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WORK TITLE: Embracing Protestantism
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CITY: Gainesville
STATE: FL
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http://upf.com/book.asp?id=CATRO001
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
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CAREER
Historian and writer.
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SIDELIGHTS
John W. Catron is an independent scholar based in Gainesville, Florida, and the author of the monograph Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World. In it, he suggests that evangelical Protestantism served as an infrastructure through which African Americans could resist and actively work against the worst aspects of slavery and racism. “Catron argues that in embracing Protestantism, Atlantic Africans used transatlantic evangelical networks in a black quest for freedom and dignity,” wrote John Saillant in the Journal of Southern History. “This embrace not only countered slave-trading and slaveholding Christianity but also remedied black men and women’s lack of power in the face of white society.” “The wider Atlantic World,” explained an online Florida Bookshelf reviewer, “allowed membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations and contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa,” as well as the Caribbean. “At times, Catron suggests,” said Saillant, “some black Christians, occasionally entire church congregations, valued voluntary or semi-voluntary migration.”
It has long been known that many Africans brought to the Americas as slaves were Christians or were from areas that had historically practiced Christianity—particularly the part of central African that had been the early modern kingdom of Kongo, where Roman Catholicism had been practiced since the sixteenth century. Catron, however, examines the role played by evangelical Protestantism in creating an African diaspora identity. “The bulk of his analysis is devoted to Antigua, an island colony that Methodist mission leader Thomas Coke described as ‘the favorite of heaven,'” stated Christopher Jones in the William and Mary Quarterly. “Noting that the small sugar-producing island included nearly fifteen thousand Afro-Caribbean Methodists and Moravians by 1800, Catron makes a convincing argument that it was ‘the epicenter of … Afro-Protestantism’ … in the eighteenth century.”
Catron does not suggest that the relatively free movement of African American evangelical Protestants was characteristic of the experience of most Africans in America, enslaved or not. “The people who get the most attention in Embracing Protestantism are not necessarily typical,” declared Bradford J. Wood, writing in the Journal of Southern Religion. “Instead, they are suggestive of a range of possibilities for a shared Atlantic African Protestant identity. Or, in Catron’s words, they ‘represent in broad outline the strategies used by many eighteenth-century black Christians in their attempt to forge new and freer lives for themselves in the British Atlantic world.'”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, John Saillant, review of Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World, p. 144.
Journal of Southern Religion, Volume 19, 2017, Bradford J. Wood, review of Embracing Protestantism.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, July, 2016, Erica Johnson, review of Embracing Protestantism, p. 1183.
William and Mary Quarterly, October, 2016, Christopher Jones, review of Embracing Protestantism, p. 741.
ONLINE
Florida Bookshelf, https://floridabookshelf.wordpress.com/ (February 25, 2016), review of Embracing Protestantism.
University Press of Florida Web site, http://upress.ufl.edu/ (July 26, 2017), review of Embracing Protestantism.*
Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World
John Saillant
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p144.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World. By John W. Catron. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xii, 302. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6163-4.)
This accomplished first book is a succinct synthesis of the last twenty-five years of scholarship on black Atlantic religion from the early Atlantic slave trade to 1800. John W. Catron demonstrates that various trajectories of scholarship have overlapped, although individual researchers have not always noticed their neighbors. Prominent examples of these intersections include analyses of Roman Catholic influences in West Africa beginning in the fifteenth century, of Caribbean black Protestantism as it drew from generalized African traditions and from Protestant evangelicalism, of evangelical black religion on the mainland that took on diasporic and antislavery elements, and of the spark ignited by the American Revolution that compelled black believers to demand their rights. New scholars in particular should benefit from the book's historiography.
Catron argues that in embracing Protestantism, Atlantic Africans used transatlantic evangelical networks in a black quest for freedom and dignity. This embrace not only countered slave-trading and slaveholding Christianity but also remedied black men and women's lack of power in the face of white society. At times, Catron suggests, some black Christians, occasionally entire church congregations, valued voluntary or semivoluntary migration. There also existed a parallel "colored" third way. Scholars today tend, as does Catron, to subsume colored into black, Atlantic creole, or Atlantic African.
While scholars usually examine a small number of black people in the context of a large evangelical network, Catron has produced an excellent synopsis. One corollary of his argument is that the high tide of black activity in the transatlantic evangelical networks--from about 1750 to 1800--formed a distinct historical period in black religion. He identifies the loss of the pro-black powers of English and Afro-British evangelicalism in the early republic as another hardship of the new racism that developed in the United States. White Americans understood themselves beginning in the 1790s as in a nationalist covenant that excluded African Americans. "By reaching out to foreign preachers of British and Afro-Caribbean lineage," Catron argues, "the blacks of Georgetown [South Carolina], Wilmington [North Carolina], Charleston, Sunbury [Georgia], and Savannah ran counter to a growing American nationalism that was based upon the concept of a white evangelical mission" (p. 176).
