New Documentary Reckons with Christianity’s Spotty History

In Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, Katherine Gerbner, assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota, debunks a common myth: that early 18th-century Protestant missionaries to the New World laid the foundations for later abolitionism. The dark reality is that many of them helped form a pro-slavery ideology that for decades would be used to defend the compatibility of Christianity and slaveholding. From ‘Protestant Supremacy’ to ‘Christian Slavery’ Gerbner’s argument traces three historical steps in the transition from the belief in “Protestant supremacy” to a full-fledged defense of “Christian slavery.” Along the way, she shows…