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

In The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, Charles F. Irons deftly argues that decades of meaningful racial interaction shaped the development of evangelical culture in Virginia. Irons reveals the considerable extent to which black Southerners acted as historical agents who managed to influence white evangelical policies respecting slavery and the racial status quo.

Treating the religious defense of slavery as an unevenly unfolding process rather than a fixed set of doctrines, Irons’s narrative covers the growth of evangelical institutions in Virginia from the late-seventeenth century through the Civil War. In his first chapter (dealing with the colonial and Revolutionary eras), he explores the mostly unsuccessful efforts of early missionaries to recruit African Americans into their churches. The strong colonial association between slave and “heathen” populations meant that religious reformers were forced to struggle against the slaveholders’ fear that baptism of their slaves would entail their liberation from service. While white ministers articulated a proslavery interpretation of Christian doctrine, African Americans began, during the Revolutionary era, to establish their own place in the emerging evangelical landscape. In chapters 2 and 3, Irons chronicles the contradictory power dynamic that emerged between white church authorities and the thousands of black worshippers who played major roles in the surging growth of the Baptist and Methodist denominations during the Early National era. On the one hand, white evangelicals realized by the turn of the nineteenth century that their churches would never flourish in slaveholding Virginia if they continued to openly challenge the morality of slavery. On the other hand, the vibrant presence of black worshippers taking part in every facet of church life forced white ministers to acknowledge their humanity and to accept their efforts to spread the Christian faith across the state. The beauty of Irons’s account lies in its capacity to explore the nuances and paradoxes flowing from these biracial negotiations over the relationship between evangelical faith and the institution of slavery. Irons, for example, demonstrates how the American Colonization Society reflected, sometimes simultaneously, the agendas of paternalistic slaveholders seeking to broadcast their altruism towards the subordinate race and black religious activists eager to demonstrate their worth in the face of unjust racism.

In chapters 4 and 5, Irons investigates the changing evangelical racial dynamic following Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton in 1831. After politicians briefly explored the prospect of emancipation before ultimately pinning the state’s future securely to slavery, white evangelical authorities scrambled to comply with new statutes requiring more complete oversight of black religious life. When abolitionists flooded the postal system with anti-slavery literature in the mid 1830s, leading white ministers responded with ever more explicit defenses of the morality of slavery. While the broad contours of this development have been explored by a number of scholars, Irons makes a twofold contribution to the historiography. First, he notes that these proslavery efforts grew directly from the theology mapped out by preceding generations of colonial and Early National missionaries to the slaves. Second, Irons persuasively argues that the ministers’ explicitly proslavery rhetoric did not preclude white religious authorities from continuing to allow black religious activists a considerable degree of autonomy in their efforts to build up black church membership during the final antebellum decades. Irons’s final chapter presents the conflicted stance adopted by white evangelical ideologues during the secession crisis.

Irons’s monograph merits careful consideration from historians working on a host of religious, racial, and sectional questions. This excellent study reflects the author’s considerable research into primary sources ranging from church records to manuscript collections and his mastery of the voluminous secondary literature. It is a superb first book.