Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

3. Religion and the Civilizing Mission

{ 5 } Religion and the Civilizing Mission A decade after the Oberlin ministers began their missionary work, the missionaries went to great pains to explain that while Jamaica had many mission churches, it had few authentic Christians. One missionary acknowledged that after emancipation in 1838 many freed people had been moved by the Holy Spirit to join churches, but after ten years it had become clear that “comparatively few conversions proved to be real and genuine.” Skeptical of the authenticity of conversions, the American ministers also blamed lax church discipline, and they regretted “that greater care and strictness were not exercised in the admission of members to the church.” According to one article, “The novelty of freedom and the peculiar sensations to which it gave birth gradually wore off,” and black Jamaicans had become less interested in supporting mission churches over time. Whether black Jamaicans had once been legitimate Christians who had backslid, or whether the missionaries had only recognized too late that 3 { 6 } chapter three “the Christianity so largely professed was . . . a false and spurious thing” all along, it had become clear that the American missionaries and Jamaican freed people had distinctly different notions of what it meant to be free and what it meant to be a Christian.1 This uneasy assessment of the state of religion in post-emancipation Jamaica conveyed to the home audience why the American mission on the island was proving to be more complicated than initially anticipated. After all, if accounts like that of James Thome and Horace Kimball were to be believed, emancipation, religious conversion, and racial uplift were all part of the same process. Why had black Jamaicans not become the “civilized ” people whom American abolitionists had imagined? Why had the transformative power of emancipation failed? These questions stemmed in large part from the disparities between American and Jamaican notions of freedom. From their experiences as abolitionists in the United States, the Oberlin missionaries had undergone evangelical conversion, and in their antislavery education, they had interpreted the legal emancipation of slaves to be intertwined with a more spiritual and cultural conversion. Freedmen would emerge from slavery as exemplars of independent manhood, eager to labor for their own support on their freeholds and quick to establish domestic tranquility in their free homes. Few enslaved Jamaicans had shared in this American view of emancipation, and the much-discussed backsliding in the decade after 1838 that dominated American and British reports illustrated the growing anxiety of the white missionaries. The first Oberlin graduates to go to Jamaica in the late 1830s and early 1840s left the United States as fervent abolitionists, and they assumed that black Jamaicans awaited their arrival. Former slaves needed schools, to be sure, and this would be hard work for the missionaries, but evangelism and conversions to Christian perfectionism would come easily. After all, why would freed people shun white Americans who cared so deeply about their condition? Only when the missionary encounter began did the Americans begin to revise their abolitionist assumptions, and in this mission, it appears that the Americans were changed far more than the people whom they attempted to civilize and convert. Regardless of the amount of theoretical and theological missionary planning that occurred in the United States, Jamaicans and the religious culture of the island had a hand in shaping the Jamaica Mission. Facing black Jamaicans who claimed to be Christians but who practiced adult baptism, drank rum, and sometimes religion and the civilizing mission {  } engaged in extramarital sex put the American ministers on edge, and they questioned whether they could tell a true convert from someone just trying to get into the church. The Americans were certainly not unfamiliar with religious unorthodoxy. Charles Finney’s Christian perfectionism had been the target of attacks in the United States, for example, and one evangelical visitor to Jamaica remarked that the island’s “superstition” was mild compared “to the extravagancies of Mormonism; or to the horrible doctrines of the Universalists.”2 The Oberlin ministers quickly racialized the threat from Jamaican Christianity. As Catherine Hall writes in regard to British Baptist missionaries’ similar dilemma, “White Baptists could never be mistaken for Black or Native Baptists, but Baptists who were black were always susceptible to that possibility.”3 Church discipline became the most important part of the missionaries’ religious work in Jamaica. While church discipline was used in the United States to exclude sinful slaveholders from...