This article traces the presence in the Arab world of international Christian student organizations like the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and its intercollegiate branches of the YMCA and YWCA associated with the Protestant missionary movement in nineteenth-century Beirut. There, an American-affiliated branch of the YMCA emerged at Syrian Protestant College in the 1890s, and the Christian women's student movement formed in the early twentieth century after a visit from WSCF secretaries John Mott and Ruth Rouse. As such, student movements took on lives of their own, and they developed in directions that Western missionary leaders never anticipated. By attending to the ways in which the WSCF and YMCA/YWCA drew Arabs into the global ecumenical movement, this study examines the shifting aims of Christian student associations in twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon, from missionary-supported notions of evangelical revival to ecumenical renewal and interreligious movements for national reform.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern within the Church of Sweden that the church was, to a too large extent, managed by the clergy alone. In an attempt to give the laity a more active and influential role in the Church of Sweden, the Brethren of the Church was established in 1918. Since it was only possible for men to become members, the organization simultaneously addressed a different issue: the view that women had become a much too salient group in church life. This process was described by the Brethren and similar groups as a “feminization” of the church, a phrasing which later came to be used by historians and theologians to explain changes in Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Brethren considered questions of gender vital to their endeavor to create a church in which the laity held a more prominent position. This article analyzes how the perceived feminization and its assumed connection to secularization caused enhanced attempts to uphold and strengthen gender differentiation in the Church of Sweden in the early twentieth century. By analyzing an all-male lay organization, the importance of homosociality in the construction of Christian masculinities will also be discussed.

The traditional narrative of religion and the gay rights movement in the post-1960s United States emphasizes conservative Christians and their opposition to gay rights. Few studies focus on the supportive role Christian leaders and churches played in advancing gay rights and nurturing a positive gay identity for homosexual Americans. Concentrating on the period from 1977 to 1993 and drawing largely from manuscript collections at the Minnesota Historical Society, including the Minnesota GLBT Movement papers of Leo Treadway, this study of Christianity and gay rights in the state of Minnesota demonstrates that while Christianity has often been an oppressive force on homosexuals and homosexuality, Christianity was also a liberalizing influence. Putting forth arguments derived from religious understandings, using biblical passages as “proof” texts, and showing a mutuality between the liberal theological tradition and the secular political position, the Christian community was integral to advancing gay rights and liberation in Minnesota by the early 1990s despite religious right resistance. These efforts revealed a Christianity driven to actualize the love of God here on earth and ensure human wholeness, freedom, and an authentic selfhood. Christian clergy, churches, and ordinary persons of faith thus undertook activity in three areas to ensure wholeness and freedom: political activity for civil protections; emotional, pastoral care for persons with AIDS; and as a source of self-affirmation and social comfort in the midst of an inhospitable society.

Between roughly 1500 and nearly the end of the nineteenth century, slave traders sent more than twelve million enslaved Africans to the Americas. It is no secret that Christianity was deeply complicit with the rise of the plantation system that created the lethally voracious demand for forced labor. Two basic questions have preoccupied historians studying the links between religion and slavery: why did Christianity become an ideological bulwark for human bondage; and why did enslaved Africans and their descendants begin to embrace a religion so friendly to slavery, inverting it into a spiritual vernacular of liberation and transcendence? Whereas historians of Atlantic world Protestantism have mostly probed these questions in their North American contexts, Katherine Gerbner's book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, shifts the focus to the Caribbean of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Protestant missionaries there began proselytizing among enslaved Africans at least half a century earlier than in North America, creating connections between race, religion, and slavery that would prove perniciously durable across both time and region. In this forum, four distinguished scholars consider the implications of Gerbner's work.

Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.

Katharine Gerbner's wide-ranging and provocative book connects a broad range of scholarship on religion and race in the Protestant Atlantic world prior to the Great Awakening. It is organized around her concept of an emerging ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which she argues was the first step toward White Supremacy. This ideology came out of evangelizing failures in the seventeenth-century colonial Americas as Protestant slaveholders reframed their own values on religious and secular freedom in the context of colonial settlement and the growth of African slavery. This argument is entirely convincing and innovative in its comparisons of sometimes separate denominational scholarship. In my comments, I hope to reflect on Gerbner's use of the word conversion, a keyword in her book's title and one that many religious historians employ in their own work. Gerbner outlined her views in the introduction to her book (pages 6–12), but a fuller version of her arguments can also be found in her 2015 article published in History Compass, “Theorizing Conversion: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Her engagement with scholarly definitions rightly focuses on the malleability of what defined conversion in this eighteenth century Protestant Atlantic world—both when comparing different denominations and as a process that changed over time in conversation with things like slavery. She retains the word since the baptism and conversion of enslaved Africans prompted European Protestants to rethink their definition of Christianity, and particularly prompted them to find new ways to exclude non-whites. She also argues that using the term conversion helps to validate the actions and self-articulated changed identity of African-descendant converts as they engaged with majority white cultures hostile to their inclusion in the Christian community.

Over the last generation, historians have begun to explain Christianity's impact on developing ideas of race and slavery in the early modern Atlantic. Jon Sensbach's A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 showed how Moravians struggled with both race and slavery, ultimately concluding that Moravians adopted the racist attitudes of their non-Pietist North Carolina neighbors. Travis Glasson's Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World showed how the Anglican church accustomed itself to slavery in New York and the Caribbean. Richard Bailey's Race and Redemption in Puritan New England unraveled changing puritan ideas about race and belonging in New England. My own book, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, argued that Protestant ideas about heathenism and conversion were instrumental to how English Virginians thought about the bodies and souls of enslaved Africans and Native people, and to how they developed a nascent idea of race in seventeenth-century Virginia. Heather Kopelson's Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic traced puritan ideas about race, the soul, and the body in New England and Bermuda. From a different angle, Christopher Cameron's To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement outlined the influence of puritan theologies on black abolitionism. Engaging all this scholarly ferment is Katharine Gerbner's new book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Gerbner's work both synthesizes and transforms this extended scholarly conversation with a broad and inclusive look at Protestants—broadly defined as Anglicans, Moravians, Quakers, Huguenots, and others—and race in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over a geography stretching from New York to the Caribbean. The book is synthetic in that it builds on the regional and confessionally specific work of earlier scholars, but innovative in its argument that Protestants from a variety of European backgrounds and sometimes conflicting theologies all wrestled with questions of Christian conversion of enslaved peoples—could it be done? Should it be done? And, of overarching concern: how could Protestant Christians in good conscience hold fellow African and Native Christians as slaves?