Enslaved Africans on St. Thomas did not simply receive a finished religion from white missionaries. As historian Jon Sensbach reads the surviving records, Black converts carried the mission, joined it for reasons of their own, and turned its message against the people who enslaved them. That is a strong answer. It also rests on particular documents with particular limits. This guide asks you to test it the way an investigator would: state the claim, sort the evidence, weigh what cuts against it, and decide what you can honestly say.
The case file comes from a conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Jon Sensbach, a professor of history at the University of Florida, about his research on Rebecca Protten in the Danish Caribbean of the 1730s and 1740s. You can work through it alone in about an hour. A group can use two sessions: the first on the evidence, the second on Scripture and the practice. If you lead a group, ask different people to read the evidence sections aloud. Nobody needs to share personal history to take part. The work here is weighing a historical claim.
The claim on the table
The claim under examination is a common one: enslaved Africans accepted Christianity because it was imposed on them, and the faith they practiced was the slaveholders’ faith passed down unchanged. Before reading any further, decide what evidence would support that claim and what evidence would weaken it. Here is a starting list. Add to it before you go on.
- If reception was passive, we would expect missionaries to do the recruiting and preaching, with converts in the audience.
- We would expect converts to repeat the missionaries’ teaching, including its acceptance of slavery.
- We would expect little sign that converts chose the faith for reasons of their own.
- If the claim is false, we would expect Black leadership, independent motives, and interpretations the missionaries did not intend or could not control.
Write your own expectations down. Coming back to them at the end shows you whether the evidence changed your mind or only confirmed what you already thought.
Know the documents before you trust them
Sensbach found Rebecca Protten in the Moravian Church Archive in Germany. The Moravians were the German-speaking missionaries who came to St. Thomas in the 1730s. Most of what survives about the mission was written by them. That is the first fact an investigator has to hold onto. When the records describe what enslaved converts did or said, the description usually reaches us through a missionary’s pen.
Three other kinds of evidence sit beside the missionary records, and each has a different value.
- Trial documents. Rebecca and her white missionary husband were charged with sedition, and Sensbach says “those trial documents have survived and proved a crucial source that I drew upon in the book.” These were produced by her accusers, so they show what the colony feared as much as what she did.
- Converts’ own writing. Sensbach says the mission taught literacy and that “many of them left written messages that they themselves wrote.” This is testimony from the converts themselves, not about them.
- Rebecca’s letters. Several survive in her own hand. Sensbach notes how unusual that is: “Letters written by women of African descent are very rare.”
Sensbach is also candid about how uneven the record is. On what the enslaved members thought, he says “the records are contradictory as well.” On her later years in West Africa, he says “the records are much more vague for that part of their mission.” A careful historian telling you where his sources thin out is a sign of reliability, not weakness. Keep track of those admissions as you read.
The evidence, one piece at a time
The missionaries could not do the work alone
Sensbach describes the first Moravian efforts bluntly: “They couldn’t gain any traction among the slaves.” They did not speak the language, struggled to get access, and did not understand the people they meant to reach. Rebecca, who was literate and had been freed at around 13 or 14, joined them and was made an elder sent out to preach. His conclusion is that “the missionaries could never have succeeded without the efforts of the Afro-Caribbean people themselves.”
What this shows: the growth of the mission depended on Black leadership. What it does not show by itself: what those leaders believed, or whether they departed from the missionaries’ teaching.
The movement was led and filled by Black women
Rebecca was placed over the women’s half of the mission and drew hundreds of enslaved African and Afro-Caribbean women into it. Sensbach reports that congregational records put women at roughly 60 to 70 percent of members. He also says dozens of others, including Afro-Caribbean men, preached on the plantations. He adds that a female majority is common in religious movements across cultures, which is a useful check: the numbers mark this movement as normal in one way, and its leadership as unusual in another.
Converts confronted slaveholders
This is the exhibit that most directly answers the question. Sensbach says the Moravian documents record enslaved Black Christians “going up to white slaveholders and accusing them of being un-Christian and saying, I’m going to heaven, and you’re not.” The missionaries had agreed to hold back on antislavery preaching. Their converts drew a conclusion the missionaries had not authorized.
Notice the source type. This is a missionary record of what converts said. It is not a convert’s own letter. That matters for precision, though it cuts in an interesting direction: the people recording it had every reason to soften such an incident, and it still made it into the record.
The colony treated her as dangerous
Rebecca’s interracial marriage and preaching led to a sedition charge. Sensbach says she was told to renounce her marriage and confess to spreading an incendiary message, and she refused. She was jailed for nine months and faced being sold back into slavery until the church’s leader arrived from Europe and secured her release. Hostile documents are useful here. An accuser rarely invents the strength of the person accused.
Her own explanation
In her letters, Sensbach says, Rebecca described her calling this way: “her life was a test, that God was putting a test before her.” She believed God had chosen her to preach. This is the only exhibit in which she speaks for herself, and it shows a woman who understood her work as obedience to God, not as service to the missionaries.
What cuts the other way
A fair investigation has to give equal attention to the evidence that complicates the answer. Four points stand out.
First, the message really was limited. Sensbach says Rebecca and the missionaries both understood they could not openly preach Christianity as liberation without being expelled. After her trial, he says, both pulled back further. The faith that reached the plantations had already been trimmed to fit a slave society.
