Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.
Gerbner's study delves most deeply and thoroughly into developments that largely played out during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet, it is also a book premised on some assertions about the formative role of Protestantism in the founding of English and Dutch colonies. In particular, she has some important things to say about the way that colonists used Protestantism to legitimize slavery and mastery during the early colonial era. The story that she tells in her opening chapters is a story of Anglo- and Dutch-Americans who “articulate[d] and implement[ed] a new ideology of Protestant Supremacy.”Footnote 2
Protestant Supremacy, in and of itself, is an inviting subject for all that it promises to describe and explain about the early modern Protestant Atlantic world. For Gerbner, however, Protestant Supremacy is especially important because she sees it is an emerging ideology (one that was actively constructed) that signals how the Protestant Europeans who came to inhabit American colonies were either different from, or made different choices than, their European cousins. Considering the fact that the book moves generally in the direction of a careful consideration of why planters might have had different ideas than church officials and state representatives about the desirability of converting Africans (and African-descended individuals) to Christianity, this is an important foundational argument. Only by establishing the existence of a widespread acceptance of Protestant Supremacy among early Americans can she particularize her story in a way that explains the embrace of the logic of White Supremacy by some Christians but not others.
While it does seem likely that such a thing as Protestant Supremacy was a tool in the hands of the early English and Dutch actors tasked with describing the difference between who should be free and who could be enslaved, it is also a concept that has its complications. Although Gerbner is generally interested in attacking her subject with surgical precision, Protestant Supremacy turns out to be a rather blunt instrument. For example, Protestant Supremacy was far from a new idea in the Protestant Atlantic world and generations of English writers imbued it with ideological force, in other places and in other contexts, before the questions of “race” or “slavery” had to be figured out in plantation colonies. In the Anglophone world, it clearly tracks back to the sixteenth century where it was an arrow in the quiver of English theologians and constitutionalists concerned with describing what made Protestantism better than Catholicism, as well as why Protestants were the most authentic representatives of pure Christianity in the early modern world. This story of “Protestant Supremacy” is much more concerned with “English exceptionalism” in a religious or even ethno-nationalist context than either race or slavery.
For example, throughout the sixteenth century, and especially after the Reformation, a number of English would-be historians and theologians spilled ink on the subject of the Protestant schism in a way designed to establish the purity and superiority of the English Church. Some of them, like John Bale, took strides to distinguish the English Church from the Roman Church by suggesting that the two had been walking along different paths for a long time. In one story, Bale claimed that the seeds of the pure church had been planted in English soil in 63 CE when Joseph of Arimathea delivered the good news, and “not from Rome whom both Peter & Christ called Babylon.” In fact, Bale claimed, Roman agents had spoiled things upon their arrival in the sixth century. In essence, as early as the mid-sixteenth century, English apologists were already making the argument that (in John Aylmer's famous words) “God is English.”Footnote 3
These sorts of assertions were clear statements of national pride and the primacy of the English Church over a long period. No work was more important in that regard than John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, more commonly known as The Book of Martyrs (a work that Gerbner mentions briefly). Foxe, too, emphasized that the English were God's chosen people, that they had received the pure church earlier than any other nation, and that they had largely avoided the contamination that had corrupted continental (especially Roman) Christianity.
