When Slavery Became Racial: Scripture, Heredity, and Christian Bondage
White Theology and White Power Part VI
Atlantic slavery did not begin with a fully developed ideology of biological race. Europeans enslaved Africans within older worlds of warfare, commerce, religious difference, and inherited servitude, while Africans and Europeans participated in complex systems of trade and captivity that predated the English colonies. What became distinctive in the plantation societies of the Americas was the gradual construction of a system in which African ancestry, hereditary status, coerced labor, legal inferiority, and eventually whiteness reinforced one another across generations. Christian theology did not single-handedly create that system. It did, however, become deeply involved in determining whether Christianity would challenge the emerging racial order, modify it, or make it morally possible to maintain.[1]
That distinction is important to understanding what I mean by white theology. I am not suggesting that Christianity was inherently white, that all European Christians held the same beliefs, or that theological ideas mechanically produced slavery. White theology emerged when Christian interpretation was developed and institutionalized within societies in which Europeans controlled most of the churches, legislatures, courts, land, wealth, and political authority. Theology became connected to white power when interpretations of Christianity helped those institutions reconcile Christian belief with a social system that distributed freedom, property, authority, and legal protection overwhelmingly toward Europeans while assigning hereditary bondage increasingly to Africans and their descendants.
Seventeenth-century Virginia offers a particularly revealing window into this process because its legal record captures the closing of possibilities that had once remained unsettled. Elizabeth Key, a woman of African and European ancestry, successfully sued for her freedom in the 1650s using arguments that included her free English father and her Christian baptism. Her case did not by itself cause the laws that followed, but it illuminates a legal world in which ancestry, religion, and status had not yet been fused into a stable racial order. Her Christianity mattered. Her father’s freedom mattered. The boundaries had not completely hardened.[2]
Virginia lawmakers soon began removing those ambiguities in ways that strengthened slaveholding. In 1662, the legislature declared that children’s status as free or enslaved would follow the condition of the mother. This reversed the usual English common-law presumption that status followed the father and made enslaved women’s reproductive lives central to the reproduction of the labor system. The children of enslaved women could now become property regardless of the identity or status of their fathers—including white fathers. What had been labor exploitation could reproduce itself biologically and legally across generations.[3]
Five years later, Virginia confronted Christianity itself. In 1667 the legislature declared that baptism did not alter a person’s condition of bondage. The law explained why the clarification was necessary: some slaveholders apparently feared that allowing enslaved people to become Christians could jeopardize their ownership. The legislature reassured them that conversion would not threaten property rights. Masters could permit baptism without risking emancipation.[3]
This was an extraordinary theological and political settlement. Baptism could change a person’s relationship to God without changing that person’s relationship to an owner. An enslaved Christian could become a brother or sister in Christ and remain property in law. Christian identity was preserved spiritually while being stripped of implications that might destabilize the economic hierarchy.
This is one of the places where white theology and white power became mutually reinforcing. The law protected slaveholders’ property, but Christian interpretation helped make that protection morally intelligible. Churches could preach salvation to enslaved Africans without necessarily questioning the power of Christians to own them. Ministers could affirm equality before God while accepting radical inequality before the law. Spiritual equality could therefore coexist with civil bondage because the claims of Christianity were increasingly confined to a sphere that did not have to overturn the distribution of property and power.
The transformation continued. In 1691 Virginia prohibited marriages between “English or other white” people and Negroes, mulattoes, or Indians. The law is significant not merely because it regulated marriage but because the legal category of white was becoming explicit at precisely the time that African ancestry, enslavement, and hereditary status were becoming increasingly connected. The statute also assigned responsibilities to parish churchwardens in cases involving interracial relationships and their children. Racial order was therefore not operating outside Christian institutions. Parish structures themselves could participate in administering the boundaries being constructed between white and nonwhite populations.[4]
By 1705 Virginia had consolidated much of this developing system into an extensive law concerning servants and slaves. It reaffirmed both principles that had become essential to hereditary racial slavery: children followed the status of their mothers, and baptism did not free the enslaved. Even more revealingly, proclamations concerning enslaved people who had fled were to be published on the Sabbath at church doors immediately after divine worship.[4]
The image is difficult to miss. Worship could conclude, the congregation could emerge from church, and the machinery of racial slavery could continue at the church door.
