Christian Slavery

Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

By: Katharine Gerbner

Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley

Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy", which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion.

When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery", arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal.

Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

©2018 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2021 Tantor

An interesting take on the origins of anti-black racism

The author looks at on-the-ground sources for the first century (or so) of the Atlantic slave trade in the West Indies and on the North American continent. She argues that, ironically, sincere efforts by white missionaries to Christianize enslaved people actually contributed to development of an ideology (“Protestant supremacy”) that reinforced the supposed legitimacy of racialized slavery. This is a detailed, careful academic work arguing a plausible and important thesis. The narration is fine.

Fascinating, thorough, compelling

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Americas, especially a critical and intellectually honest historical perspective. This book has provided me with several other avenues to research and learn about and I will look for more from this author as well.

I read a hard copy of this book a few years ago and decided to revisit via audible. I enjoyed the narrator’s voice and style. Five stars all around.

Radicalized slavery required Christian support

The rough thesis is that racial hierarchy developed not through an inherently racialized system but through a belief in Christian (and later Protestant) supremacy where Christianity was viewed as a type of ethnic identity, and only later was that Protestant (ethnic) identity slowly shifted over to white racial identity. Chapter four developed this idea most clearly:

"Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant slave owners gradually replaced the term "Christian" with the word "white" in their law books and in their vernacular speech. Scholars have long recognized that whiteness emerged from the protoethnic term "Christian." Yet the intimate relationship between slave conversion and whiteness has not been fully appreciated. By pairing baptismal records with legal documents, it becomes clear that the development of "whiteness" on Barbados was a direct response to the small but growing population of free black Christians." (p74)

In the 17th Century, the British began to colonize what became the United States and the Caribbean. The split of the Church of England from the broader Catholic church started in the 16th century. Still, it was not until the early 17th century that the Church of England was firmly established as a religious/cultural identity. And even then, in the mid-17th Century, the English Civil War shifted that identity. This Protestant identity developed concurrently with the rise of colonization, the development of capitalistic enterprises, and increased interaction with different cultures and geography. The weakness of the Church of England in the colonies (the churches were culturally important, but often there was a lack of clergy and no real supervision from the ecclesiastical structure) meant that the direction of church policy was more directed by concerns of lay people than theological or missiological concerns. Similar to the arguments of Joel McDermot's The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Gerbner illustrates how the development of slavery can be traced legally through changes in law, but also points out how Christian theology was explicitly or implicitly used to create a justification for that law because of economic concerns.

One of the helpful aspects of Christian Slavery is that she looks primarily at the English-speaking Caribbean and then compares that with the British colonies in what became the United States and the Catholic colonies in the Caribbean. This methodology uses other English-speaking and non-Protestant non-English speaking communities to explore similarities and differences in how those areas approached the relationship between Christianity and slavery. There was significant communication between these groups, and within the English-speaking colonies, you can see legal language moving from community to community as they all attempted to address similar issues.

The 17th and 18th century was still very close to the reformation, and by this time, religious identity had been largely incorporated into ethnic identity. Within the Catholic domain, baptism and conversion of enslaved were more common, in part because the missionary orders of Dominicans and Jesuits who were politically and socially powerful and somewhat independent from state and economic concerns.

By the 1680s, the English protestant system had adopted a different approach, religious toleration. The Church of England was the state church, but to different extents, Catholics, Baptists, Friends, and other minority religious positions were tolerated legally, even as the Anglicans were politically dominant. The Catholic missionary orders were unable to act completely independently, and while there were many examples of abuse of slavery and bigotry against Native American or African slaves, many of the examples of Christians calling for human rights for the enslaved or indigenous were from the relatively independent missionary orders.

On the other hand, almost all church officials within the English-speaking Protestant world were based on a parish system and funded through local support, which meant that the clergy were dependent upon financial support primarily through either tithes or tax support from the local community, both of which were dominated by wealthy land owners who were largely wealthy because of their slave holdings. There were some missionary activities within the English-Speaking Protestant colonies, but even that was largely supported by the wealth directly or indirectly supported through slavery. It was only later in the early 19th century that abolitionist-leaning mission agencies arose that were financially independent of slave wealth.

There is a long discussion about the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel which did seek to evangelize the enslaved in both the Caribbean and British Colonies of North America. However, fairly early in the society's existence, a large donation was given to the society, which included two plantations with slaves. Gerbner has a long discussion about how becoming a slave owner as an organization impacted the mission. (The book All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church by Christopher J. Kellerman, SJ discusses how enslaving people impacted Jesuit missions.)

In Catholic and Protestant examples, the desire to evangelize ran counter to the idea that Christians could not be enslaved. Missions agencies in the English-speaking world worked to make explicit that Christians could be enslaved. And it was often in the same laws, as in the example of New York that is discussed extensively, suggested that slave owners allow for the evangelism of the enslaved also said that baptism was not grounds for manumission and that slavery was racially restricted to only non-white people and that slavery was passed down from mother to child, not father to child, as was part of traditional British common law.

A chapter on the Moravian missions to the enslaved discussed the Moravian focus on inner transformation in contrast to freedom from slavery. Moravians were theologically so focused on the inner transformation that they, like British mission groups, taught the enslaved that part of true Christianity was to be a good slave and not seek freedom. Gerbner is talking in this chapter about a theological decision to split social justice from evangelism. This movement became more explicit later but had its roots early in Protestantism.

Slavery developed into a race-based chattel slavery system in the western hemisphere because of economic incentives. But it is also true that it could not have developed into the system that it did without the support of the church, both Protestant and Catholic.