What is the significance of this tradition? For the purposes of thinking through the arguments in Gerbner's work, it seems worth fleshing out the nature of “Protestant Supremacy” at its founding in order to clarify with even greater precision what it was before we address what it became (which, again, is where Gerbner is most concerned). One thing that she is careful to note is that early English Protestants (whether approaching the subject from a religious or secular point of view) agreed that they were an inherently “free” people. More interesting, I think, is that English freedom had been contested on numerous occasions as others had sought to do them harm or even enslave them. Thus, “Protestant Supremacy” came to life within the context of a much longer-lived narrative concerned with the struggle to preserve liberty in the face of efforts to reduce the English nation to a state of slavery, often by other Europeans. That the English could not, and would not, be enslaved was a core idea of English national identity at the moment they began to get involved with overseas enterprises.Footnote 4
There is more to this line of inquiry that could be developed to enhance the argument Gerbner is already trying to make. The emergence of a sense of national identity in the sixteenth century was not just theological and ideological in nature, it was also arguably ethnocentric in a way designed to set the English apart as a people above everyone else in the world. When the English fought against human bondage in the sixteenth century, their real and imagined oppressors were many. John Bale, in the course of censuring Catholic bishops, characterized Englishmen as a people “cruelly enslaved by the tyrannical papists, who made them suffer far more than the Israelites did when enslaved by Pharoah.” In his anti-French tract, John Aylmer prayed that the God who defended his children of Israel might “defend us from the slavery and misery of that proude nacyon, that cruel people, and tiranous rulers.” And, later, in the context of the Anglo-Spanish War, Elizabeth rallied her nation by warning that Spain and the papacy were preparing to invade England and “overthrow our most happy estate and flourishing commonweal, and to subject the same to the proud, servile, and slavish government of foreigners and strangers.” Worse still, Elizabeth suggested, the pope was plotting to incite the English “to betray and yield themselves, their parents, kindred, and children … to be subjects and slaves to aliens and strangers.”Footnote 5
As with these fears of the mounting threat posed by slavery, expressions of English ethnic/racial superiority through either British or Anglo-Saxon descent were also on the rise in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By the 1640s—at precisely the moment English colonists in Barbados were beginning to solidify a system of slavery rooted in the exploitation of African and indigenous Americans—John Hare wrote in St. Edward's Ghost that Englishmen should revel in their ancestry, characterized by “our generosity of blood and freeness of descent and condition.”Footnote 6 These ideas took on an even more jingoistic fervor during the English Civil War as nationalistic English writers increasingly couched their discussions of their native land in the language of purity and righteousness. The English, some were inclined to emphasize, were not bound together just by common laws, language, or terrain, but also by their uncorrupted blood line. In Richard Verstegan's words from 1605, Englishmen were the direct descendants of a people that had “ever kept themselves unmixed with forrain peoples.”Footnote 7
Not surprisingly, there is plenty of interesting evidence along these lines that the English were also already thinking about Africans and African-descended people. On the one hand, some Africans already lived in England by the late sixteenth century, where they had been baptized as Christians and buried with Christian rites. There was also some sense that Africans could be worked into the imagined Protestant Atlantic world under English auspices as partners and allies against the more looming threat posed by Iberian powers (although this was rarely conceived in religious terms). For nearly a century after English ships began visiting the African coast with increasing regularity beginning in the 1550s, a variety of Englishmen put forward schemes that imagined ways to bridge the divide between the English and African peoples throughout the Atlantic world. Of course, little of this was surprising in the context of the Anglo-Spanish War of the late sixteenth century or the emerging “Black Legend.” Certainly, the English did not hesitate to enslave Africans when circumstances allowed, and Elizabeth plotted to rid England of its small black population in the final years of her reign (1596 and 1601). There was no consistently “English” or “Anglo-American” (or Dutch, presumably) policy when it came to imagining how black-skinned people might factor into things—beyond, of course, that slavery was desirable for would-be masters.
This brief outline of what might be imagined as the pre-history of “Protestant Supremacy” is not intended to challenge Gerbner's argument. Rather, it is offered by way of a suggestion that there is another potential link in the chain of a broader discussion of the eventual development of “White Supremacy.” Protestant Supremacy was surely a device in the hands of enslavers—a gateway ideological rationalization for doing something that was largely indefensible by conventional measures (such as common law). But it could only work if it was at once theologically defensible and already colored by at least some elements of a racial logic.
Which gets us back to Gerbner's origin story: the real problem (for Gerbner and others before her) with slavery in the English colonies at its founding is that, while it was often taken for granted, whenever people got around to writing down the rules about it, they most often articulated things in language that invoked religion rather than race. Many of the laws on the books differentiated between Christians and heathens, not between whites and blacks. Gerbner, it seems, takes this as an indication that there was a meaningful distinction being made here and that there was an operative ideology at work (“Protestant Supremacy”)—that the laws really meant something in colonial American settings. One wonders, however, to what degree Protestant Supremacy, or Christianity more broadly, may have been more of a useful tool (or a cover) than a meaningful “ideology.” Did English and Dutch colonists “articulate and implement a new ideology of Protestant Supremacy” or did they simply cut-and-paste from a widely available transatlantic lexicon that could be used to describe, explain, or justify a whole host of New World circumstances?Footnote 8
Whatever the case, Gerbner has done us all a great service in drawing a line between the early religious history of the Protestant Atlantic world and the eventual articulation of a White Supremacist ideology.
