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)
In the 17th Century, the British began to colonize what became the United States and the Caribbean. The split of the Church of England from the broader Catholic church started in the 16th century. Still, it was not until the early 17th century that the Church of England was firmly established as a religious/cultural identity. And even then, in the mid-17th Century, the English Civil War shifted that identity. This Protestant identity developed concurrently with the rise of colonization, the development of capitalistic enterprises, and increased interaction with different cultures and geography. The weakness of the Church of England in the colonies (the churches were culturally important, but often there was a lack of clergy and no real supervision from the ecclesiastical structure) meant that the direction of church policy was more directed by concerns of lay people than theological or missiological concerns. Similar to the arguments of Joel McDermot’s The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Gerbner illustrates how the development of slavery can be traced legally through changes in law, but also points out how Christian theology was explicitly or implicitly used to create a justification for that law because of economic concerns.
One of the helpful aspects of Christian Slavery is that she looks primarily at the English-speaking Caribbean and then compares that with the British colonies in what became the United States and the Catholic colonies in the Caribbean. This methodology uses other English-speaking and non-Protestant non-English speaking communities to explore similarities and differences in how those areas approached the relationship between Christianity and slavery. There was significant communication between these groups, and within the English-speaking colonies, you can see legal language moving from community to community as they all attempted to address similar issues.