The third-century martyr text that tells the story of Perpetua and her coreligionists as they witnessed to their faith in Carthage—the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas—is much beloved by modern readers. It purports to be Perpetua's prison diary, and, as such, it is the earliest writing by a Christian woman that has been preserved. In the fifth century, two shorter texts—the Acts—were written that recount in quite different ways the experiences of these North African Christians. In this essay, I explore the ways these shorter accounts reimagine the original text as well as the possible motives for doing so. The fifth-century author did not merely shorten the Passion; he made marked changes to it. It presents, for instance, a dramatic change in the death scene: whereas the Passion narrates Perpetua drawing the gladiator's sword to her own throat, the Acts report that she was killed by a lion. An analysis of these revisions to the Passion suggest the author was working from an Augustinian perspective. The author revised the Passion to deny the Donatists’ claims to the Carthaginian martyrs. The author's revision of Perpetua's death, therefore, is best understood as a rejection of Donatist desires for martyrdom.

Although religious polemic is typically understood and studied as a phenomenon of mutual antagonism across the confessions—Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant—the growth of the early modern polemic traditions was the product of heated internal controversy. In a series of theses intended to point to rhetorical aspects of conflicts within the Lutheran and Catholic confessions, this paper brings forward features of polemical writings from the disputes between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists in the wake of the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and those between and among Jesuits and Jansenists in the seventeenth century. Early modern religious thought, I suggest, cannot be understood without attention to the fissures within the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.

This article explores the newly catalogued manuscripts of the English Poor Clares preserved in Palace Green Library, Durham. It argues that the collection advances our understanding of the spirituality of the Poor Clares, a group who have received substantially less attention than their Benedictine and Carmelite counterparts. Focusing on manuscript evidence relating to mysticism at the convents of Aire and Rouen, it suggests three areas of interest to scholars of English women religious and recusant Catholic spirituality. First, it explores how a dual understanding of unio mystica in the convents converted wider concepts of anonymity and self-effacement into a radical form of authorial poverty. Through this, the nuns sought not only to unite with God but also achieve a symbolic union with each other. Secondly, it explores how the physical objects of the crucifix and Eucharist served to inspire a deeper mystical pattern of growth within the souls of the nuns. It suggests that feast days and specific times of the year, especially building up to Easter, had a profound effect on spiritual outpourings. Finally, the article explores the importance of the concept of the “heavenly Jerusalem” to the Poor Clares, revealing its centrality to their understanding of their life as a pilgrimage and their own lived experience as exiles.

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.

The debates about female fashion in the new Republic of Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s saw papal representatives, bishops, leading public intellectuals, and members of Catholic youth movements argue about deep décolletés and short skirts. In this predominantly Catholic country, objections made against modern fashion may initially look like a conservative stand against modern developments. Studying more closely the debate around women's fashion as it developed in a particular subset of the Catholic population in Lithuania—educated youth in the Ateitis Catholic student association, this article examines the interconnected arguments that were woven together to evaluate what women should wear in interwar Lithuania and shows that Catholics in this northeastern European country aimed to create a modern national and rational woman. At issue were not just Catholic moral norms but also national identity and the challenges posed by mass consumer culture. The new ideal being proposed was a modern Catholic female intelligentsia, a gender ideal that embraced the opportunities offered in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as suffrage, education, urban living, more active participation in civic life, while retaining more conservative moral norms, questioning consumer culture, and debating woman's nature and mission.

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?

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.

“Protestant Supremacy,” the phrase that evoked the majority of commentary in this forum, is a neologism. I began researching Christian Slavery in 2005, but I did not coin “Protestant Supremacy” until 2013. I have an audio recording of the first time I used the phrase. It was during my dissertation defense and I was explaining why I felt it was wrong to use the terms “pro” or “antislavery” to describe the slavery debates of the seventeenth century. “Spiritual equality does not equal antislavery,” I said at the time, when I refusing to draw a straight line from Quaker founder George Fox to later Quaker abolitionists. I needed a new way to frame the conversation. “I could call it ‘Protestant Supremacy,’” I said. “It isn't White Supremacy in the seventeenth-century. … [Instead,] you have a contest between the ideology of Protestant Supremacy and the ideology of Christian Slavery. … That's the conversation that's important.”