Overview

The origins of African American Christianity lie in the earliest decades of English colonization, when Africans forcibly transported to English North America entered a colonial religious environment shaped by Anglican establishment, missionary ambition, and the emerging legal architecture of race-based slavery. Some Africans arrived from West Central African societies in which Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, was already known, while others came from religious traditions rooted in different parts of West and West Central Africa.

This article focuses primarily on the period from 1619 through the eve of the Great Awakening in the 1730s. It was not yet an era of widespread Christian conversion among enslaved Africans and their descendants. Instead, it was a period in which important legal, theological, and social questions surrounding Black Christianity were first contested and increasingly defined. The relationship between baptism and legal status, the role of colonial churches in slavery, the persistence of African religious traditions, and the emerging racialization of bondage all helped establish the environment in which later African American Christianity developed.

First Arrivals and Early Ambiguity

The documented presence of Africans in English North America includes the arrival in 1619 of a group of African captives at Point Comfort in the Virginia colony. These men and women had been taken from West Central Africa and transported across the Atlantic through the expanding system of European slavery and colonial trade. Their arrival occurred before Virginia had fully codified the rigid system of hereditary racial slavery that would later define the colony.

The legal and social position of Africans during the early decades of seventeenth-century Virginia could vary considerably. Some Africans were held in forms of forced labor that became increasingly indistinguishable from slavery, while a small number eventually gained freedom, acquired property, and participated in colonial economic life. Anthony Johnson, who arrived in Virginia as Antonio in 1621, was held in servitude, later became free, acquired land, and eventually held servants of his own. His life illustrates the changing and increasingly racialized labor system of early Virginia rather than a settled regime identical to the plantation slavery that emerged later in the century.

Religion figured directly in this unsettled legal environment. Before colonial legislatures explicitly separated Christian baptism from legal freedom, Christian status could become one element in arguments over bondage and liberty. There was no simple or universally operative rule automatically preventing Christians from enslaving other Christians, but colonial legal practice left enough uncertainty that baptism and Christian identity could carry legal significance.

In 1644, a man named Manuel, described in surviving records as a "mulatto," petitioned for freedom in Virginia and received a form of limited release from lifetime service. His Christian identity formed part of the legal and religious context surrounding the case. In the 1650s, Elizabeth Key, the daughter of an enslaved African mother and a free English father, pursued a freedom suit in which her Christian faith was one component of a broader legal claim involving her English parentage and the terms of her service. In 1656, the Virginia General Assembly concluded that she ought to be free.

Cases such as those of Manuel and Elizabeth Key demonstrate that, for a limited period, Christianity could be invoked alongside other legal arguments by people of African descent seeking freedom. They also help explain why colonial lawmakers eventually moved to clarify that baptism would not alter an enslaved person's legal condition.

As slavery expanded during the mid-seventeenth century, particularly alongside the growth of tobacco cultivation, Virginia lawmakers increasingly defined bondage through racial and hereditary law. One important question concerned whether Christian baptism might alter an enslaved person's legal status.

In 1667, the Virginia General Assembly passed "An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage." The statute stated that the conferring of baptism did not alter a person's condition with respect to bondage or freedom. The law also explained that resolving this issue would remove doubts among enslavers who feared that baptizing enslaved people might lead to emancipation and therefore encouraged masters to support the "propagation of christianity."

Other colonies adopted laws that similarly separated Christian conversion from legal freedom. The result was to close off baptism as an argument for emancipation while removing an important legal disincentive to missionary activity among enslaved people. Enslavers could now permit or encourage Christian instruction without fearing that conversion itself would weaken their legal claim to human property.

The law did not, however, produce immediate or widespread evangelization. Religious instruction continued to depend on local clergy, missionary resources, planter cooperation, labor conditions, and the willingness of enslavers to permit religious gatherings or education. The 1667 statute therefore established an important legal framework for later missionary activity rather than directly causing large-scale conversion.

