Katherine Gerbner's Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World is a tremendous book. It is meticulously researched, well written, clearly argued, and takes a big-picture look while also telling small stories. Gerbner tracks the shift from what she calls Protestant Supremacy to Christian Slavery from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century in the Protestant Atlantic world (from Barbados to the Danish West Indies to Charleston). Protestant Supremacy organized slave societies by “a caste system based on Christian status,” in which Protestants reigned over tolerated religions (such as Judaism and Catholicism), with the “heathens” at the bottom (3). Christian identity was the marker of freedom and rights. Planters associated Christianity with elite status and thus had no interest in evangelizing slaves in the colonies’ early years. Anglican and Moravian missionaries “responded to this hostile environment by articulating and promoting a vision of ‘Christian Slavery’ that reconciled Protestantism with bondage” (3). This process had two significant consequences. First, missionaries argued that Christianity encouraged obedience and docile dispositions among slaves. This idea, Gerbner shows, was greatly expanded upon in the late eighteenth century and antebellum period as proslavery theology developed in the United States. Second, the missionaries’ activities shifted the language describing free identity from “Christian” to “white.”

The eight chapters that follow the introduction track this shift from Protestant Supremacy to Christian Slavery. This was not always a smooth process for missionaries, planters, or enslaved Africans. Theological ideas changed over these years, too, as baptism and conversion became entangled with freedom. The chapters of Christian Slavery reflect close, careful archival research. Gerbner utilized Moravian, Quaker, and Anglican missionary sources, written in German, Dutch, Dutch Creole, and English and written by white missionaries and enslaved and free Afro-Caribbean men and women. As such, when Gerbner explores that shift in Protestant thinking to include Afro-Caribbean converts in the Christian community, she pays attention to the voices of Afro-Caribbean converts themselves to interrogate their reasons for conversion.

The book makes a number of important historiographical interventions. Rather than emphasize “a humanitarian impulse” in early missionary records, Gerbner's book draws our attention to how even those Protestant communities most closely associated with abolition (like the Quakers) shaped conversations and actions that strengthened slavery (4). Although many historians emphasize how the Quakers’ embrace of spiritual equality later developed into abolitionist views, Gerbner's work shows how that initial idea of spiritual equality developed to promote the evangelization of enslaved persons as enslaved persons. A second key historiographical contribution is her focus on the era before the first Great Awakening. Typically, this period of evangelical revivals receives the focus through an emphasis on the attraction of enslaved persons to the revivals’ emotionalism. Although this interpretation is not incorrect, Christian Slavery does the important work of showing the consequences of the planters’ strong anticonversion sentiment. By refusing Christianity to enslaved men and women, “Protestant slave owners made Christianity a sign of mastery and power” (11). Gerbner shows how this association of Christianity with power, freedom, and literacy in the period before the Great Awakening played a significant role in Afro-Caribbean conversions. Third, although focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christian Slavery also makes an important contribution for those examining the dynamics between proslavery Christianity and Christian abolitionism in the nineteenth century. Her book explains a significant step in proslavery arguments from Africans’ perceived lack of “religion” as evidence for slavery to the need to evangelize enslaved persons as a reason for slavery's continuation. Thus, not only does her book provide important context for those antebellum debates, it also reveals so much about the power of white supremacy in present-day North America and its relationship to Christianity.

Christian Slavery is a necessary book for all academic libraries. It would find an appropriate place on many graduate course syllabi and graduate reading lists in religious studies, theology, and history. The entire book might be too much for some undergraduate courses, but a single chapter (such as 4 or 8) would work in a number of undergraduate courses in those same fields. Through her examination of the shift from Protestant Supremacy to Christian Slavery, Gerbner illuminates the close entanglement of race and religion as Christianity buttressed whiteness. Gerbner's book makes a tremendous contribution to scholarship on religion in the Atlantic world; religion, slavery, and race in the Americas; and the history of Protestantism.