This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

ANGLICANISM IN COLONIAL AMERICA 29might enhance the slaves’ feelings of self-worth, thus making them less compliantto their masters’ directives. When one SPG missionary in South Carolina declaredthat all festivals of the church year would be observed in his parish, plantersboycotted worship services because his policy meant that slaves would not haveto work on those religious holidays. 49 Responding to this problem, Anglican proponentsof African evangelization emphasized the irrelevance of baptism to aslave’s civil status. Following a line of reasoning used by such notable theologiansas the Apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, and Martin Luther, they differentiatedbetween “Christian liberty,” which was spiritual, and ordinary forms of freedom,which were not applicable to enslaved Africans. 50The activities of Francis Le Jau, an Anglican priest and SPG missionary inSouth Carolina between 1706 and 1717, illustrate how religious ideas about freedomand bondage functioned in the everyday lives of planters and slaves in colonialAmerica. Despite the resistance of the planter elite, Le Jau was committedto promoting the conversion of Africans in his parish. He was determined, however,that converts to Christianity would subscribe to the complete Anglican gospeland not transfer their own spiritual presuppositions into the faith they adopted.Thus, to deal with the apprehensiveness of slaveholders about the potentiallyliberating effects of evangelism, Le Jau instituted a ritual for the baptism of slaves.Before he baptized enslaved Africans, he required them to stand in front of theirmasters and repeat an oath that he had taught them for the occasion. They sworethat they did not seek baptism out of any desire to free themselves from dutiesowed to their master but simply “to partake of the Graces and Blessings promisedto the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ.” In addition, each man agreed togive up African sexual customs by having only one wife rather than a “pluralityof Wives.” 51 Although it is not certain how the enslaved Africans interpreted eitherthis ritual or baptism itself, the meaning of Le Jau’s rite was clear at least to theEnglish slaveholders: Christianity could be a valuable means of cultural indoctrinationand social control. 52Although Anglicans such as Fleetwood and Le Jau were instrumental in creatingthe paternalistic ethic that characterized the religious thought of Americanslaveholders a century later, this ideology never had much appeal to the Anglicangentry who dominated the planter class in the eighteenth-century South. Despitethe determined efforts of their clerical leaders, most Anglican laity who ownedslaves continued to assume that any promise of liberty, whether material or spiritual,would inevitably undermine their economic interests. In the 1750s and1760s, moreover, planters saw their fears realized in the preaching of upstartevangelicals, many of whom denounced the harsh treatment of slaves and eventhe morality of slavery itself. The popularity of Anglican revivalist George Whitefieldamong enslaved Africans especially gained the attention of his fellowchurch members. The informal setting of Whitefield’s public services allowedslaves to have easy access to his preaching, and many of them responded enthusiasticallyto the spiritually liberating message he proclaimed. 53 In reaction againstthe social threat posed by evangelicalism, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed