Review by Choice Review
Based on her Harvard dissertation, Gerbner's debut monograph is a significant, provocative, and readable work. Gerbner (history, Univ. of Minnesota) looks at attempts to "Christianize" slavery in English and other Protestant American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Originally, Gerbner asserts, colonists embraced the concept of "Protestant supremacy" to separate them from the Africans they enslaved. She argues that English slaveholders were long reluctant to permit evangelism among their slaves, partly out of a worry that Christian baptism would entail emancipation, partly out of a fear that Christian teachings encouraged rebelliousness. Gerbner's most provocative argument is that first Quakers, then Anglicans, and finally Moravians responded by creating the idea of "Christian slavery"--that baptism did not entail freedom, that humane treatment of slaves was an expression of Christian faith, and that Christian slaves were better slaves. She also recognizes, however, that black Christians, enslaved and free, found ways to make Christianity advance antislavery, linking it with literacy and liberty. When religion no longer separated white and black, slave and free, then colonists transformed "Protestant supremacy" into a racialized "white supremacy." Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Thomas D. Hamm, Earlham College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
