Katharine Gerbner
She read every slave law passed in Barbados across eighty years and found the opposite of what everyone expects: slaveholders fought to keep the enslaved OUT of Christianity, because a Christian slave was a threat to the whole system.
Dr. Katharine Gerbner. Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. BA, Columbia University; MA and PhD, Harvard University. Author of Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025). Her research is on the religious dimensions of race, authority, and freedom in early America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world.
Also anchors sessions 4.3, 4.4 of the learning path
Who she is
Katharine Gerbner is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, where she also directs Religious Studies. She took her doctorate at Harvard. She wrote Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, which argues that religion was not incidental to the invention of race in the Atlantic world but fundamental to it.
She is the only person in this archive who answers the question purely from the legal record, and she answers it by having read the whole thing. Every slave law passed in Barbados from the 1650s to the 1730s, set beside that island's baptismal registers.
What you are getting in this dossier
A finding that reverses the entire accusation. The term she had to invent because the standard one did not fit the evidence. The exact year the law swapped one word for another, and why. What happened when a missionary society was handed its own plantations. And a letter written in 1739 by a formerly enslaved woman that she says is the answer to all of it.
The finding
Start with her conclusion, because it inverts the premise most people argue from.
"So proslavery theology, I think in order to understand that, and to understand this sort of idea that Christianity is the white man's religion, that is an effect of proslavery propaganda. Because what we see when we go back in time is that Christianity, far from being forced down anyone's throat, was seen as the domain of free people only, and therefore for an enslaved person to become Christian was a huge threat."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
1,673 more words and 4 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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