Mastering Christianity

Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World

Bibliographic Data

ID5706115
AuthorsDee E Andrews (0000-0002-3593-5696, California State University, East Bay, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume100
Issue2
Pages503-503
Publication date2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jat191
OpenAlexW2320606666
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Travis Glasson's Mastering Christianity is a welcome addition to the burgeoning historical literature on slavery and the Atlantic world. The book's subject is the Church of England's missionary wing, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (spg) and its tortured relationship with slavery, from the society's founding in 1701 to its acceptance of West Indian emancipation in 1838. Readers may be familiar with the spg through the writing of Frank J. Klingberg, R. A. Knox, Carl Bridenbaugh, John Frederick Woolverton, Carla Pestana, and Jeffrey Cox. Glasson goes beyond their work to provide a sweeping assessment of the society's policies on the religious conversion of slaves on the North American mainland, in the West Indies, and in West Africa, from the society's universalist wellsprings to its proslavery justifications. Glasson points out the paradox of the spg's experience with ideas about human difference and slavery: “while part of its missionary program was inspired by a commitment to the unity of humankind, ... [its] ideological and material investment in slaveholding deepened across the eighteenth century” (p. 6). Glasson's study comprises seven chapters that range in coverage from the spg's origins, the sources of its ideas, and its labors in the colonies to the impact of evangelicalism after 1740, a brief history of the spg's Barbados plantation (called Codrington), a sensitive profile of Philip Quaque (the first ordained African Anglican minister and fifty-year spg employee at the slaving port of Cape Coast), and the society's responses to the antislavery movement in Great Britain. Although it is difficult not to label the spg's inability to persuade slaveholders and slaves of the worthiness of its goals as a failure of religious vision, Glasson emphasizes that “debates about slavery were, in part, intramural contests within sincerely religious circles” (p. 200

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Christianity · Diaspora · Emancipation · Gospel · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Subject (documents · Theology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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