The claim is that Christianity worked on enslaved Black people like a sedative: masters handed it over, and the enslaved learned to obey now and wait for heaven later. The record supports half of that sentence. Enslavers did hand over a version of the faith designed to produce obedience. The rest of the charge fails on the evidence. Christianity was not born in the slave trade, and the enslaved did not simply receive the version they were given. They read the Bible against the people who owned them, met in secret to do it, and drew on it to flee, to shelter fugitives and to stay whole.
That answer rests on specific evidence, and the evidence has limits. What follows tests the docility claim one piece at a time against what theologian Dr. Walter Strickland, author of the two-volume history Swing Low, laid out in conversation with Lisa Fields. It also marks where his account is a historian’s synthesis rather than a document you can hold in your hand.
Three claims inside one
Lisa Fields named the charge directly when she put it to Strickland: “there’s this narrative and culture that Christianity made our ancestors docile.” She added that the story “really paints our ancestors in a bad light,” because it casts them as people who just took what they were handed.
Pulled apart, the docility claim makes three separate assertions. The first is about origins: Christianity came to Africans as a tool of enslavement. The second is about intent: enslavers taught the faith to make people compliant. The third is about effect: it worked, and the enslaved became passive because of what they believed. Each could be true while the others are false, so each needs its own test. The third matters most and is the hardest to settle.
What would count as evidence? If the docility claim were true, we would expect enslaved Christians to have accepted their masters’ reading of Scripture, to have kept their worship where masters could watch it, and to have left little sign of the faith in escape and resistance. If it were false, we would expect independent interpretation, hidden gatherings, and church people turning up in the record of flight and refusal.
Did Christianity reach Africans through the slave ship?
Strickland’s history does not begin in America. He opens in Africa on purpose, and he explains why: “people often assume that Christianity was introduced to Africans through the transatlantic slave trade, which is not the truth.”
Scripture itself places Africans inside the earliest Christian story. Acts 8:26-39 tells of an Ethiopian official, a eunuch who managed the treasury of the queen of the Ethiopians, who was baptized after hearing the gospel explained from Isaiah. Acts 2:10 lists people from Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene among the crowd at Pentecost. These are narrative texts that describe rather than command, but what they describe is the point: African believers were present at the start. Strickland’s starting point is also the one Jude 3 teaches, that Christianity is not foreign to Africa and that African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. Something that existed in Africa long before the Atlantic trade cannot have been invented to break African people.
The limit matters, though. The African roots of the faith answer where Christianity came from. They do not answer what Christianity did on a particular plantation in Virginia or South Carolina. An enslaved person in the American South may never have heard of the Ethiopian church. So the docility claim has to be tested on its own ground, in America, among the enslaved themselves.
Did enslavers intend a faith that would make people obey?
Yes, and Strickland does not dodge it. He says enslaved people were “given a faith for the purpose of making them docile, but they reclaimed the faith.”
The first half of that sentence concedes the intent claim. Strickland describes enslaved people being taught Bible stories with one fixed application: stay as you are. He names the passage that was bent toward that purpose, calling it “a misuse of First Corinthians chapter seven.”
That reference rewards a close look, because the chapter works against the use it was put to. Paul tells the Corinthians, “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (1 Corinthians 7:20). Read alone, that sounds like a command to accept bondage. The next verse reads: “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (1 Corinthians 7:21).
Interpreters do debate verse 21. Some translations render it as Paul urging the believer to take freedom if offered. Others render it as urging the believer to make the most of their present condition. But on either reading, Paul is not grounding slavery in God’s will. He is telling believers that their standing before God does not depend on their social status, and verse 23 goes on to tell them not to become servants of men. A preacher who quoted verse 20 and stopped was not reading the passage. He was trimming it.
So the intent claim stands. Enslavers wanted a docile Christianity, and they built one by selection. The question left is whether the trimmed version took hold.
What did the enslaved actually do with it?
Here the evidence Strickland assembles points against docility. His central observation is about where interpretation happened. He says the enslaved “interpreted those texts for themselves in the invisible institution,” his term for worship held in the corners of the plantation, in the places where enslaved people slept and lived. There, he says, they taught the word to each other and sang, and this is where the spirituals came from.
That detail carries real weight. A docile congregation does not need to meet in secret. Hidden worship, apart from the master’s preacher and the master’s sermon, means the enslaved deliberately created a space where the master did not control the reading.
Strickland also explains how this worked in their minds. He points to Frederick Douglass, remembered mostly for his abolitionism but, in Strickland’s words, a Christian. In Strickland’s rendering, Douglass drew the widest possible line between the Christianity of the Bible and the Christianity of his captors. Douglass did not abandon the faith. He accused his captors of abandoning it.
