In 1491, according to David Daniels, professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, a group of young men came home to the Kingdom of Kongo from Portugal. Their king had sent them to study the strangers’ religion and the society that practiced it, because he did not want to rely on what Portuguese traders told him. He heard their report, believed it and converted. Kongo was not a colony. Daniels says its rulers dealt with the king of Portugal as peers.
A century and a half later, on the English sugar island of Barbados, an enslaved man asked to become a Christian and was refused. His owner said Christians could not be slaves, and that his fellow planters would curse him for allowing it. By the 1690s, the island’s lawmakers were quietly removing the word Christian from their slave laws and writing in the word white.
Those two moments belong to the same story, and the scholars the Jude 3 Project has interviewed have recovered much of what lies between and after them. Taken in order, the records show enslavers who first kept the faith from enslaved people and later tried to shrink it into a gospel of obedience. They also show enslaved people who contested both efforts. They carried the faith across the Atlantic, preached it when missionaries could not, argued theology with those missionaries, and turned Paul’s letters into petitions for freedom.