“Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door”: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America

Abstract

An Anglican clergyman crossing Virginia's James River in 1711 used the occasion to probe the religious beliefs of his black ferryman. What was his idea of God? “He was the maker of all things both in Heaven and Earth.” Did he profess any religion? “He did, and … when he had time he went to the Church of England.” Was he baptized? “He said not. His Master not admitting it. Notwithstanding his great desire.”1 This anecdote and a growing body of similar comment challenge the familiar notion that northern mainland blacks showed little interest in Christianity before the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. The assumption of black apathy toward Christianity has come under increasing scrutiny as the complexity of Africans' spiritual universe—encompassing not only traditional African and Muslim practices but also Afro-Christian beliefs—attracted the interest of historians of the Atlantic world. A number of scholars turned their attention to the Americas as a cultural terrain on which Christian and African religions met, mixed, and evolved. Writings on the formation of Afro-Catholic brotherhoods in Brazil, Christian outreach to black communities in early Mexico and Spanish Florida, and the interplay of African healing arts and Christianity in the Portuguese Atlantic have offered fascinating looks at religious encounters in the mutable societies of the Americas.2

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