John W. Catron, <i>Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World</i>. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. 320. $74.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsJohn W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. 320. $74.95 (cloth).Lamont DeHaven KingLamont DeHaven KingJames Madison University Search for more articles by this author James Madison UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBy using church records, journals, and diaries from the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and Europe, Embracing Protestantism examines how black Christians, during the Great Awakening, created a new “Atlantic African” culture that transcended ethnic and national boundaries. The book focuses primarily on the Moravian and Methodist denominations, which often gave blacks authority in their churches. John W. Catron follows the lives of individual missionaries who increasingly began to seek the aid of these international religious organizations in their quest for greater autonomy.Central to Catron’s analysis is the observation that black culture in the New World was extraordinarily varied. Though many blacks understood multiple languages and shared common religious and cultural values, African “traditional” religions often tended to “particularize rather than unify” even those who had been imported from the same region. Consequently, parochial ethnic identities were eroded, as blacks reached out to each other for support in Protestant congregations. In this process, many blacks became Afro-Moravians, or Afro-Methodists, before becoming “Atlantic Africans.” However, they were not Ira Berlin’s (Many Thousands Gone, 2000) “deracinated” Atlantic Creoles, attempting only to integrate into the white culture of the American seaport towns in which they flourished. Instead, for Catron, by embracing these nascent Protestant sects, blacks were resisting, while simultaneously accommodating, slavery.Catron does an excellent job of organizing this complex subject regionally and chronologically. Chapter 1 shows that Christianity thrived in Africa even before the fourth-century conversion of the Aksumite king, Ezana. In addition to the well-documented, fifteenth-century conversion of the Kongolese elite, Catron also examines the less investigated Catholic presence in Benin and Warri. In so doing, he explains the role played by the mixed-race, multilingual offspring of European men who profited from the slave trade. These middlemen helped fashion a “hybridized culture” of Christianity that existed alongside traditional faiths, creating a “truly African religion” that many of the enslaved brought with them to the New World.In chapter 2, Catron explains that Antigua became the “epicenter” and vanguard of black Protestantism in the British West Indies and North America because of relatively increased rights for free blacks, such as suffrage, and fewer restrictions on slaves’ mobility. Even more important, because of fear of slave revolts, Protestant planters did not have large revivals. Consequently, essentialist analyses that focus on emotionalism, physicality, and spirit possession—characteristics that are often cited as reasons for blacks’ affinity to Protestantism—are countered by the fact that Moravians achieved communion with God in a “joyous but muted” manner, which Catron considers no less of an African form of worship. He reminds us that since African spirituality defies easy classification, we must move beyond essentialism and attempt instead to understand that an African-born slave could be a Moravian and still consult an Obeah priest.Chapter 3 follows Moravian blacks to the Middle colonies, particularly the frontier settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Though the research in this understudied area is obviously important, Catron strains unnecessarily to find parallels between Moravian Bethlehem and Igbo society. For example, he posits that life in the Moravian congregation gave the young Igbo slave, Ofodobendo, a new “coming of age” name, York (changed to Andreas by the time he became the first church-sponsored black missionary in British North America in 1742), a new ruling clan, and even the institutional regulation of personal behavior that paralleled Igbo secret societies. His argument is much stronger when he stresses integration into the congregation because of the prohibition of private property in slaves who were, consequently, owned by the church. This alteration of the slave experience is more illustrative of Catron’s point that, though clearly not free of racial prejudice, more than anywhere else in Anglo-America, the Moravians “blurred the line between slavery and freedom,” fostering a “liberation theology” that “encompassed physical security, economic stability, and social harmony” (226).In chapters 4–5, Catron examines the years surrounding the American Revolution when the potential for black emancipation caused hysteria among Southern whites. While black preachers in Philadelphia, like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, created independent churches, in the Deep South, blacks realized that they would have to accept white “domination of their churches if their congregations were going to survive” (177). Moreover, many slave and free blacks who had supported Britain accompanied white American loyalists to Canada after the war. Hence, blacks from Birchtown, Nova Scotia, combined with London’s black poor who had settled at Granville Town in Sierra Leone in 1787 and created a black bourgeoisie that ultimately also included Jamaican maroons and recaptives by the British Royal Navy. Despite the contempt this “reverse diaspora” often showed for its new neighbors, an Atlantic African identity—a “middle path,” reminiscent of Paul Gilroy’s (The Black Atlantic, 1993) “counter culture of modernity”—was forged by their shared experiences of slavery and Protestant evangelism. Here, Catron also investigates Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in 1822, reminding us again that black Protestants did not eschew alliances with African spiritual leaders or the use of violence to achieve their aims. By this time, however, the Revolution and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade had cut the “umbilical cord” to Africa and the Caribbean. Accepting blacks into white churches became less threatening and a means of social control, especially in the interior regions of the new cotton-growing South. Thus, by the 1840s, Christianity was, more than ever, a mechanism for blacks to cope with slavery, rather than an instrument in the pursuit of freedom.This meticulously documented work forces us to ignore Roger Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s suggestion that identity should be jettisoned as a focus of analysis (“Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 [2000]: 1–47), Catron’s conceptualization of Atlantic Africans certainly raises important questions for black studies. Still, the violence inherent in identity as a Protestant slave, though often alluded to, is minimized throughout the book. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701085 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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