For most of the colonial period, no. Across the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, most Protestant slaveholders in the English colonies tried to keep the people they enslaved out of the church. They believed Christianity was a religion for free people, and they feared that a baptized slave would claim freedom. Historian Katharine Gerbner, who studies slavery and its relationship to Christianity, traced this resistance through colonial records. The same records show enslaved people asking for baptism again and again, often at great cost.
Gerbner did not set out to tell this story. She began by researching Quaker antislavery and the first antislavery protest written in the Americas, and then found that in the seventeenth century most Quakers were slave owners. Following that thread led her to Christian missions to enslaved people and to a narrower question: when and why did enslaved people choose to convert? When most people think about Christianity and slavery, they picture the antebellum period and its pro-slavery preaching. The earlier record is different. For more than a century, the main obstacle between enslaved people and the baptismal font was the people who owned them.
Barbados, the 1640s: A Request and a Refusal
Gerbner’s earliest example comes from Barbados in the 1640s. An Englishman named Richard Ligon traveled to the island and met an enslaved man who told him he wanted to become a Christian but was not allowed to. Ligon was new to slave societies, so he went to the man’s owner and passed on the request. As Gerbner tells it, the owner replied that “Christians cannot become slaves.” Ligon answered that “he didn’t wanna make a Christian slave. He wanted to make a slave a Christian.” The owner said the laws of England did not allow it and that his fellow planters would curse him if he permitted it.
Consider what each person in that exchange believed. The enslaved man assumed that baptism was something a person could ask for. Ligon, an outsider, saw no contradiction between being enslaved and being a Christian. The owner saw an obvious one, and he believed the law and his neighbors agreed with him. Gerbner finds three fears in his answer:
- Freedom. Protestantism was identified with freedom.
- Law. Planters understood English law to bar the enslaved from becoming Christian.
- Revolt. Underneath both lay the fear of rebellion. In one of the earliest letters Gerbner found on the subject, slave owners wrote that Christian slaves would “rebel and cut our throats.”
So at the start of English colonial slavery, owners did not treat the faith as a means of control. They treated it as a threat. In Gerbner’s summary, “most Protestant slave owners in the early colonial period did not want their slaves to convert to Christianity. They thought of Christianity as a religion that was for free people, and they worried that a baptized slave would then demand freedom.” As a result, the vast majority of enslaved people were excluded from Protestant churches.
The Early Slave Laws: Christian Against Heathen
The owner’s appeal to law makes more sense once you see how the earliest English colonies drew their lines. Gerbner calls the arrangement Protestant supremacy: “Protestant supremacy, I really see as the forerunner to white supremacy. So white supremacy uses race to create inequality, and Protestant supremacy uses religion.”
Her evidence comes from the earliest slave laws in the English colonies. “Colonists didn’t call themselves white,” she notes; “instead they called themselves Christian.” The concept of whiteness did not yet exist. Religious difference served as the justification for slavery. Masters were Christians, and the enslaved were labeled heathens. As Gerbner puts it, “Christians couldn’t be slaves and slaves had to be heathen.”
That rule had a weakness the planters could see: a heathen could become a Christian. Every baptism put pressure on the boundary the whole system relied on, which explains why a planter in the 1640s would refuse a man who only wanted to join the church.
The next stage changed the justification without ending the hostility. Over time, Gerbner says, the concept of whiteness was created, and race became the new justification for slavery. Skin could not be changed by baptism. Even so, she says, opposition to conversion “persists for a long time after the codification of racial slavery.” The law had found a new basis, but owners’ suspicion of Christian slaves continued.
The Eighteenth-Century Missions and the Backlash
When missionaries began working among enslaved people, the response showed how seriously colonists still took baptism. Gerbner calls slave baptism “an extremely threatening development.” Missionaries and Black converts to the Moravian Church were regularly beaten and attacked by white colonists. Quakers were fined for allowing enslaved people to meet for worship.
She gives three reasons for the threat:
- The old justification. Christian slaves undercut the religious justification for slavery.
- Literacy. Some missionaries taught converts to read the Bible and to write, which owners strongly opposed “because it was really a source of power.”
- Gatherings. When enslaved Christians met for worship, white colonists saw a gathering of Black people and feared rebellion. Owners worried that Christian slaves would no longer accept their place.
Many of those missionaries were not opponents of slavery. Gerbner notes that most were not against it, and many owned slaves. The conflict was not between abolitionists and slaveholders. It was a dispute among slaveholding Protestants over whether the people they held could be admitted to the church.
Converts Who Walked for Hours
Enslaved people pursued the faith anyway, and it cost them. Gerbner says Christian slaves often worked six or seven days a week, sometimes through the night, and then walked an hour or several hours to reach one of the few congregations. “I think this shows how important these congregations were to the enslaved people who converted,” she says. Some traveled on their own as much as they could to preach to others. On St. Thomas, a free Black woman named Rebecca did much of the work of spreading Moravian Christianity. Gerbner says she traveled widely and eventually went to Europe and then to Africa.
