Slavery and Protestant Missions in Imperial Brazil: “The Black Does Not Enter the Church, He Peeks in from the Outside.” (review)

This book examines the issue of slavery among the Protestant missionaries who began to operate in Imperial Brazil beginning in the 1830s, but especially after the Civil War in the United States. Missions from both the North and the South, for different reasons, viewed Brazil as an attractive field for gaining converts, especially as its rising urban population and a growing economy seemed to create a population that would be sympathetic to the individualism and “modernizing” attitudes of these denominations. Brazil in the nineteenth century was officially a Catholic country, but freedom of religion had been guaranteed in its constitution of 1824 so that, despite the objections of the hierarchy, the missionaries could operate freely, and they did so—distributing Bibles, establishing schools, and contesting the predominance of the Roman Catholic Church by claiming to represent truth and progress in contrast to its obscurantism and superstition. Little wonder that they were opposed.

Basing his work on secondary literature, numerous travel accounts, and contemporary newspapers, José Carlos Barbosa outlines this story, but its complexity and variations overwhelm the author’s methodology and abilities of organization. The culling of quotations on slavery from well-known foreign travelers and observers such as Thomas Davatz, Daniel Kidder, James Fletcher, Henry Koster, Thomas Ewbank, and Richard Francis Burton, as well as from the Protestant press in Brazil, especially the Presbyterian Impresa Evangélica, is useful, but the lack of a chronological continuity and a failure to contextualize the citations within that chronology or within the changing situation of abolitionist sentiment within Brazil produces a contradictory story that the absence of conclusions in each chapter or for the book as a whole only makes worse.

The narrative that emerges here is not without interest, but perhaps tells us much more about Protestant hopes and projects in Brazil than it does about slavery. Despite the well-known association between evangelical Protestantism and the abolitionist movement in England, the North American Protestant missionaries in Brazil reflected their regional backgrounds, some representing abolitionist perspectives and others, those tied to Confederate emigration, finding justifications for slavery. The author does not provide much discussion of denominational differences on the issue of slavery or on other issues, and there is a tendency to homogenize Protestant theological differences. At various points, the author characterizes the Catholic Church’s accommodation with slavery in a negative way, but then presents considerable evidence that some Protestant observers and missionaries were no less willing to accept the institution. In a similar way, he fails to recognize a strong ameliorationist impulse among Catholic clergy and laity that paralleled some Protestant thought in that direction. By the 1880s, the strong abolitionist sentiments found in the Protestant periodical press were very little different than what could be found in the Brazilian press in general.

What emerges most clearly from the book is a conclusion that the Protestant missions to Imperial Brazil were aimed primarily at free Brazilians and at ministering to Protestant immigrants. They were concerned with slavery as an aspect of Brazilian economic and moral life, but much less so with slaves as converts. Unlike much of the writing on slavery in Brazil in the last forty years, this book tells us virtually nothing about the slaves or what they might have thought about either slavery or Protestantism. The author does mention a few converts, but they were admittedly few, and the missionaries themselves recognized the comforts and attractions that the Church offered to the enslaved and their loyalty to it. The value of this book lies principally in what it reveals about the range of attitudes of Protestant missionaries toward the institution of slavery and, somewhat unintentionally, about the willingness of the Brazilian state to accept Protestantism as...