Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World

Conclusion: The British Atlantic World in Perspective

conclusion The British Atlantic World in Perspective The circulation of peoples throughout the British Atlantic world brought together many different religious traditions. The meeting of western European Christianity, West African traditional beliefs, and Native American spirituality only began to capture the extent of the ideas and practices in circulation. Atlantic African Muslims, Mohawk and Kongolese Catholics, Sephardic Jews, and an enormous variety of European Christians further enhanced the complexity of the religious scene. Believers transplanting a wide range of organized church alternatives especially from Protestant Europe into Britain, Ireland, and the Atlantic basin. This diversity and the multiplicity of encounters it engendered changed religions and believers’ understanding of their faiths, as traditions blended or clashed, and individuals negotiated the various options presented to them. By 1800, monotheism and especially Christianity had reached deep into North America, carried by European-descended believers, embraced by recently converted slaves and freed persons of color, and taken up by Native American peoples. While monotheistic institutions and practices had not been transplanted in precisely their Old World forms, the variations that had been translated into the wider Atlantic world spread Mediterranean monotheism well passed its original boundaries. By 1800, indeed, Christianity and Islam were both becoming global religions, penetrating far beyond their longestablished geographies. Both Africans and Native Americans had begun to remake Christianity into faith traditions of their own. Despite the expectations of those who sought to convert them, they did not simply drop their old ways, ties, and perspectives, entirely transforming themselves into new Conclusion 257 persons. The rhetoric of Christian conversion assumed drastic change, but incremental shifts and gradual blending had been the case since the Protestant Reformation first began to remake English Catholics into Protestants centuries before. When charting the effect of expansion, we naturally look first to the places Europeans moved into, yet the impact was not limited to those areas. Rather religion in Europe itself was also transformed as part of this process. Atlantic settlements became sites of unprecedented religious diversity, challenging expectations that such diversity would lead to social and political collapse. If some conservatives understood the American Revolution to prove that maxim, others had come to perceive the possibility that persons of different faiths might live side by side in relative harmony. A transatlantic religious trend like evangelism arose out of the strife of a religiously divided Europe, speaking to the need of Protestants of different stripes to find common ground and to spread the faith to non-Christians in various missionary outposts . British Protestants learned to become missionaries in the Atlantic world, a surprisingly long and slow process given the rhetorical commitment to outreach from the first. British abolitionists who extolled publications by African Christian men to prove the injustice of slavery and the educability of the peoples of West Africa thereby participated in the creation of an inclusive Atlantic Christian community. In these ways and more, the religious encounter changed thinking and forged new practices in Europe as well as elsewhere. The Protestantism of the British Atlantic fundamentally shaped its development . The Christianity that had been brought to the New World after 1600, and in particular to the British Atlantic world, had itself already been fragmented, so the diversity that prevailed should come as no surprise (though it occasionally did so). As the leading edge of expansion out of the British and Irish archipelago, the English transferred their various iterations of Protestantism and their residual Catholicism as well as opening the way for Scots Presbyterianism, Irish Catholicism, and other local variations. As Britain increasingly became a refuge for European Protestants the variety of faiths present expanded further, to include many forms of German Protestantism , French Huguenots, and others. Protestants in Europe, although proportionally fewer in number than Catholics, were more inclined to leave home during these centuries than their Catholic counterparts, and they thereby transferred the complexity of the European Protestant scene to the British Atlantic. If Protestantism generally had more difficulty launching itself into the African American and Native American communities than Ibe- 258 conclusion rian Catholicism did, it did eventually make inroads, fostering a vibrant African American faith by 1800 as well as some strong strides among Indians. The diverse and predominantly Protestant nature of the British Atlantic world is traceable to the unpromising beginnings of an early English movement into the Atlantic basin after 1600. Surveying religion from an Atlantic perspective offers a number of advantages. On this scale...