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

by Charles F. Irons

In the half-century following Godwyn's diatribe, Virginia Anglicans continued to ignore the tens of thousands of unconverted slaves among them, even as they embraced the idea that conversion did not threaten slavery. They drew additional confirmation of this idea from William Fleetwood's 1705 The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, in which the author taught that God had ordered the world in a series of overlapping hierarchies-and that baptism left those hierarchies intact.24 Like Godwyn, Fleetwood also advocated recruitment of slaves into the church, so much so that he helped organize in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (sPG) to promote the Christianization of American Indians, slaves, and others unreached by the Gospel. The SPG sent out dozens of missionaries to the American colonies, but none to Virginia. The decision by SPG officials to bypass the commonwealth indicated, on one hand, the relative strength of the Anglican Church in Virginia. On the other hand, it indicated that white Virginians did not consider the proselytization of their slaves a high enough priority to ask for assistance from the sPG.25