Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World by John W. Catron (review)

John W. Catron is and independent scholar, living in Gainesville, Florida. Five chapters, a conclusion, notes, bibliography and an index section constitute the framework of his book. Methodologically speaking, Catron undertakes the techniques of historical data analysis and field study (p. ix). This is Catron's first book, which results from his doctoral dissertation (Catron 2008).

From a black-Atlantic geocultural dimension (Gilroy 1993), Catron's first book—which is based mainly on his doctoral dissertation (Catron 2008)—focuses on how conversion to Afro-Protestant Christianity encouraged an imbrication between exclusionist ethnic African identities and uprooted Atlantic creole identities. By emphasizing on the spread of black Protestantism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Catron's study expands the understanding of African-American social and religious history beyond the plantations and plantation churches of Virginia and South Carolina to include the entire Atlantic world. As he shows, many Afro-evangelicals were highly mobile, using a discourse of freedom and equality to connect people of color in North America with their fellow Protestants in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Catron arguments are based on the fact that they maintained a moral egalitarian, personal and collective virtue identity. Black Protestants leaders took upon themselves, as a duty, the task of traveling with the purpose of spreading their egalitarian ideology in an ever-expanding itinerant circuit. Eventually, it encompassed the entire Atlantic basin.

Thus, as Catron shows in the book's Introduction, America was thru the XVIII and most part of the XIX century the land of slavery and white supremacy, where citizenship and economic mobility were off-limits to most people of color. Further, he also argues that the Black Christian community originally attempted to foster a transnational black society and an Atlantic African cohesive identity. Consequently, Black Atlantic religious culture enabled Afro-Protestant Christians in the XVIII Century to transcend their status as enslaved laborers and identify themselves as Atlantic Christians. This new sense of identity empowered them to struggle more forcefully for emancipation and for an end to the slave trade (pp. 1-14).

Therefore, Catron establishes that early black protestants used the connections they forged with international religious organizations to transmit to broad audiences the truth of their own humanity and the basic wickedness and inhumanity of a slave society holding people, especially, other Christians in bondage and to have access to the growing abolitionist movement in Europe (p. 6). Those connections were also instrumental in building contacts with black Christians in West and Central Africa and channeled inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean and from black missionaries. This helped the black Afro Atlantic Protestant Christian community to use multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. Thus, these diverse religious traditions were used as a crucial strategy by black Anglophone Christians who resisted slavery. In Catron's words:

Defining the emerging Atlantic African culture these early black evangelicals created is important but difficult given the diversity of those people of color who lived in such a large geographic space; … First, Atlantic African culture in British America was heavily influenced by African spirituality that emphasized practical solutions to temporal problems rather than the vague promises offered by white preachers of heavenly rewards after a life of slavery's degradation. These people did not suffer in silence; they actively, reached out to sources of power outside their nominally circumscribed worlds in search of freedom, Second, and quite practically; Atlantic African culture was delineated by the mobility of its adherents who had the ability to walk, ride or sail in their quest for freedom. And third, black Atlantic Protestants distinguished themselves by their willingness at certain movements to use violent means to achieve freedom.

(p. 6)

In chapter one, Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800, the author analyzes why Antigua became an even more influential cradle of Afro-Protestantism...