Second, the mission profited from slavery. The Moravians bought enslaved people and a sugar plantation, so members of the congregation also worked its fields. Sensbach’s verdict: “the paradox was not resolved, let’s put it that way.” He also cautions against judging the missionaries only by modern standards, saying that from their point of view “they seem to have made a kind of compromise with power that they felt would enable them to preach their message.” Hold both: the compromise was real, and it was chosen.
Third, conversion was not always a clean break. Many converts were recent arrivals from Africa, and Sensbach is careful to say this “is not to say that they totally abandoned their African religions.” He also names practical motives, including literacy and a position from which to challenge masters: by joining the master’s religion, he says, “you give yourself a basis upon which to critique that master’s power.” Some readers will hear that as evidence of shrewd agency. Others will ask whether it weakens the case for sincere faith. The records do not settle every individual’s motive.
Fourth, notice the historian’s own sympathy. Describing the argument between slaveholders and the enslaved, Sensbach says “from our perspective, of course, we like to think that the slaves have the better of it.” He is open about where he stands. That does not discredit his research, but it reminds you to separate what the documents record from the conclusions he draws. When he says this congregation was the first Black Protestant congregation in the New World, he frames it as his belief about what the evidence allows. Treat it as a well-researched argument, not a settled fact.
Sensbach does point to a kind of convergence. He notes that later formerly enslaved writers, including Frederick Douglass and Mary Prince, denounced slaveholding Christians as false Christians while still claiming the faith. Those narratives come from different places and times, so they do not prove what happened on St. Thomas. They do show that the St. Thomas converts were not alone in reading the faith against their enslavers.
Testing the converts’ reading against Scripture
Both sides on St. Thomas claimed the Bible. The slaveholders taught that Christianity made the enslaved obedient. The converts told slaveholders they were not true Christians. Lisa Fields put her finger on the method behind the converts’ move: “if I read through this book and see that you’re inconsistent with what you say you hold to be true, then I have a basis, like you said, to critique you.” The converts were holding their masters to the book their masters claimed.
The sources do not tell us which passages Rebecca or her hearers preached, so do not assign these texts to them. Use them to test whether the converts’ reading had a footing in Scripture.
Start with the hard text. In Ephesians 6:5, Paul tells servants to obey their earthly masters with fear and sincerity, as serving Christ. Slaveholding readers often stopped there. Now read on to verse 9: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” Paul writes to households inside a Roman world where slavery existed, and the passage describes that setting rather than declaring slavery good. What it plainly does is put masters under a higher Master who does not favor them.
Then read Acts 10:34, where Peter says: “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.” And 1 Corinthians 1:27: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” In context, Paul is addressing a church proud of status and reminding them that God called people the world overlooked.
For each passage, ask two questions in order. What did the author mean to his first readers? Then: does the converts’ claim that God sides with the forgotten, and that slaveholders stood under judgment, follow from that meaning, stretch it, or contradict it?
A practice: build a case file
Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns. Label the left one Evidence of agency and the right one Evidence of constraint or compromise. Go back through the exhibits and the counterevidence above and place each item in a column. Some items belong in both. The trial, for example, shows Rebecca’s courage and also led to a more cautious message.
Next to each item, mark its source type: missionary record, hostile trial record, convert’s own writing, or historian’s interpretation. Then circle the two items you think are strongest. Most people find that the converts’ rebuke of slaveholders and Rebecca’s refusal at trial carry the most weight, but decide for yourself and be ready to explain why.
Finally, write three sentences you could say to a skeptic who insists that enslaved Christians were simply brainwashed. Each sentence should rest on an item from your case file, and at least one should admit a real limit in the evidence. In a group, have people trade sentences and check each other’s claims against the case file. If a sentence says more than the evidence allows, revise it together.
Questions for discussion
- Look at the expectations you wrote down at the start. Which ones did the evidence meet, and which did it fail to meet?
- Much of what we know about the converts comes through missionaries who accepted slavery. How should that shape the way we read their reports of converts’ words and actions?
- Sensbach names practical motives for conversion, such as literacy and a basis for critiquing masters. Do practical motives and genuine faith compete, or can they belong to the same decision? What in the record helps you answer?
- The missionaries limited their message to keep access to the island. Where is the line between a strategic compromise and a betrayal of the gospel? Use the plantation purchase as your test case.
- After reading Ephesians 6:5-9 as a whole, how would you explain the difference between the slaveholders’ reading and the converts’ reading to someone who has only heard verse 5 quoted?
- Sensbach admits that from his perspective he likes to think the enslaved had the better argument. Does a historian’s stated sympathy make you trust his account more, less, or neither? Why?
What the evidence allows you to say
Here is what the record supports. On St. Thomas in the 1730s and 1740s, a mission that white preachers could not grow was built largely by Black men and women, led on its larger side by a formerly enslaved woman. Converts took a faith delivered to them with its antislavery edges filed down and used it to judge the people who enslaved them. Rebecca Protten understood her preaching as a calling from God and refused to recant when it cost her freedom.
Here is what it does not let you say. It does not tell us every convert’s motive, and it does not show the missionaries as villains with no faith of their own. It does not prove beyond argument that this was the first Black Protestant congregation in the New World, and it does not reach us without the filter of missionary authors. The honest answer to the question is not that enslaved Africans received a faith or invented one. They received a compromised preaching of it and read the Scriptures more faithfully than the people who brought it.
Carry one test with you after this study. The next time you hear a confident claim about what enslaved Christians believed, ask who wrote the record down, and whether the people being described ever left words of their own.