Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  That the Catholic Church, where it possessed theocratic power, was still conducting persecutions for blasphemy, heresy, and witchcraft was very much a part of the consciousness of educated Protestants in the colonies. Less than three years after the church bells of different religions rang out in Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old French nobleman, Jean-François de la Barre, was beheaded in Abbeville for (according to the court’s sentence) the crimes of singing impious and blasphemous songs against God; failing to bow to the Communion host being carried in a Corpus Christi procession; and possessing blasphemous books, most notably Voltaire’s Portable Philosophical Dictionary. The sentence specified that Voltaire’s work be burned, along with the Chevalier de la Barre’s body, after the beheading.*5 Although more than two centuries had passed, there was no significant difference between this Catholic execution and the Protestant execution of Servetus engineered by Calvin. This internationally publicized execution took place on July 1, 1766—only a decade before the American revolutionaries were to put the finishing touches on the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Such events, exemplifying the bloodshed that union between church and state had inflicted on the peoples of the Old World, were recent history, not a bad memory from a distant past, for the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Some of the founders were Christians and some were freethinkers, but when they sat down to write the nation’s founding documents, nearly all of them had in mind the contrast between the religious pluralism expressed in the 1763 celebration in colonial New York and the European religious violence that had taken so many lives.

  The circumstances of Jews in colonies like New York—long before the federal Constitution gave them legal protection—offers what is arguably the most dramatic evidence of the differences between the New World and the Old. Five years after Congregation Shearith Israel participated in the celebration of the end of the French and Indian War, it appointed twenty-three-year-old Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745–1816) as its hazzan, or cantor. Seixas was the son of a Portuguese Converso whose family had fled to London in 1725, and then moved on to New Amsterdam, after being accused by the Inquisition of secretly continuing to practice Judaism. In the case of Seixas’s father, who was responsible for his son’s education in Hebrew and Judaism, the suspicion was obviously justified.*6 The younger Seixas would become a strong supporter of the American Revolution (though many members of his split congregation, like many other New Yorkers, bet on the wrong horse and backed the British). He believed that American independence, founded on the Enlightenment concept of natural rights, would establish the principle of religious liberty in ways that Jews had never before experienced in civil society. When Columbia College (founded in 1754 as King’s College, now Columbia University) reopened after the Revolution, Seixas was appointed to the board of trustees. (By this time, Ashkenazi Jews, many refugees from the regions that now make up Germany, outnumbered Sephardim in Congregation Shearith Israel.) Seixas’s appointment to the Columbia board of trustees was made at a time when Jews were barred from attending universities in all of the areas that constitute modern Germany. His stewardship at Columbia coincided with the period when Immanuel Kant, who taught at the University of Königsberg, permitted a small number of chosen Jews to audit (as the term is understood today) his philosophy seminars.*7 They could not receive any credit toward a degree, because they could graduate only if they converted to Christianity.*8

  In the new American republic, there would be fierce social and economic discrimination, at different times and in different places, not only against Jews and Catholics but against many other old and new religious groups. These passions would occasionally turn violent. What would never happen, though, was the emergence of a national, government-supported system of legal religious persecution. Many members of minority religions would convert to the majority faith in America (as my father’s family did) for social advantage, but conversion would never be a legal requirement for any form of advancement, as it was in many parts of Europe before the twentieth century. As far as the law was concerned, an American’s choice of faith would always be a private, not a public matter.

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  There was, however, one glaring exception to the hands-off policy regarding religious choice and conversion on the part of colonial America’s governing classes. As usual, the exception involved slavery and race. The mass conversion of slaves from paganism or Islam to Christianity, beginning in the late seventeenth century and proceeding as long as new slaves continued to arrive from Africa, is the single example of large-scale forced religious conversion in American history. (Although there were many missionary efforts among Indians, with varying degrees of success, there was no mandatory mass conversion.) The Christianization of African-born slaves and their descendants is not generally thought of as an example of forced conversion, because it took place within the context of the more overwhelming force that created slavery itself and because blacks by the end of the Civil War were—as they are today—overwhelmingly Christian by choice. How, exactly, African-born and African-descended slaves became Christians falls into the zone of the many largely unexamined consequences of slavery.

  Initially, slaveholders in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were far from convinced that their chattels should be encouraged or even allowed to convert to Christianity. Assuming that they considered themselves good Christians, the owners could not fail to see a certain contradiction between Jesus’s teachings about the brotherhood of man and their ownership of “brothers.” But in the late seventeenth century, when slavery began to expand dramatically in the American colonies, none of the major Christian denominations were willing to allow awareness of that contradiction to interfere with business. Penn, to cite a particularly shameful example in view of his other beliefs about human rights and justice, owned slaves himself and said unashamedly that he preferred them to less reliable indentured servants. What master would feel otherwise? By definition, a term of indentured servitude has a beginning and an end. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that American Quakers, who were to play such an important role in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, took a firm stand against slavery. Not until 1774 did the American branch of the Society of Friends state unequivocally that a Quaker could not own slaves. Slavery was not, as is mistakenly thought by many today, a strictly Southern institution. New York had the largest proportion of slaves outside the South—between 12 and 18 percent of the population in the eighteenth century, with an even larger percentage in New York City. The religion of slaves was not, however, a major social issue in the mid-Atlantic colonies, because slavery did not form the basis of the entire economy.