This did not mean every minister approved every provision of slave law. Nor does it establish that theology alone created racial slavery. It shows something more historically precise: the institutions of Christianity and the institutions of racial power were capable of inhabiting the same social world without being understood by dominant white society as fundamentally incompatible.
Scripture became central to that accommodation because Protestants placed extraordinary authority in the biblical text. Defenders of slavery cited patriarchal slaveholding, Pauline household codes, instructions directing enslaved persons to obey their masters, and the absence of an explicit New Testament command abolishing slavery throughout the Roman Empire. The so-called curse of Ham—more accurately the curse of Canaan in Genesis 9—was increasingly racialized and applied to Africans even though the text says nothing about modern racial categories or an African hereditary slave caste.[5]
But the theological problem went deeper than quoting particular verses. Biblical interpretation involves decisions about which texts govern other texts, which historical practices are descriptive rather than normative, and how the moral purposes of Scripture are understood. Proslavery theology repeatedly made one particularly consequential interpretive choice: biblical passages that could sustain obedience and hierarchy were allowed substantial social force, while passages capable of destabilizing the racial order could be confined to spiritual meaning.
Thus an enslaved person could be told that Paul’s instructions concerning obedience applied directly to plantation life, while Paul’s declaration that believers were one in Christ did not require equal civil standing. The household codes could regulate the behavior of the enslaved, while the Exodus did not necessarily regulate the behavior of the enslaver. Christian brotherhood could describe souls without determining property rights.
That asymmetry is central to the relationship between white theology and white power. Theology did not need to proclaim white supremacy explicitly in every sermon to help sustain it. It could accomplish much of the same work by determining which biblical principles were permitted to challenge social arrangements and which were not.
Antislavery Christians demonstrated that other readings were possible. They appealed to creation in the image of God, the Exodus, prophetic denunciations of oppression, the Golden Rule, the Great Commandment, the moral logic of the gospel, and the unity of humanity. Their argument exposed a hermeneutical problem that would eventually divide American Christianity: whether specific biblical regulations inherited from ancient slaveholding societies should control Christian ethics, or whether those texts should be interpreted through the larger biblical demands of neighbor-love, justice, human dignity, and liberation from oppression.[5]
The conflict, therefore, was not simply between people who believed the Bible and people who rejected it. Christians committed to biblical authority reached radically different conclusions. The question was what faithful biblical reasoning required—and whether interpretations that protected existing institutions were being mistaken for interpretations required by Scripture itself.
Economic power made that question considerably more difficult. Plantation agriculture created enormous demand for labor, while colonial law transformed enslaved Africans and their descendants into increasingly valuable assets. Enslaved people could be purchased, inherited, mortgaged, transferred, and used to generate additional wealth. Once slavery became hereditary, the children of enslaved women became part of that economic system as well.
The theological stakes therefore extended far beyond abstract biblical interpretation. A Christianity that concluded slavery was fundamentally incompatible with Christian discipleship threatened labor, land values, inheritance, credit, family wealth, and political authority. It threatened not merely individual prejudice but an emerging structure of power.
This does not mean that every proslavery theologian consciously manipulated Scripture to increase his wealth. Human beings seldom experience their moral reasoning so mechanically. Social location operates more subtly. People tend to ask some questions urgently and leave others largely unexamined. They often recognize injustices committed against them more readily than injustices embedded in institutions from which they benefit. The deeper problem was therefore Christianity’s capacity to develop sophisticated doctrines of personal sin while failing to recognize that sin could also become embedded in law, property, custom, and institutions.