Why would anyone take on that burden? Gerbner is cautious, because few diaries by enslaved Christians survive, but she identifies three likely reasons for the faith’s appeal during the Great Awakening:
- Kinship. Congregations gave enslaved people support and community.
- Literacy. Reading was a major draw, something rarely discussed for this period. The missionary diaries she read show missionaries “being overrun with requests for both baptism and reading lessons.”
- Theology. Moravian missions focused on the suffering of Jesus, which they called “the blood and wounds of Christ,” and that message could mean a great deal to people living under the whip.
As enslaved Christians began reading Scripture for themselves, they also emphasized parts of Christian teaching that sometimes differed from the missionaries’ emphases.
When the Protestant Door Stayed Shut
Some enslaved people went elsewhere. Gerbner describes the imperial politics of conversion. Enslaved people in British colonies, mostly barred from baptism, escaped to Catholic colonies where they could be baptized. Many then argued that they should not be returned because they could not practice their religion in British territory, and in some cases French and Spanish authorities protected them. Gerbner is clear that “this isn’t really for altruistic reasons,” but the pattern was still significant.
Enslaved Africans fled South Carolina for Spanish Florida, where they were promised Catholic baptism and freedom. On St. Christopher, an island divided between the French and the English, people enslaved in the English part escaped to the French part, were baptized in the Catholic Church and argued against being sent back. Gerbner has read British colonial governors’ complaints about these escapes.
This also shows the limits of the main claim. The resistance she documents was Protestant and centered on the English colonies. The answer to whether slave owners wanted the enslaved to become Christian depends on which owners, in which empire and at what time.
The Missionaries’ Bargain
The strongest objection is that later slaveholders did promote Christianity and used the Bible to demand obedience. That pro-slavery theology was real, and it shaped the antebellum church.
Gerbner’s chronology accounts for it. She argues that pro-slavery theology was largely created by white missionaries trying to overcome Protestant supremacy. To persuade reluctant owners to allow conversion, they claimed that Christian slaves would be obedient and docile, and they cited biblical passages about slavery to support the claim. The idea of the submissive Christian slave did not describe how enslaved converts understood their faith. It was an argument made to win owners’ permission.
That argument lasted partly because missionaries wrote most of the surviving records, so their message is the one later generations inherited. Gerbner states the consequence: “It makes Christianity seem like the white man’s religion, and it creates this myth that slaves converted to appease their masters.” Her own conclusion is the reverse: “I really see black Christianity as forged in opposition to pro-slavery theology.”
St. Thomas and Jamaica: Arguing From the Text
The Moravian records show converts arguing with their teachers. On St. Thomas, an enslaved man named Andreas, baptized Emmanuel, attended a worship meeting where missionaries taught that turning the other cheek meant accepting abuse without complaint. The passage is Matthew 5:39:
“But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
Andreas objected and debated the missionary over what the verse meant. In the end, he said they could teach what they liked, and he would learn to read the Bible for himself. His portrait appears on the cover of Gerbner’s book.
Andreas had a real point about the text. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching his followers how to respond to personal insult and injury. Christians have long disagreed about how far the command extends. But using it to tell enslaved people to accept their owners’ violence makes the verse say more than it says, and it serves the owners’ interests in the process.
In Jamaica in the 1750s, an enslaved man named Matthew asked the missionaries detailed questions about the Trinity and the relationship among the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. He also wanted to be baptized, and the Moravian missionaries refused. He responded from Acts 8, where Philip meets an Ethiopian official on the road:
“And the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?” (Acts 8:36)
The Ethiopian asked and was baptized. Matthew asked why he should be treated differently, and Gerbner says the missionary had no good answer. The passage shows an African man receiving baptism in the earliest church, and Matthew used it to press his own case.
These were not passive listeners. The questions they raised concerned the Trinity, the right time for baptism and the meaning of a difficult saying of Jesus. As Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, observed, “they’re critically thinking through what they’re receiving.”
What the Archive Cannot Yet Say
Gerbner is open about the limits of the evidence. Most of the records she has read were written by missionaries. The Moravian archives contain thousands of pages, including some writing by Black Christians that she describes as the earliest examples of enslaved Black Christians writing about their own experiences. Those pages are in German, in a script that is hard to read, and historians are only starting to work with them.
Some details remain unresolved. In the colonial baptism records Gerbner studied, everyone baptized was an enslaved or free Black person, and each received a new name. She had not checked whether Europeans baptized by the Moravians were also renamed, and she said she would need to look. Her account of the early slave laws and the origins of pro-slavery theology is a historian’s reading of documents, and it should be treated as her argument.
The sequence she reconstructs still stands:
- The refusal in Barbados and laws that separated Christian from heathen.
- Race replacing religion as the legal basis for slavery, while suspicion of Christian slaves continued.
- Eighteenth-century missions that met violence, and missionaries who sold owners the idea of an obedient convert.
Throughout that century, enslaved men and women walked for hours to worship, asked for reading lessons and argued with their teachers about the Bible. The version of this history most people know was written largely by the missionaries. Much of what the converts themselves wrote is still waiting to be read.
