If slave owners forced Christianity on the people they enslaved, the early colonial records should show masters marching people to the baptismal water. For the English colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the evidence discussed here shows something else: most Protestant slaveholders tried to keep enslaved people out of the church, and enslaved people kept asking to get in. You will not be asked to take that on trust. You will sort the evidence yourself, decide what each piece can and cannot prove, and finish with a sentence you could defend in front of a skeptic.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner, assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota, who studies slavery and its relationship to Christianity. Work through it alone with a notebook, or in a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Keep a sheet of paper divided into two columns, labeled what the record shows and what someone concluded from it. You will fill it as you go.
Write the claim down before you test it
Vague claims are hard to test. “Christianity was the master’s religion” can mean several things. It might mean owners forced baptism on the enslaved. It might mean owners used the Bible to demand obedience. It might mean the faith reached Africans only through the people who enslaved them. These are different propositions, and the evidence bears on each one differently.
Before reading on, write the version of the claim you have heard most often, in one plain sentence. Then add when and where you assume it happened. Most people picture the American South before the Civil War without realizing it. Gerbner noted that this is the usual picture, and her research looks earlier, at the English Atlantic colonies. If your sentence never named a place or a century, that gap is the first finding.
What would we expect to find?
An honest investigation decides in advance what each answer would look like. If owners were eager to make the enslaved Christian, the records should show some of these things:
- laws that encouraged or required the baptism of enslaved people
- owners inviting missionaries onto their plantations without conditions
- enslaved people baptized easily, even in large numbers
If owners resisted, the records should show refused requests, legal barriers, penalties for those who preached to the enslaved, and enslaved people going to unusual lengths to reach baptism. Keep both lists in view.
The exhibits
A refused request in Barbados
Gerbner’s first example comes from the 1640s. An Englishman named Richard Ligon traveled to Barbados and met an enslaved man who wanted to become a Christian and was not allowed to. Ligon, new to slave societies, took the request to the man’s owner. In Gerbner’s retelling, the owner’s reply was that “Christians cannot become slaves.” When pressed, he said English law did not permit it and his fellow planters would curse him if he allowed it.
This is one traveler’s account of one conversation, reported to us by a historian. It does not prove what every planter thought. Its value is that it states a reason, and the reason matches the rest of the evidence. Gerbner summarized the pattern this way: “most Protestant slave owners in the early colonial period did not want their slaves to convert to Christianity.” In one of the earliest letters she found on the subject, owners wrote that Christian slaves would “rebel and cut our throats.”
The wording of the early slave laws
The second exhibit is legal. Gerbner points to the earliest slave laws in the English colonies and notes their vocabulary: “Colonists didn’t call themselves white.” Instead, she said, “instead they called themselves Christian.” The legal line ran between Christians and heathens, and she put the rule plainly: “Christians couldn’t be slaves and slaves had to be heathen.” She calls this arrangement Protestant supremacy and treats it as the forerunner of white supremacy, with religion doing the sorting that race would later do.
The word choice in a law is strong evidence, because laws record what a society was willing to enforce. The interpretation, that this was a deliberate system later replaced by race, is Gerbner’s argument from those documents. Put the wording of the laws in your first column and the term “Protestant supremacy” in the second. Both matter. They are not the same kind of claim.
Punishment for opening the door
Gerbner described the reaction to missions as intense and violent. Missionaries and Black converts to the Moravian Church were regularly beaten and attacked by white colonists, and “Quakers were fined for allowing enslaved people to meet for worship.” She called slave baptism “an extremely threatening development.” Her reasons: it undercut the religious justification for slavery, some missionaries taught converts to read and write, and white colonists feared any gathering of Black worshipers as a possible rebellion.
Fines and beatings are costly behavior, and people rarely punish what they want to happen. Ask which of your two lists this exhibit belongs on.
Converts who kept pressing in
The fourth exhibit is what enslaved people did. Gerbner said Christian slaves often worked six or seven days a week, sometimes through the night, and then walked an hour or more to reach a congregation. Early missionary diaries show “missionaries were being overrun with requests for both baptism and reading lessons.” Some enslaved people in British colonies escaped to French and Spanish territory, were baptized as Catholics, and argued they should not be returned. Gerbner is careful that the Catholic governments protecting them were not acting “for altruistic reasons,” and that British colonial governors complained about the escapes.
This exhibit cuts against the idea that the faith was simply imposed, and it also narrows the claim. The resistance Gerbner documents is Protestant and English. Catholic empires handled baptism differently, so the honest question is always which owners, in which empire, at what date.