Anglican Missionary Efforts and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

Organized missionary efforts expanded slowly after the legal relationship between baptism and bondage had been clarified. In colonies where the Church of England was established, some clergy argued that enslaved Africans should receive Christian instruction. In practice, these efforts were often limited by planter resistance, labor demands, geographic isolation, and a shortage of ministers and teachers.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, an Anglican missionary organization founded in London in 1701, took an early interest in evangelizing enslaved Africans in Britain's Atlantic colonies. The Society sent clergy, missionaries, and catechists to colonial communities and encouraged religious instruction among enslaved people.

The Society was also directly entangled with the slave economy. In 1710 it received the Codrington estates in Barbados, in the British Caribbean, where enslaved Africans labored on plantations whose revenues supported the institution's missionary and educational activities. The Codrington estates illustrate the contradiction at the center of much eighteenth-century Anglican missionary work: an organization promoting Christian instruction could simultaneously benefit materially from slave labor.

In English North America, missionary results remained uneven and generally modest during the early colonial period. Some enslavers feared that religious instruction might encourage literacy, independent assembly, or claims to spiritual equality that could undermine plantation discipline. Missionaries frequently complained about difficulty obtaining enslavers' cooperation. Where instruction did occur, it was often catechetical and closely supervised, with substantial emphasis placed on obedience and the maintenance of the existing social order.

African Religious Retention

Christian instruction remained limited among much of the enslaved population during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, while African religious traditions continued to shape religious life. These traditions were not uniform. Enslaved people came from many societies in West and West Central Africa, each with its own languages, ritual systems, cosmologies, sacred authorities, and understandings of the relationship between the visible and spiritual worlds.

Practices found in different African societies could include forms of ancestor veneration, spirit communication, healing ritual, divination, communal ceremony, sacred music, and embodied performance. Musical and performative traditions involving rhythm, antiphonal or call-and-response structures, movement, and collective participation also remained important in many communities. These practices changed under the pressures of forced migration, plantation life, cultural mixing, and generational change.

Christianity therefore did not encounter a religious vacuum. Some Africans already possessed knowledge of Christianity before arrival, especially those from parts of West Central Africa influenced by Catholic missions and the Christian Kingdom of Kongo. Others encountered Christianity primarily after reaching the English colonies. In both cases, religious ideas could be interpreted through existing cultural and spiritual frameworks.

The result was not a single, uniform synthesis. Religious adaptation varied by region, generation, community, and individual experience. Over time, however, the interaction between African religious cultures and Christian teaching helped create forms of worship and interpretation that would become increasingly visible during the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century.

Legacy of the Colonial Period

By the early eighteenth century, several of the tensions that would shape later African American Christianity were already in place. Colonial law had largely separated Christian baptism from legal freedom, allowing enslavers to support evangelization without relinquishing claims to enslaved labor. Anglican clergy and missionary organizations had begun developing programs of religious instruction, though their reach remained limited.

At the same time, Africans and African Americans continued to preserve, adapt, and transform religious traditions of their own. Christianity could be used by enslavers to reinforce hierarchy, but Christian language, biblical narrative, and claims to spiritual personhood could also be interpreted in ways that exceeded or challenged the purposes of slaveholders and missionaries. Early legal cases in which Christian identity appeared as part of freedom claims demonstrated that religious status could carry meanings that colonial authorities later worked deliberately to restrict.

The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s would mark a new stage. Evangelical revivals reached much larger numbers of enslaved and free Black people and encouraged forms of conversion, preaching, testimony, and communal worship that differed substantially from the limited catechetical efforts of the earlier colonial church. The legal and institutional developments of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not cause that transformation, but they defined much of the social and legal environment in which it occurred.

For that reason, the early colonial period remains essential to understanding the later history of African American churches. It established the relationship between slavery and colonial law, exposed the contradictions between Christian teaching and racial bondage, and created the first documented settings in which Africans and African Americans negotiated the meaning of Christianity under conditions of coercion and emerging racial slavery.

Selected Sources