Neither the word mission nor any cognate thereof appeared in William III's 1701 charter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Though conceived as the Church of England's answer to the Roman Catholic Congregation de Propaganda Fide, the king's charter merely empowered the society to remedy the insufficiency of public worship in “Our Plantations, Colonies and Factories beyond the Seas.” For all the missionary aspirations of its founders, the SPG's royal mandate seemed largely confined to “our loving subjects” abroad. In its first century, the SPG was defined by this polarity between ambitious evangelization and imperial accommodation, between Christianization of unbaptized peoples and ecclesiastical incorporation of Englishmen and women in the colonies.
This is why Travis Glasson's marvelous new study of the SPG's operations among African slave populations in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world is such a welcome addition to our understanding of the dynamics of imperial Christianity. After all, ministering to slave populations in the colonies confounded the dichotomy between evangelization of non-Christians and institutional provision for European Protestants. African slaves in the New World were both an alien and a domestic population at once. The SPG's attempts at converting African slaves thus exposed the very real antinomies at the heart of the “missionary Anglicanism” of Glasson's subtitle—and, indeed, the very notion of “loving subjects” in William's charter.
Glasson's deeply researched and thoroughly engaging Mastering Christianity begins with an overview of the institutional and ideological foundations of missionary Anglicanism. He rightly places the genesis of the SPG in the multifaceted program of Anglican renewal adopted in the years surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. The intellectual foundations of the SPG, Glasson argues, lay in the contemporaneous culture of the English clerical enlightenment, with its healthy regard for the universality of natural religion and its preoccupation with using the scriptural genealogies of “ethnic theology” to explain human difference while reaffirming for all peoples a common descent from Adam. The SPG's initial approach to slave populations was thus underpinned by a “reformist zeal and religiously grounded belief in the essential unity of human kind” (4). The society proceeded upon the conviction that the institution of slavery, if reformed to reflect both the essential humanity and the potential Christianity of Africans, could be made compatible with the Gospel.
The early SPG did not, however, mount any substantive opposition to the institution of slavery. Glasson shows that even its initial mildly reformist imperatives foundered on the shoals of colonial American society. As the SPG became ever more enmeshed in the material and political realities of colonial life, it came to embrace not only the institution of slavery but, increasingly, the cruelty and violence by which it was maintained. By the mid-eighteenth century, the relationship between planter and missionary in the empire had come to resemble that between squire and parson back home. In the case of Codrington Plantation in Barbados, which the society inherited in 1710, the SPG came to serve as both master and minister. In this venture, Glasson convincingly demonstrates, the political and economic exigencies of the former role generally predominated. After 1740, in the face of the enthusiasm and disorder of the Great Awakening—not to mention Protestant evangelical successes in appealing to slave populations—the SPG effectively abandoned the last vestiges of reformist zeal and became positively committed to the defense of slavery. It was in this reactionary mind-set, Glasson argues, that the SPG confronted with hostility the nascent antislavery movement of the later eighteenth century.
Mastering Christianity thus uncovers a kind of ecclesiastical subimperialism at work in the operations of the SPG. The early Enlightenment impulse to reform slavery, nursed in the pulpits, coffeehouses, and Boyle Lectures of the metropole, waned on the colonial periphery. The missionaries of the SPG were not itinerant evangelists but sedentary parish ministers, men of property and society (increasingly, slave owners themselves) bound by interest, marriage, and tithe to the colonial communities in their care. Their moral distance from colonial life quickly collapsed and with it their capacity to critique the social and economic foundations of the Atlantic world. In Glasson's telling, the fusion of Anglicanism and Atlantic slave society largely occurred in places like Barbados and Charleston and the British slave forts of West Africa. Glasson has offered a seemingly unanswerable challenge to the early twentieth-century school of Frank Klingberg and the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who insisted on locating the SPG firmly within the genealogy of British humanitarianism.
Glasson's thesis is an original and compelling one. Although, as with all subimperialist approaches, there is some tendency to lose sight of the metropole—in this case, the metropolitan church. The relationship between the SPG and the established church is not always kept clear. There is little effort to establish the theological and ecclesiological self-identity of the eighteenth-century Church of England antecedent to its moral and ideological imbrication in the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, the reader is assured that the SPG initially embodied something of a consensus position within the postrevolutionary church. As Glasson somewhat peremptorily dismisses the contest of high- and low-church Anglicanism that structured ecclesiastical politics throughout much of the century, it is not entirely clear how such a consensus was maintained. Moreover, absent a working sense of theological and ecclesiological development in the church, Protestant evangelicalism enters the narrative with the force of an exogenous shock—often appearing more like a rival denomination than a movement internal to the Anglican communion. Presumably, the crumbling of whatever imperial Anglican consensus the SPG once embodied was part and parcel of a broader crisis in the established church. But this goes unaddressed. As it stands, Mastering Christianity presents a richly detailed portrait of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, whose commitment to slavery seems to have deepened as its representativeness of the church as a whole diminished.
