Embracing Protestantism

By examining eighteenth-century black Christianity in multiple locales and tracing the circuits of black evangelicals as they traveled through Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, Catron examines how many Afro-Protestants maintained cultural and intellectual ties outside the confines of America's plantation complex and suggests they might be better understood as Atlantic Africans.

"This book describes how English and colonial American Protestants described religions throughout the world during a crucial period of English colonization of North America, from 1650 to 1765. It uses a variety of sources, including thick accounts of Catholicism, Islam, and Native American traditions, to argue-against much of current scholarship-that Protestants changed their perspectives on non-Protestant religions and conversion during the early eighteenth century. This account of a transformation in Protestant discourse locates the English Revolution of 1688 and subsequent growth of the British empire as a turning point, when observers keyed the wellbeing of Britain to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. A wide range of Protestants, including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals endorsed this new understanding of religion and the state. They accordingly began to parse religions around the world not as good or bad as a whole but as complex traditions with some groups who sustained religious liberty and other groups that, under the sway of power-hungry clergy, suppressed religious liberty. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilizing agendas for reasoned persuasion as the means of mission. This story concerns ambiguities in Protestant ideas yet suggests the importance of those ideas for contemporary understandings of religious liberty, matters of race, and moral reasonableness in public life"--

In Embracing Protestantism, John Catron argues that people of African descent in America who adopted Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans but instead assumed more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was then the land of slavery and white supremacy, where citizenship and economic mobility were off-limits to most people of color. In contrast, the Atlantic World offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Europe. Catron examines how the wider Atlantic World allowed membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations and contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa. It also channeled inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean and from black missionaries. Unlike deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants were "Atlantic Africans," who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. And this religious heterogeneity was a critically important way black Anglophone Christians resisted slavery.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1865. Ninth Edition Revised.