The record of flight is where Strickland’s account becomes most concrete. He describes enslaved Christians modeling themselves on Samson, taking up the Nazirite vow and letting their hair grow, convinced that it was not God’s will for them to be enslaved to anybody. He points to Harriet Tubman, and to the reason people called her Moses: they were reading the Exodus and concluding that the God who freed his people once would do it again. He notes that many safe houses on the Underground Railroad belonged to pastors, deacons, first ladies and church sisters. His summary is that “the church was very integral in the pushing back against this counterfeit faith.”
He also reports that Henry Highland Garnet called for resistance so that people could worship as God commanded, keep the Sabbath and raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Strickland says he is summarizing Garnet, so his wording should not be read as Garnet’s. But the shape of the argument matters. Garnet’s case for freedom was theological. The faith was the reason to leave.
Strickland answers one more objection enslavers raised. Some argued that a slave who refused to submit was sinning. His reply is that for the Christian slave, “their master is the Lord.” That reasoning takes the very language of submission and moves the authority above the plantation owner’s head.
Evidence or one scholar’s story?
The conversation gives us Strickland’s synthesis, not the primary documents themselves. He says the second volume of Swing Low collects 112 primary sources, including sermons, oratory, liturgy, correspondence and autobiography. Those are his figures and his description of his own work. A transcript proves that Strickland said these things, not that every detail happened as he describes it. A reader who wants to test the case should go to those documents directly.
Strickland himself marks one place where interpretation and evidence separate. When he links the enslaved readers to the idea that Scripture is living and sharper than a sword, he stops to say, “they didn’t say this, but we see this.” The verse he has in mind, Hebrews 4:12, says, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword.” In the KJV, “quick” means living. Strickland offers that verse as his theological explanation of why the enslaved could see through the counterfeit. He does not claim they quoted it.
One piece of evidence arrives secondhand. Lisa Fields reported that the Christian ethicist Dr. Cheryl Sanders, studying slave narratives, kept finding the same answer to the question of why enslaved people embraced their enslavers’ religion: because they met Jesus. That finding reaches us through Lisa’s account of Sanders’s research, and its weight depends on the narratives themselves. Strickland’s gloss on what that answer meant is worth hearing: “I met a man who knew all that I was, accepted me for all that I am, and is able to not just leave me there.” People with every reason to reject the faith reached for it, and the reason they gave was a person, not their masters’ authority.
The strands are different kinds of evidence: secret worship, Exodus imagery in escape, church people sheltering fugitives, a Christian abolitionist indicting false Christianity by name, and the testimony of the narratives. Different kinds of evidence pointing the same way strengthen a case. But here every strand reaches us through Strickland’s reading, or in Sanders’s case through Lisa’s report of it, so the case is only as strong as the documents behind those readings.
What about the ones who stayed?
The strongest form of the docility claim is not about Tubman. Most enslaved people did not escape. A skeptic can grant every fugitive story and still say that for the majority, faith made suffering bearable, and that making suffering bearable is exactly how a sedative works.
Strickland addresses this group directly. He says the invisible institution, “if it didn’t encourage them to flee, it really upheld them and kept them sane in situations that should cause you to go insane.”
The skeptic will hear that as a confession. But look at what it describes. Staying sane under a system built to destroy your sense of self is not the same as consenting to it. The faith that sustained people came from gatherings their masters did not run, built on readings their masters had cut out. A person who stays put because escape means death, while singing about Moses in secret, has not surrendered their mind.
The same distinction applies to forgiveness, the teaching critics most often call a tool of oppression. When Lisa Fields raised it, Strickland argued that “what forgiveness does is it frees the person who is wronged as well.” He rejected the forgive-and-forget version outright: “We don’t step right back into a situation where we can be abused again or hurt again.” Forgiveness, on his account, releases the wronged person from waiting to collect a debt. It does not require them to accept the wrong or return to the person who caused it. Jesus’s command in Matthew 5:44 to love enemies is not a command to stay in their power.
Honesty requires one more admission. The record of the people who stayed is thinner than the record of those who fled. Fugitives wrote narratives. Many who remained left no written words at all. The faith they practiced in secret was not the faith their masters preached, and the evidence we have points toward endurance with dignity rather than resignation. Beyond that, the silence of the record has to be respected.
Where the power came from
On the available evidence, the origin and effect claims fail and the intent claim holds. There is also a correction that runs the other way. Strickland warns that “the story of African American Christianity is not one big reaction against oppression.” Swapping the docile caricature for a story about nothing but resistance would make the same mistake in reverse, treating these believers as if their faith were only a strategy.
Strickland says we tend to see the enslaved as people to be pitied, then adds, “But there was power there.” His argument is that the power had a source: people who believed what they read, and who could tell what the Bible said from what their captors needed it to say. That claim now rests on documents most readers have not yet opened. They are the place to finish the investigation.