The break between mainland African American Christians and British evangelical networks did close doors, as Catron maintains, yet the Second Great Awakening saw the revival and Americanization of mainland black churches while new connections within the Atlantic world were forged. Scholars have yet to produce a full account of the development of African American churches during the Second Great Awakening as they grew at home and as they interacted with the Atlantic world at large. The periodization Catron suggests highlights the need for that scholarship.
A few points should have been expressed as speculative. Only slight evidence places Denmark Vesey as a member or exhorter of Charleston's independent African Episcopal Church (often incorrectly called African Methodist Episcopal). This significant congregation needs no association with Vesey to raise its profile. Attestation by Moravian missions of extremely high black membership in late-eighteenth-century Antiguan congregations is taken, as in other modem scholarship, at face value. To Catron's credit, however, he does not use an 1842 estimate of eleven thousand black or colored Antiguan Moravians to speculate about the eighteenth-century population (Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and Its Inhabitants [2 vols.; London, 1844], 1:250). Others studying Antigua have used that number, itself perhaps doubtful, to estimate the eighteenth-century black Moravian population. Indisputably, Charleston and Antigua were bright lights of black Protestantism. No artificial light is needed. For Charleston and Antigua, Catron did rely on established scholarship, as any scholar would, but some of it has needlessly sought to heighten black religion's importance by using unclear evidence, which certainly needs reexamination.
John Saillant
Western Michigan University
Review: Embracing Protestantism
Bradford J. Wood
Bradford J. Wood is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University.
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JSRVolume 19
Cite this Article
Bradford J. Wood, "Review: Embracing Protestantism," Journal of Southern Religion (19) (2017): jsreligion.org/vol19/wood.
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John W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2016. 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-6163-4.
Publisher’s website
An earlier generation of students of southern religious history considered the Christianization of African American slaves a nineteenth-century story. Most readers of this journal probably now recognize the limits of this perspective, but reading John Catron’s new book Embracing Protestantism provides a powerful reminder of just how much Africans and African Americans in the English-speaking world engaged with Christianity before the nineteenth century. Catron is the beneficiary of increasingly sophisticated bodies of scholarship related to slave culture, the Atlantic World, and the history of religion, and he weaves strands from these topics into an engaging and provocative book that should interest many scholars. Of course, Catron deals with such large topics that he must be selective, so his book is primarily an account of the relationship between evangelical Protestantism and peoples of African descent in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World.
Catron challenges histories of conversion on colonial plantations by emphasizing the influence of African contexts for Christianity in the Americas, in what many may consider his most interesting chapter. He goes beyond positing compatibility between Christianity and traditional African religions and, in fact, he is careful to avoid over-generalizations about African and African American religious beliefs. West Central Africans who converted to Catholicism at an early point provide his most obvious evidence, but Catron contends that Christianity had an important presence through much of West Africa. He cannot and does not try to argue that Christians were especially numerous in the African regions of the slave trade, but he does make a plausible case that many Africans in the slave trade were at least familiar with a basic version of Christianity before they left Africa.
The Africans and African Americans in Embracing Protestantism make their own choices and have their own beliefs. Catron disagrees sharply with other scholars who have seen Christianization as evidence that slaves adopted white culture in an effort to mitigate their oppression. Instead, he describes Christianity as an opportunity for some to find inspiration, resist their oppression, and help to forge new identities that were in part African, Christian, and transatlantic. As Catron shows, the world beyond West Africa involved unspeakable horrors for many but also introduced other Africans to forces that could be more positive, including the British abolitionist movement, a cadre of energized and determined evangelical missionaries, and, ultimately, a wide and supportive network of Afro-Protestant churches and fellow believers.
Embracing Protestantism also describes a surprisingly connected world, in keeping with recent decades of scholarship that have emphasized linkages between Atlantic World peoples and places. Catron’s chapters focus on varied but interrelated places. After discussing Africa, he shifts to Antigua, which he characterizes as “the birthplace of Afro-Protestantism in the British Caribbean” (56). Christianity took root among the slave populations of Antigua partly because of Moravian missionaries, and Catron can document the emigration of over 300 Afro-Moravians who might well have spread their beliefs beyond Antigua, through much of the British Caribbean, and to more distant Atlantic World locales (93). Successive chapters chart similar and interrelated developments among other slaves and other missionaries in the Middle Colonies, the Carolina Lowcountry, and Sierra Leone. Often the connections among religious activities in such disparate places is impossible to prove and necessarily speculative, so, while Catron suggests some fascinating possibilities, some readers may see more similarity and less interrelation. Many readers will also recognize a familiar cast of unusually cosmopolitan and literate Afro-Protestants, such as David George, Olaudah Equiano, and Denmark Vesey. As Catron acknowledges, the people who get the most attention in Embracing Protestantism are not necessarily typical of the bulk of slaves working in more brutal and grueling conditions on plantations. Instead, they are suggestive of a range of possibilities for a shared Atlantic African Protestant identity. Or, in Catron’s words, they “represent in broad outline the strategies used by many eighteenth-century black Christians in their attempt to forge new and freer lives for themselves in the British Atlantic world.” (4).