Charles
F. Irons. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals
in Colonial and Antebellum
In the
wake of Senator Barack Obama’s
speech on race, religion, and politics, Charles F. Irons’ recent exploration of
evangelical Christianity in colonial and antebellum
The
mundane and somewhat misleading title of this book (Roman Catholics, after all,
had put forth suspiciously “proslavery” interpretations of Christianity as
early as the 16th century, and these interpretations influenced Catholic
slaveholders in nearby Maryland.) belies Irons’ extensive research and the
insightful – if controversial – nature of the arguments he presents. Utilizing a well-known framework that was painstakingly built over many years by scholars such as David
Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, Rhys Isaac, Donald
Matthews, and Albert Raboteau, Irons is interested
primarily in cultivating an “appreciation of black agency” in our collective
understanding of how evangelical identity developed and spread throughout the
antebellum South (2). According to Irons, “biracial worship” – that is to say,
worship where blacks and whites belonged to the same congregations and
sometimes even sat side-by-side during services – became a fundamental
component of evangelical identity in the Upper South during the first half of
the nineteenth century. So important was this bi-racialism to white
evangelicals’ understanding of what it meant to be an evangelical that
Presbyterians and Episcopalians “pursued black members… as part of their
efforts to become more evangelical” (102). These same white Christians
experienced an identity crisis when, during and after the Civil War, their
black co-religionists abandoned mixed congregations in droves and set up
separate, black evangelical churches that were based on very different
hermeneutics.
According
to Irons, free and enslaved blacks in
It is a
controversial assertion. While the
author certainly makes African-Americans agents in much more than just the
development of a pro-slavery orientation in evangelical Christianity – insisting
that even as they joined white churches, “black evangelicals maintained a set
of values so different from whites’ that black evangelicalism sometimes seemed
a different religion” – the implications
of his argument are still unavoidable (209). Irons is suggesting that by
embracing evangelical Christianity, black Americans participated in the
justification – and perpetuation – of
their own exploitation, because they made it possible for ministers across the
South to assert that “the status of
black Americans as slaves was a necessary link in the chain that led to their
conversion” (215). Not only that, but by converting, black Americans helped
create the pan-Southern identity that lay at the heart of the Confederacy,
because as “southern whites traded strategies for Christianizing the remaining unchurched slaves in their respective states,” they “built
a regional identity around the role that they assumed as stewards of black
evangelical development” (212).
Irons
is not suggesting that African-Americans were co-opted by white evangelicals
when they converted, but a more extensive discussion of what conversion meant
to the slaves – and more specifically, what it meant to them when they joined
racially mixed congregations – might have mitigated the discomfort some readers
will feel when they encounter his argument. Irons hints at the need for this
discussion when he notes that white evangelicals’ understanding of the slave
mission as something that “proved their righteousness in holding slaves… does
not explain why the number of black evangelicals in Virginia doubled between
1830 and 1850” (175). Yet, Irons’ most revealing explorations of what formal,
evangelical worship meant to antebellum African-Americans take place in the
context of colonization and Nat Turner’s rebellion. The former was a movement
that enjoyed a very short-lived popularity among black evangelicals and was
really the antithesis of the “biracial worship” that is so important to Irons’
thesis. Colonization, after all, sought to place blacks and whites not just in
separate congregations, but in separate countries. And
the latter was a rather extreme example of just how different black and white
understandings of evangelical Christianity could be, making it a problematic
window into the meaning of black conversion.
Still,
Irons’ book adds a novel and provocative chapter to the story of race and evangelical
Christianity in the South. Rather than presenting religious defenses of slavery
as opportunistic, he asks us to consider that white evangelicals might actually
have believed slavery was helping them save thousands of people of African
descent – and that this conviction was a byproduct of their success.
Irons’ command
of the relevant primary and secondary sources is exhaustive, and his writing is
fluid – though he does seem at times to stray from his focus on race and
religion a little more than is necessary. The appendices he has compiled at the
end of his book, wherein he classifies evangelical Virginians according to
race, denomination, county, and method of church governance, will undoubtedly
serve as valuable resources for future students of evangelicalism in the antebellum
South.
Maura
Jane Farrelly,