negotiate better living conditions from a slave society that was just entering one of its most brutally productive stages” (4).
Catron succinctly expresses these themes and, in so doing, conveys the many strengths of his research, arguments, and methodologies. He covers some ground well trodden by previous scholars, yet a tremendous asset of this book is that, throughout, he succeeds in rehearsing this specialist scholarship while offering refreshing new interpretations of, as he calls it, Atlantic African identity and, more importantly, the role of Protestantism in forming that identity. Indeed, while his coverage draws upon previous scholarship, Catron weaves his wide geographical and denominational coverage into his own unique overarching interpretations of the importance of evangelical Protestantism for the formation of “African Atlantic” identity. He competently traverses early evangelical Protestant Christianity in early Africa; Antigua; the Middle Colonies’ Moravian settlement and mission hub of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the black evangelical diaspora in low country Georgia and the Carolinas; and the African evangelical diaspora. Throughout, the book both builds on, yet challenges, assumptions of African American or, as Catron would prefer, African Atlantic identities. In keeping with these assumptions, Catron has contextualized various slave revolts and resistance into the context of nascent black nationalism—for example, that of David Walker (208)—placing them into a larger interpretation of black Christianity, resistance, and identity in the Atlantic world.
Embracing Protestantism is thus a book I would recommend as essential reading for students and scholars of African diaspora evangelicalism. Instead of emphasizing the influence of African-descent communities’ African heritage on Protestant evangelicalism—as so many have before him—Catron has flipped the tables, in a very original way, to emphasize the impact of evangelical Protestantism on the formation of Atlantic African culture, broadly writ. He has also adopted an imaginative use of environmental history to explain religious conversion in Antigua and early West African Protestantism (ranging from drought to hurricanes to worm infestations), and incorporated the cultural connections between Europe, the Americas, and West Africa, including accounting for the revolutionary discourse and realities that swayed the fates of so many “Atlantic Africans.”
Catron does a beautiful job of weaving together the disparate experiences and historiographies of Portuguese Afro-Catholicism on the west coast of Africa; Afro-Moravianism in the Danish and British West Indies; and African-American Protestantism in low-country Georgia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean, and beyond, including repeatedly showing the potential for Protestant evangelicalism to foster a form of resistance, as in the Denmark Vessey revolt plot. But even better: the author succeeds in showing—in new ways—how these African diasporic communities created evangelical networks and, in so doing, made Protestantism an integral part of their cultural identity and embraced it as a bulwark against the dehumanization of enslavement.
Yet, despite gesturing to this possibility of black Protestantism as a form of resistance, Catron never fully articulates the Protestant Atlantic African identity he champions. He makes abundantly clear how evangelical Protestantism spread through Atlantic African communities in West Africa, the West Indies, the Middle Colonies, and Georgia and South Carolina. But his lively narrative of the spread of Protestantism into the Atlantic African world assumes rather than investigates the Atlantic African identity he claims it spawned. Relatedly, the monograph's tracing of the development of Atlantic African identity would have benefited from an organization of the manuscript that was more chronological and thematic, and less regional. As it stands, the book is structured around particular regions and, as such, each chapter keeps repeating the same chronology, which not only makes the reading less pleasurable, but also dilutes the strength of the arguments and evidence.
These latter minor critiques should not detract from my positive assessment of this commanding interpretation and wide-spanning contribution to our understanding of the role of Protestant evangelicalism in the creation of black identity in the Atlantic world. Embracing Protestantism is a “must read” for all students and scholars of black evangelical Protestantism in the Atlantic world.