  In the South, where slavery was the economy and large numbers of captives were concentrated on great plantations by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the question of slave religion was more urgent. With blacks outnumbering whites in many areas of the South, the African religious practices of many slaves could and did seem threatening to many masters. Should those in bondage be permitted to retain their polytheistic African religious practices or be introduced to stories from the Old and New Testaments? The problem—the intractable problem—was that some Bible stories posed a moral challenge to what was becoming the Southern Way of Life. That no major religion, while claiming freedom for its own members, had hesitated to enslave others was almost beside the point in the debate over whether slaves should be subjected to Christian proselytizing. The Mosaic injunction “Let my people go” should really have been written with the emphasis on “my,” but no matter. The Jewish Bible, and the story told in Exodus, were also integral to Christian teaching, and the willingness of the Israelites to make slaves of others was an inconvenient fact that neither Christians nor Jews wished to acknowledge. One need only recall the persistence of the phrase in Negro spirituals dating from slavery—“Go down, Moses, / Way down in Egypt’s land; / Tell old Pharaoh / To let my people go!”—to understand that the Anglican plant
ers were right to worry about the implications of conversion to a Christianity that also incorporated the Jewish biblical story. The planters were equally right, by their own lights, to worry about the consequences of teaching slaves to read.

  In typical fashion, the planter class veered between fearing the effects of Christian proselytizing among slaves and claiming that slaves were too stupid to comprehend so complex a religion. In 1699, the Virginia General Assembly concluded that conversion to Christianity would be too arduous an undertaking for slaves because of the “Gros Barbarity and rudeness of their manners, the variety and Strangeness of their Languages and the weakness and Shallowness of their minds.”12

  At the same time, the Anglican clergy developed elaborate rationales and rituals to reassure planters that, should these weak and shallow minds prove, against all odds, capable of understanding Christianity, they would learn to understand their new religion as a yoke of obedience. Francis Le Jau, an Anglican minister (himself a convert from the Huguenot faith) in South Carolina, wrote a special oath in 1707 for slaves to take, in the presence of their masters, before being baptized. Each slave was required to swear “that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free your self from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live.”13

  This oath was more than a formality (at least to the masters)—especially in South Carolina and Georgia, the colonies closest to Spanish-controlled Florida. The Spanish Crown had promised emancipation to any fugitive slave who converted to Catholicism after reaching its territory (although evidence about whether the Spanish colonial rulers actually delivered on this promise is thin). But authorities in the Southern colonies, if they were going to allow slaves to participate in the comforting rituals of Christianity, wanted no misunderstandings that equated religious conversion with a change in chattel status. It was up to the Anglican Church, which wanted to convert the slaves, to supply the planters with a rationale to reconcile Christianity with slavery. Of course, Paul’s dictum that servants be subject to their masters was always extremely helpful.

  Thomas Bacon, an Anglican minister from Maryland, in sermons delivered to mixed audiences of slaves and their masters, referred to slave owners as “God’s overseers.” Slaves were obliged to serve these overseers “as if…for God himself.” Furthermore, they were bound to follow orders that were not only “peevish, and hard,” but even those involving immoral acts.14 So much for the rape of female slaves. In this world, slaves must not resist any command—however immoral the command might seem to a free person. Justice would wait for the next world. (Bacon’s sermons were published in London and widely circulated among colonial planters as exemplars of how to teach slaves about Christianity in a way that provided religious sanction for them to stay in their proper, inferior place.)

  The controversy over the meaning of conversion for slaves continued even as the colonies moved toward a revolution based on the philosophy of natural rights and the liberal ideals of the High Enlightenment. Colonial legislatures passed, and often redundantly reaffirmed, laws that explicitly denied emancipation to baptized slaves. These laws, as historian Winthrop Jordan points out in White over Black (1968), were specifically designed to reassure planters that the law did not countenance any idea that, although it might be morally sound for a Christian master to own a slave of another religion, it was wrong for the same master to own a Christian slave. Colonial legislatures reaffirmed the proposition that it was just fine for Christians to own other Christians (a position held by the church since late antiquity). The passage of such laws in all Southern and at least two Northern colonies by the second decade of the eighteenth century offers powerful evidence of the white ruling class’s fear that even a supposedly weak-minded slave might be intelligent enough to perceive a conflict between a religion whose Lord, in his earthly incarnation, had proclaimed the dignity of all men, and a society that allowed slaves no dignity at all.

