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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2019
In her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, Katharine Gerbner offers a rich history of Protestant planters’ efforts to tether Christian identity to free status and European descent in the American colonies, and missionaries’ answering attempts to reconcile African and indigenous conversion with enslavement. Gerbner's concept of Protestant Supremacy names the sociopolitical function and economic utility of “religious belonging,” specifically how Christian institutional, discursive, and ritual spaces demarcated boundaries between the enslaved and their enslavers, prefiguring race in the process. In this history of Atlantic slavery, religion is not subsidiary to the punitive, legal, sexual, and economic systems that enabled the enslavement of African and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Rather, Gerbner argues that Protestant Christianity provided a metastructure for the race-based caste systems that emerged in Barbados and other British colonies in the Americas. Through an intense and extensive interrogation of correspondence, missionary accounts, and institutional records from across the Atlantic, she traces how Protestant emissaries established “Christian” as a “protoracial” term and hastened the legal and discursive codification of lineage-based American caste systems in the process. The linkage of Christian identity and nascent whiteness not only exposes the Protestant architecture of American racial logics, but also sparks nuanced questions about how African, indigenous, and creole people oriented themselves toward Protestantism in early America. In this way, Gerbner definitively situates religion at the center of ongoing conversations about racial formation in the Americas, while opening up avenues for fresh speculation and imaginative intellectual trajectories in studies of American religion and Atlantic slavery.
24 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 31.
25 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 80. See also the concept of “hereditary heathenism,” in Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 3.
26 For exceptions to this, see for instance Long, Charles H., Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 1986), 89–106Google Scholar, 171–186; and Noel, James A., Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 15–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Smallwood, Stephanie E., Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35Google Scholar; and Eltis, David, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (December 1993): 1400–1402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 180.
29 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 3.
30 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 86–87; and Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 194.
31 Raboteau, Albert J., Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99–150Google Scholar; and Frey, Sylvia R. and Wood, Betty, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 63–69Google Scholar.
32 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 130–131.
33 For discussions of power in the religious cultures of southern enslaved people, see Chireau, Yvonne P., Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Jason R., Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Brown, Ras Michael, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 For an example of this type of analysis in the Catholic context, see Fromont, Cecile, “Under the Sign of the Cross in the Kingdom of Kongo: Religious Conversion and Visual Correlation in early Modern Central Africa,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (Spring/Autumn 2011): 112Google Scholar.