The strongest counterevidence
The skeptic has a real point here. Pro-slavery theology existed. Some Christians did use the Bible to demand submission, and that history should not be minimized.
Gerbner offers an account that holds both facts together. She argues pro-slavery theology was largely built by white missionaries trying to get past owners’ resistance. To win permission to evangelize, they promised that Christian slaves would be obedient and docile, and they cited biblical passages about slavery to back the promise. This is her thesis, drawn from the archives she studied, and other historians may weigh the origins of pro-slavery theology differently. Put it in your second column.
Who wrote the records matters here. Gerbner said of the missionaries, “they’re the ones who wrote things down for the most part.” Her conclusion about the result: “It makes Christianity seem like the white man’s religion, and it creates this myth that slaves converted to appease their masters.”
That creates a problem for the investigator. The same archive that shows the resistance was written mostly by people with a sales pitch. Gerbner acknowledged that “the records that I read are mostly written by missionaries rather than the slave owners,” and that few diaries by enslaved Christians survive. Some writing by Black Christians survives in the Moravian archives, but it is in German, in a difficult script, and historians are only starting to use it. The record is real. It is also partial, and one historian is reading most of it for us here.
Read the text the converts read
Gerbner described an enslaved man in Jamaica in the 1750s named Matthew who wanted baptism and was refused by Moravian missionaries. He answered from Acts 8, where an Ethiopian official meets Philip on the road. Read Acts 8:26-39 in full before going on.
At verse 36, the KJV reads: “And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?” Verse 38 follows: “And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.” Acts 8:37, the profession of faith between them, appears in the KJV, though its earliest manuscript support is debated. The narrative moves from the request to the baptism either way.
This is narrative, so it describes what happened rather than setting a rule for when every baptism must occur, and Christians still differ on the timing of baptism. But Matthew’s question was fair. The text shows no waiting period imposed on the Ethiopian, and in Gerbner’s words, “the missionary sort of doesn’t really have a great answer for him.” The Ethiopian official shows that an African embraced the faith in its first generation, and Matthew used that.
One more passage belongs here as a method rather than a proof. Proverbs 18:17 says, “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh, and searcheth him.” The first story you heard about slavery and the church was told by someone. This guide asks you to let the neighbor come and search it, including the account given here.
The practice: an evidence sort
- Under what the record shows, list every concrete item from the exhibits: the Barbados refusal, the wording of the laws, the fines, the beatings, the walks to worship, the requests for reading lessons, the escapes.
- Under what someone concluded from it, list the interpretations: Protestant supremacy, the origin of pro-slavery theology as a missionary pitch, the reasons enslaved people found the faith attractive.
- Beside each item, note who produced the original record if you know it: a traveler, a lawmaker, a missionary, a governor, an enslaved person.
- Circle any item that depends on a single source. Star any item supported by several independent kinds of record.
- Return to the claim you wrote at the start. Rewrite it so it says only what your starred items support.
In a group, have two people do the sort separately and compare. Where you placed an item in different columns, talk it through. That disagreement is usually where the real learning happens.
Questions for discussion
- Your original claim named a time and place, or it did not. How did adding a date range change what evidence counted?
- Which exhibit did you find strongest, and was it strong because of the event itself or because of the kind of document recording it?
- If missionaries wrote most of the records, how should that affect our confidence in their accounts of resistance, as well as their accounts of docile converts?
- Enslaved people fled Protestant English colonies to be baptized in Catholic ones. What does that comparison suggest about whether the resistance came from Christianity itself or from a particular system of slave law?
- Gerbner’s evidence is specific to Protestant English colonies. What would you need to know before making a claim about the antebellum South?
- What evidence, if it turned up in the German-language Moravian papers, would change your conclusion? Be concrete.
If you are leading a group
Some people in the room may have stepped back from faith over this exact claim, or watched someone they love do so. Do not treat the exhibits as a way to win. Let people state the claim at its strongest before testing it, and treat the pro-slavery theology section with the same seriousness as the exhibits. The aim is accuracy, not a scoreboard.
What you can responsibly say
Lisa Fields drew out one thing these records overturn: the assumption that enslaved people simply absorbed what they were given. In the exchanges Gerbner described, she said, “they’re critically thinking through what they’re receiving.” That is also the posture this guide asks of you.
So finish the way an investigator would. Write two sentences you could say to a skeptic. The first states what the evidence supports, with its time and place. The second names one honest limit of that evidence. If both sentences survive a friend’s hardest question this week, you are answering from proof rather than slogan.