  As late as the 1770s, both Anglican clergy and nonconformist Protestant leaders continued to reassure slave owners that Christianity did not mean freedom for human property. When the Second Great Awakening began, at the end of the century, moving many away from orthodox magisterial Protestantism and toward the fervor of born-again evangelicalism, the role of Christianity as a bulwark of slavery, and vice versa, only hardened. Conversion would admit slaves to the fellowship of Christian believers, but it would not admit them to the ranks of humans endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. No one has ever put it better than W. J. Cash in his classic The Mind of the South (1941). After 1800, the position of the Southern states—some, like Virginia, having been pioneers in institutionalizing the principle of the separation of church and state—moved toward that of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Every man was in his place because He [God] had set him there,” Cash concludes. “Everything was as it was because He had ordained it so. Hence slavery, and, indeed, everything that was, was His responsibility, not the South’s. So far from being evil it was the very essence of Right. Wrong could consist only in rebellion against it. And change could come only as He himself produced it through His own direct acts, or—there was always room here for this—as He commanded it through the instruments of His will, the ministers.”15

  We have little access to what generations of slaves thought about Christian proselytizing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, because there is almost no written record. On the subject of religion, the nineteenth century also yielded few testimonies. There are, however, several outstanding exceptions. One is Solomon Northrup’s long-forgotten 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, restored to history by the Oscar-winning movie in 2013. Northrup, a free New York black man kidnapped into slavery, describes just the sort of sermon advocated by Reverend Bacon. The description is worth quoting in full precisely because it is so rare; Northrup, with his education and former life in freedom, was in a unique position to observe, as both an outsider and a slave, the conflict between slavery and Christian teaching.

  Like William Ford, his brother-in-law, Tanner was in the habit of reading the Bible to his slaves on the Sabbath, but in a somewhat different spirit. He was an impressive commentator on the New Testament. The first Sunday after my coming to the plantation, he called them together, and began to read the twelfth chapter of Luke. When he came to the 47th verse, he looked deliberately around him, and continued—“And that servant which knew his lord’s will,”—here he paused, looking around more deliberately than before, and again proceeded—“which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself”—here was another pause—“prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

  “D’ye hear that?:” demanded Peter [a slave] emphatically. “Stripes,” he repeated, slowly and distinctly, taking off his spectacles, preparatory to making a few remarks.

  “That nigger that don’t take care—that don’t obey his lord—that’s his master—d’ye see?—that ’ere nigger shall be beaten with many stripes. Now, ‘many’ signifies a great many—forty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty lashes. That’s Scripter!” and so Peter continued to elucidate the subject for a great length of time, much to the edification of his sable audience.16

  Thus was conversion, originally feared by the planters, transformed into an instrument of subjection. One wonders what Robert Boyle, so dedicated to the conversion of non-Christians from Malaya to Turkey, would have thought of the dogma of absolute slave obedience as a condition for conversion. As Jon Butler, an eminent historian of early American religion, observes, “The advancing paternalism rooted in a doctrine of absolute obedience reinforced the growing violence of eighteenth-century slaveholding….Blacks were not Sambo—the soft, docile, lethargic slave—but had become rebellion personified, and their ‘insolence’ was all but guaranteed by the doctrines that demanded absolute rather than conditional obedience, first rationalized by Anglican ministers in the colonies.”17 Moreover, non-Anglicans in sla
veholding states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—including nonconformist Protestants and Catholics in Maryland—raised no objections to the absolutist view of obedience promulgated by Bacon.

  Northrup’s memoir is a valuable commentary on slave conversion and religion not only because of its rarity but because it focuses, in almost journalistic fashion, on the actual religious practices encouraged and/or tolerated by masters. He is concerned with what people around him do and say, not with whatever inner spiritual experiences they might be having. Of great importance was the custom of allowing slaves to work for pay on the Sabbath, and this extra day of work on what was supposed to be the Christian day of rest was their only way of buying anything that the masters did not provide. Had these slaves been literate, they would surely have been as disinclined as fifteenth-century Spanish Conversos to leave a record of whatever their “true” religious feelings were. We know that, whatever form of Christianity was adopted by slaves, many traditional African religious practices—from circumcision to magic rituals—survived along with the religion fostered or permitted by individual masters. Like every mass conversion (as opposed to the individual, spiritualized conversions that occupy a disproportionate space in literature), the Christianization of America’s slaves took place as a result of overwhelming economic and political forces. In the end, most masters concluded that it was better to live with slaves who professed a shared religion than with slaves who might adhere to demonic, unknown spiritual beliefs that promoted rebellion.