Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (review)

The title of Sensbach’s book denotes that he has written a biography of a Caribbean woman, Rebecca Protten who, he asserts, was probably “the first black woman ordained in western Christianity.” (7) Rebecca led a quite remarkable and extraordinary life as a free woman of color, household servant, teacher, and evangelist on St. Thomas, as a Moravian Church leader in Germany, and as a Moravian missionary on Africa’s Gold Coast. Sensbach tackles a far more ambitious agenda that transcends, but includes, Rebecca’s life story. He explores her singular evolution as a woman who encountered distinct, yet overlapping religious, cultural and political worlds. He also examines how African-American consciousness emerged out of the spiritual revolution of their conversion to evangelical Christianity and women’s ascendancy as transmitters and interpreters of this consciousness. Sensbach demonstrates how Rebecca embodied that process of spiritual, cultural and political transformation and how she served as the leader and conduit through which much of that transformation occurred from the 1730s to the 1760s. In doing so, Sensbach adroitly poses an essential question that scholars have pondered for several decades. What role did Christianity play in creating a space for African humanity to survive, thrive and assertively challenge established political, social, cultural, economic and gendered hierarchies? Sensbach answers this question in this history of the African and Creole Moravians on St. Thomas Island who emulated the New Testament martyrs and in doing so, asserted African-American religious authority. Furthermore, he concludes, “St. Thomas proved to be the model for the spread of evangelical religion through New World slave communities.” (240)

Sensbach weaves an intricate tale that spans four continents (the Americas, Africa and Europe) and ultimately transforms our understanding of the entire Atlantic world of the early eighteenth century. He relates the horrific history of slavery on St. Thomas and the Moravian mission to the island’s black population—slave, free and Creole. Sensbach analyzes how evangelical Christianity transformed the black population and how they transformed and translated Christianity, in general, and Moravian beliefs, in particular, into their own empowering spiritual revolution. As one of the most effective and ardent Moravian evangelists whose obstinate resilience led to her imprisonment, near martyrdom and intermittent exile, Rebecca embodied the major social, political and cultural shifts in the Afro-Atlantic world. Sensbach also explicates her role as a catalyst that shapes this evolving world.

Sensbach manages to capture the complex nuances of this religious and cultural transformation by illuminating rather than ignoring its inherent contradictions. Christianity undermined and disassembled notions of white supremacy and black subordination, just as much as it supported these ideas and the infrastructures that sustained them. Rebecca embodied the fluid nature of these changes as a woman who experienced many worlds: slavery and mutable definitions of freedom; European and African cultures that morphed in the new context of St. Thomas; and competing even hostile interpretations of Christianity, including evangelical Protestant sects, the Moravians being only one of several. Rather than drowning in the chaotic ebb and flow of an amorphous universe, Rebecca understood and embraced this political, cultural and “spiritual triangular trade” (242) of mutable worlds. None could exclusively claim her because she belonged to all of them. Sensbach successfully demonstrates the complex convergence of the multiple and mutable social, cultural and political contexts from which Rebecca chose who she wanted to be and what she wanted to become. Her vision—like that of all pioneers who seize transformative opportunities—presumed a mission greater than herself and therefore, greater than her own time and place. Sensbach provides compelling and convincing evidence that Rebecca’s vision evolved into a legacy of African-American evangelical Protestantism more powerful than she could have realized.

This is a book everyone can enjoy. Sensbach translates superbly expansive and meticulous research into eloquent prose. His detailed descriptions of people and places provide powerful sensory images that stimulate readers’ emotions and intellect. At times his literary license compromises the historical evidence as he goes too far...