Enslaved Christians exposed the contradiction from inside Christianity itself. Black Christians learned Scripture in churches that frequently emphasized obedience, but they encountered a biblical world containing Exodus, judgment, deliverance, prophets confronting rulers, Jesus proclaiming good news to the poor, and a God who heard the cry of the oppressed. Spirituals, sermons, conversion narratives, petitions, slave narratives, and eventually Black theology demonstrate that enslaved Christians were never simply passive recipients of the enslaver’s interpretation.
The same Bible could therefore perform radically different work depending upon where the reader stood in relation to power.
From the plantation house, Scripture could be interpreted as establishing order.
From the slave quarters, Exodus sounded different.
That difference helps explain why racial slavery cannot be understood by theology alone and cannot be adequately understood without theology. Commerce made slavery enormously profitable. Law made status hereditary. Violence enforced bondage. Reproductive exploitation perpetuated it. Racial categories increasingly naturalized the division between those presumed suited for freedom and those presumed available for enslavement.
Theology helped determine what Christians believed those facts meant.
At its worst, white theology transformed a contradiction that should have produced a Christian crisis into a social arrangement Christians could inhabit. It allowed people to believe simultaneously that all humanity descended from one Creator and that some human beings could be inherited as property; that enslaved people possessed souls worthy of salvation and bodies that could be bought and sold; that Christians were brothers and sisters before God while some Christians exercised nearly absolute power over others.
That is where white theology became white power. Theology supplied neither the ships nor the plantations, neither the slave codes nor the whips. But theological interpretation could supply something every durable system of power eventually needs: moral permission.
It could explain why the hierarchy did not have to be dismantled.
It could reassure those who benefited from it that Christian faith did not require them to surrender their advantages.
And it could separate salvation strongly enough from social equality that a society increasingly organized around racial bondage could continue to understand itself as Christian.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this accommodation would become particularly revealing within traditions possessing sophisticated doctrines of sin, providence, biblical authority, covenant, and divine sovereignty. Jonathan Edwards could write with extraordinary depth about grace and religious affection while owning enslaved people. Southern Presbyterian theologians could defend a high doctrine of Scripture while constructing biblical arguments for slaveholding.
The question raised by that history is larger than whether particular theologians held racist beliefs. It is whether a theological tradition can become so embedded within a structure of power that it remains extraordinarily perceptive about individual sin while becoming less capable of recognizing the sin built into the institutions sustaining its own authority.
That is the problem to which the next essay turns.
Notes
[1] Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Goetz emphasizes the relationship between Christian identity and the emerging construction of racial difference in seventeenth-century Virginia; Gerbner demonstrates how Protestant ideas about conversion, slavery, and religious belonging developed alongside racial hierarchy in the Atlantic world.
[2] On Elizabeth Key and the legal ambiguity of early Virginia, see “A Report of a Comittee from an Assembly Concerning the freedome of Elizabeth Key” (1656), together with the documentary record and scholarship summarized by the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and in Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia.
[3] Virginia Act XII (1662), “Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother,” establishing that children would be bond or free according to the condition of their mothers; Virginia Act III (1667), “An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.” Both are preserved in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia.
[4] Virginia, “An act for suppressing outlying slaves” (1691), which prohibited interracial marriage and employed the category “white” in distinguishing populations; Virginia, “An act concerning Servants and Slaves” (1705), which consolidated significant elements of Virginia’s slave regime, reaffirmed hereditary bondage and the legal irrelevance of baptism to slave status, and provided for proclamations against fugitive enslaved people to be published at churches following worship. See Hening, Statutes at Large, vols. 3.
[5] Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially his treatment of biblical interpretation and slavery.
[6] Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Noll demonstrates that Christians sharing strong commitments to biblical authority nevertheless reached fundamentally opposed conclusions about slavery, exposing important weaknesses in prevailing American approaches to biblical interpretation.