Christian Slavery

Summary: An exploration of the ways that slavery as practices in the Caribbean and North America was “Christian.”

The rough thesis is that racial hierarchy developed not through an inherently racialized system but through a belief in Christian (and later Protestant) supremacy where Christianity was viewed as a type of ethnic identity, and only later was that Protestant (ethnic) identity slowly shifted over to white racial identity. Chapter four developed this idea most clearly:

“Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant slave owners gradually replaced the term “Christian” with the word “white” in their law books and in their vernacular speech. Scholars have long recognized that whiteness emerged from the protoethnic term “Christian.” Yet the intimate relationship between slave conversion and whiteness has not been fully appreciated. By pairing baptismal records with legal documents, it becomes clear that the development of “whiteness” on Barbados was a direct response to the small but growing population of free black Christians.” (p74)