Of Conquest and Christianity: Rethinking Slavery and Race in the Early English Colonies

James Blair left a mess behind when he died in Virginia in 1743. The cleric, political figure, and commissary of the Bishop of London had once been a fervent, vocal advocate of spreading the gospel to blacks and Indians in Virginia. Yet when visitors inspected the dead man's house after his passing, they found piles upon piles of catechisms and religious tracts originally intended for evangelical purposes stuffed in the attic above his kitchen and "fouled by cat urine and rat's teeth" (Goetz, p. 149). For Rebecca Anne Goetz, author of The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, Blair was not a singular, exceptional figure. He was emblematic of a much wider and despicable transformation whereby sincere enthusiasm for the evangelization of blacks and Indians gave way to apathy and downright opposition. The dust on Blair's unused books was a testament to the growing hostility towards evangelizing nonwhites. Both Goetz and Margaret Ellen Newell, author of Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, trace the institutionalization of race and slavery in the early years of the English colonies. Both are exceptionally powerful works that highlight the systematic creation of race-based slavery via religious discourses (in the case of Goetz) and an insatiable desire for indigenous labor (in the case of Newell).

Goetz's book, The Baptism of Early Virginia, is a passionately argued and powerfully written exploration into the connections between race, religion, and law in Virginia. Framing the study around seventeenth-century Virginia, but occasionally looking to other colonies like Bermuda and Barbados for comparison, Goetz argues that Christianity transformed racial thinking from a nascent set of amorphous and ambiguous cultural assumptions into a legal machine of oppression and subjugation. The central principle behind Goetz's work is "hereditary heathenism," which the author defines as the "idea that religion is an essential characteristic, inborn, and determinant of future ideas and attitudes" (p. 12). Virginians eventually came to embrace hereditary heathenism and contended that Africans and Indians were incapable of Christian salvation by virtue of their race. Not only were they heathens, but they were hereditarily so—meaning that both their ancestors and descendants were ultimately irredeemable. Goetz argues that this idea was a product of the rise of plantation slavery in Virginia, and thus developed out of the legal and economic circumstances of shifting from a society with slaves to a slave society.

As Goetz notes at the beginning of the book, the English did not always think that way. English religious figures and writers wrestled with the question of human difference and, despite how nasty and violent as their own religious history was, they usually came down on the side of monogenism: the idea that all humans had the same divine origins and were thus capable of receiving the gospel. Any heathenism in a culture was just that: cultural. Spiritual states could be ameliorated, heathens could be civilized, and salvation was open to all who were willing to embrace it. Many English peoples even looked to their own pagan past to argue that non-Christians could become Christianized if given the proper training.

The Virginia Company even included language in their original charters that highlighted the importance of converting Indians, but violent encounters with Algonquians, particularly those under Wahunsonacock (Powhatan), cast doubt on whether the Indians could be saved at all. English officials hoped that they could forge an Anglo-Indian Christian commonwealth with Indians, but conflicts over trade goods, food resources, land, and diplomacy led to sporadic, unpredictable, and violent clashes between them, culminating in the devastating 1622 "uprising." The 1622...