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

by Charles F. Irons

understood to be those outside God's covenant, in bondage. When black men and women of their own initiative joined evangelical churches in numbers that far surpassed white evangelicals' expectations, white evangelicals realized the irrelevance of the Old Testament model of slavery and searched for new ways to understand a master-slave relationship in which both parties belonged to the community of faithful. White evangelicals thus embraced paternalism, the idea that master and slave owed each other reciprocal duties. From the perspective of evangelical whites, one of those responsibilities was "civilizing" people of African descent. Some white evangelicals followed the logic of their paternalist mission in the early national period to the idea that they were preparing slaves and free blacks for self-governance. They therefore tolerated black evangelicals' persistent attempts to exercise spiritual leadership and strongly supported-indeed, they led-the colonization movement. Nat Turner abruptly brought an end in 1831 to this tolerance of black assertiveness. With his militant revolt against slaveholder authority, he precipitated a spiritual crisis over how much access whites should allow the enslaved to the Gospel. Whites' resolution of this crisis involved a determination to expand blacks' access to evangelicalism but to curtail autonomous black religious expression. In the resulting mission to the slaves, white evangelicals tried to defuse the liberating power of black Chr...