Embracing Protestantism argues that people of African descent in America who embraced Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans, but rather came to think of themselves in the context of more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was the land of slavery and white supremacy where they had little chance of obtaining civil rights or economic mobility. Contrastingly, the Atlantic world offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain and Europe, membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented po ... More

Embracing Protestantism argues that people of African descent in America who embraced Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans, but rather came to think of themselves in the context of more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was the land of slavery and white supremacy where they had little chance of obtaining civil rights or economic mobility. Contrastingly, the Atlantic world offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain and Europe, membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations, the chance for contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa, and inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean with whom they had formed links through correspondence and the movement of black missionaries. Rather than deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants in this era were Atlantic Africans who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. Reaching out to third parties outside the plantation complex in the new abolitionist and humanitarian societies then springing up in late eighteenth-century Britain and America was an important way black Anglophone Christians had to resist slavery.