When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us”, they invoked antiquated claims that conflated ethnic and religious identity. For scholars investigating the development of racism in the Atlantic World, religion has long been a complex variable. At turns, it could be a moderating influence that appealed for shared humanity across all groups. Much more often, however, it could be employed to divide and oppress. In Katharine Gerbner's fascinating history of global Protestantism in the long seventeenth century, religious conversion acts as a cornerstone in the construction of racialized bondage. She argues that the white supremacy so familiar to our understanding of plantation slavery was built directly on top of earlier Protestant power that reigned in the New World. In the process, her book makes a compelling case for the centrality of religion to the early history of American slavery.
Gerbner's study rightly frames Protestantism as a locus of institutional power, as much as an ideology of belief, in the Americas. The ability to minister to enslaved people trespassed into the perceived control that planters had over their workers. Conversion posed two significant threats: sowing confusion among the baptized that they were now free, and enabling those who accepted the faith to read and write. Scholars of the Iberian Atlantic will recognize this struggle immediately, as Spanish and Portuguese officials encouraged the baptism of enslaved Africans to constrain colonial autonomy. For Northern European empires administering much less oversight onto their imperial peripheries, such ambiguities of power were unwelcome. Planters, instead, firmly took the reins of colonial governance, and—in the case of Barbados—guided the Anglican Church's teachings to service their own needs. This fact meant not only a reduction in evangelical opportunities but also an agreement that ministers could only stay in their posts if they made it clear to congregants that slavery and Christianity were compatible. Thus, the Anglican Church collaborated with colonists in subduing enslaved populations, as did the missionaries who arrived later from across Europe. In Gerbner's telling, then, the Protestant Caribbean was not a hotbed of heresy, but a religiously-minded region in which discipline and dogma worked in tandem.
Although it did not take long for colonists to hamstring their clerical neighbors, the two groups would continue to battle for decades. Gerbner explores this contest in several ways. First, she traces colonial legislation in the 1660s to reveal the process by which “Christian” came to stand exclusively for those of European descent, while “white” accordingly became synonymous with freedom. The terms “Negro” and “Indian” were suddenly outside the category of Christianity in legal statutes, even though many non-white people had already converted. There are nods here to the continuing historical debate about whether blanket anti-black racism operated to any recognizable degree during the mid-seventeenth century. Gerbner largely avoids this question, instead remarking that “the language of race would replace religious terminology in the Protestant Atlantic world” (48). Second, Gerbner follows the missionary work of the Quakers and Moravians at the turn of the eighteenth century to demonstrate both groups’ acquiescence to planter demands. George Fox visited Barbados in the hopes of converting the enslaved, but he spoke of freedom as a spiritual matter, not a legal or material one. Likewise, Moravian missions to St. Thomas reaffirmed that converts were still subservient to their masters, even if they were superior to them in morals. The Moravians more aggressively pursued literacy campaigns—mainly at the request of enslaved congregants—which enraged planters who worried about potential uprisings. Third, she documents the rise of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), and its initial flourishing through the assistance of a gift by Christopher Codrington, who gave the organization his plantation and several hundred enslaved workers. Rather than emancipate those individuals, the SPG relished the opportunity to demonstrate how productive a converted laborer could be. By the mid-eighteenth century, then, missionaries continued to lobby for conversion, even though they had long conceded that slavery was just. This situation would eventually produce currents of anti-slavery protest, but more importantly, it reaffirmed to a broad audience that race was at the core of enslavement.
Christian Slavery is a thorough and precise account of Protestantism's role in the development of white supremacism. It offers a refined mix of religious theology, social history, and race studies that is both globally positioned and locally focused. It is also, not surprisingly, a history of the evangelizers’ Protestantism, and not that of their converts. Church records, along with plantation accounts, are highly incomplete for the seventeenth century, making it difficult to understand how non-white congregants operated within the fold. At times, Gerbner offers tantalizing morsels: partial stories of baptisms, brief complaints about enslaved demands for literacy, and hints at converts’ possible rebelliousness. Her fourth chapter uses baptismal records to uncover a handful of stories of enslaved marriages within the church, but there is a frustrating absence of analysis on this front. The author could have made much more of the generational connections between enslaved Protestants, their distribution within urban versus rural environments, selected evidence of planter treatment of converts, or even a deeper probing of the evidence trotted out against enslaved congregants when supposed conspiracies came to light. Gerbner makes a subsidiary argument that enslaved baptism was an implicit challenge to evangelical defenses of slavery, but the evidence offered here is far too thin to support the claim.
Nevertheless, the book's core contention is provocative and elegantly made. For scholars of the seventeenth century, Gerbner's precise deconstruction of missionary work will help to clarify the muddle of religious activity within early slave societies. For those who study the eighteenth century, her work gives a vibrant sense of the complicated antecedents to anti-slavery activism. It serves a broad audience, and—in a rare feat—makes a substantial contribution to several historical fields.
