Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

This study contributes admirably to Atlantic world studies of enslavement, and to produce it Katharine Gerbner has mastered a wide variety of sources, regional histories, and theoretical approaches to history. The book shines in its discussion of religion and proslavery ideology and offers a valuable and original thesis on English, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Protestant Atlantic world. Gerbner first examines the seventeenth-century planter proslavery ideology, labeled by the author as “Protestant supremacy,” that separated “Christian” masters from “heathenish” slaves (p. 2). In the 1600s Protestant masters associated their faith with freedom. These colonial masters resisted missions to convert the enslaved “heathens,” and, instead, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries promoted “Christian slavery,” which became the dominant ideology in the eighteenth century. This ideology justified slavery by extolling its role in converting and Christianizing the enslaved. Gerbner convincingly shows how, particularly in Barbados and St. Thomas, missionaries of these denominations developed a new justification for enslavement. The move from Protestant supremacy to Christian slavery constituted a transition between different forms of proslavery. This shift had paradoxical sources and effects. A tragic effect was that race rather than religious status became a leading justification for enslavement. The Anglicans, Moravians, and especially the Quakers of the era are traditionally held to have developed humanitarian and antislavery ideas, and scholars have examined their documents and institutional histories with an eye to revealing this humanitarianism. Yet Gerbner reveals that the missionaries had a crucial role in developing white supremacy. Less well known, the breakdown of Protestant supremacy based on exclusion of non-Protestant slaves also originated in the actions of enslaved and free Afro-Caribbeans. “Favored” enslaved and free blacks sought out membership in white churches as a sign of status and a route to literacy and freedom. Black action and agency thus undermined Protestant supremacy by creating a new class of converts who participated in and appropriated conversion, literacy, and access to Protestant worship and the Bible for their own purposes. Conversions of some enslaved Africans preceded missionary work. When Quaker, Anglican, Moravian, and other Protestants sought converts among the enslaved, they met free and enslaved blacks, new converts and old, who asserted their own visions of Protestantism.