This essay surveys contemporary challenges facing Christian communities across the English-speaking Caribbean. The area described as the Caribbean region consists of the lands within the Caribbean Sea – all of the islands and the surrounding coasts. It stretches from the south-east of the Gulf of Mexico and the southern coast of the USA to the eastern coast of Central America and the northern coast of South America.

The Anglophone Caribbean includes the following independent states: Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. Guyana and Belize are referred to as Mainland Caribbean. There are five British overseas Caribbean territories, namely Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Colonial Legacy

From the late fifteenth century, European imperial powers competed for ownership of the Caribbean lands. Beginning with the Spanish, constant competitive conquest continued with English, French and Dutch explorers, who colonised the different lands. The original name given by European colonisers to the area was West Indies, and to the people West Indians, based upon a mistaken understanding that they had found a westerly route to India. The terms therefore belong to a colonial and imperial concept of classifying and prescribing colonised Indigenous peoples and those of African and Asian ancestry with an identity rooted in an inherent colonial contradiction. A mass movement of peoples into the Caribbean resulted in a mosaic of ethnic diversity with competing cultural traditions, which also became a distinctive feature of Caribbean Christianity.

As a result of military, political and economic conquest, many of the Indigenous peoples experienced genocide at the hands of the Europeans, whose worldview classified them as not being ‘fully human’. Their vulnerability to European diseases and enslavement fast-tracked their death. The European colonisation project received the strategic support of missionary Christianity within the Caribbean. Roman Catholic and Protestant missions, with their different religio-cultural traditions, were transported and transplanted within the Caribbean. The early missionary movements included the Church of England (Anglican), Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) and others labelled as Nonconformist, such as Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists and Moravians.