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

by Charles F. Irons

Birney and Brown lashed out at southern churches because they saw the enormous practical and ideological work that white southern Christians were doing to protect slavery. The region's white Christians penned compelling defenses of slavery for the secular and denominational presses, guarded against insurrection by policing worship meetings in the quarters, gave regional apologists grounds for boasting by converting thousands of slaves to their faith, and enabled those skeptical of slavery's justice to subvert their concerns through mission work among the enslaved. It is for good reason, then, that historians of slavery and of the sectional conflict have endorsed abolitionists' contention that the South's white Christians contributed decisive ideological support to an evil institution.' At the same time,