The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

by Charles F. Irons

The small proportion of early African American evangelicals, especially relative to the intensity of white calls for their conversion, is significant in other ways as well. First, it shows the fragility of evangelicalism's early biracial character. With so few black coreligionists, whites could have easily jettisoned the practice (if not the theory) of interracial ministry once they did not need blacks' symbolic presence to compete with an established church. Second, the relatively low number of black conversions muted the ideological conflict among whites about the justice of slavery. Since the vast majority of Virginia's enslaved men and women remained outside the Christian tradition, even if a few joined evangelical churches and a few more received a pro forma baptism as infants in the Anglican Church, the correspondence between slave and "heathen" remained close in white minds. The theological question for whites thus remained whether or not conversion should mean freedom for an exceptional few, rather than whether or not the wholesale enslavement of their fellow Christians was morally objectionable.

Damn.