Between roughly 1500 and nearly the end of the nineteenth century, slave traders sent more than twelve million enslaved Africans to the Americas. It is no secret that Christianity was deeply complicit with the rise of the plantation system that created the lethally voracious demand for forced labor. Two basic questions have preoccupied historians studying the links between religion and slavery: why did Christianity become an ideological bulwark for human bondage; and why did enslaved Africans and their descendants begin to embrace a religion so friendly to slavery, inverting it into a spiritual vernacular of liberation and transcendence? Whereas historians of Atlantic world Protestantism have mostly probed these questions in their North American contexts, Katherine Gerbner's book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, shifts the focus to the Caribbean of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Protestant missionaries there began proselytizing among enslaved Africans at least half a century earlier than in North America, creating connections between race, religion, and slavery that would prove perniciously durable across both time and region. In this forum, four distinguished scholars consider the implications of Gerbner's work.Footnote 1
Protestant missionaries in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Gerbner argues, helped to justify slavery on religious grounds that fortified emerging ideas of race. As numerous scholars have noted, the slave trade accelerated as colonial authorities contrived legal codes prescribing enslavement for Africans based on racial difference. Religion was at the heart of many of those codes. If Africans were baptized, was it still legal to enslave fellow Christians, or did they become free, as allowed under English common law? Given this legal ambiguity, many Africans sought out Christianity hoping to gain freedom; as a result, planters passed new laws forbidding manumission upon baptism. To gain access to enslaved Africans that suspicious planters might otherwise deny, missionaries abetted this scheme. While championing the idea that Africans had souls worthy of salvation, ministers contended that bodily freedom was rooted in “white” racial identity not religion. Thus, the decades between about 1670 and 1740 were foundational for the legal and religious construction of racial slavery. Missionaries were the foot soldiers who built the ideological bridge between the militant Protestantism of English, Dutch, and Danish imperialism in the Atlantic world, which Gerbner calls “Protestant supremacy” and racial identity, or White Supremacy.
Gerbner examines three distinct phases of this long process as sections in a historical arc. She contends that Quaker evangelism in late seventeenth-century Barbados represented a first reckoning with racial slavery by missionaries and thus a template for more systematic missionary endeavors in the eighteenth century. In Barbados, as well, the Church of England's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel further articulated a racialized theological discourse that defended slavery while arguing for the benefits of Christianity as a “civilizing” agent for primitive heathens. And Moravian missions in the Danish West Indies in the 1730s inaugurated a new phase of mission activity that saw Africans gain baptism and join Christian congregations by the thousands. Behind a facade of proslavery racism, Gerbner concludes, Christianity offered enslaved people access to alternative sources of spiritual power against oppression. Indeed, it was the dialectic between their attraction to Christianity and the slaveholders’ desire to control it that defined the interplay of slavery and Christianity in the early modern period.
In their comments, respondents praise the breadth of Gerbner's inquiry while raising questions about aspects of her interpretation. Michael Guasco suggests that a longer “pre-history of ‘Protestant Supremacy’” established precedents for racial formation earlier than the period under consideration by Gerbner. Discussing limitations and ambiguities with the term “conversion,” Kristen Block proposes that concepts of “religious practice” and “lived religion” might better characterize the accommodation and resistance commingled in enslaved Africans’ turn to White Supremacist Christianity. Rebecca Goetz wonders what connections might be made between shared Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward race and religion that amounted to a broader form of “Christian Supremacy.” Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh applauds the book's focus on missionaries’ role in early modern racial formation and emphasizes the search for power inherent in African-descended people's conversion.
In her response, Gerbner reflects on the intellectual path that led her to the term “Protestant Supremacy” and its links to the notion of White Supremacy that remains powerfully, and violently, alive in our own time. She also reaffirms the utility of the term “conversion” to represent “choices of the enslaved and free people of color who chose to become Christian, for whatever reason.” As this lively exchange shows, the ideas animating Christian Slavery are sure to influence debate on what Gerbner calls the “long, tangled, and deeply complicated relationship between religion and race” for years to come.
