In the three decades proceeding the American Civil War, white plantation owners led a determined effort to "Christianize" the millions of enslaved Africans in the Old South. Many, for example, established plantation chapels in which itinerant white preachers or even the planters themselves could evangelize their black "flocks." During this time, these same planters often portrayed this action as the pious duty of paternalistic slaveholders to the black charges that God had entrusted to their care.
In "Ole Satan's Church is Here Below," Leif E. Trondsen concludes that more sinister and self-serving motives underlie this latest wave of evangelization of the South's enslaved Africans. In the aftermath of the brutal and bloody Nat Turner Slave Rebellion of 1831, Southern planters desperately sought new mechanisms of social control over their increasingly rebellious black slaves. Together with the clergymen of a host of Christian denominations, they devised what former slave Fredrick Douglass referred to as "Southern religion."
Trondsen argues that this Southern religion was, in fact, "an ad hoc human and artificial creation, conceived with one overriding goal in mind: to serve as a 'bulwark' for the increasingly beleaguered institution of slavery in the Old South." Indeed, forceful challenges to the "peculiar institution," as slavery was euphemistically called, increasingly arose from many quarters, not the least from enslaved Africans themselves. Accordingly, Southern planters and preachers sought to "pacify" the region's slave population by propagating their own version of Christianity, one which demanded complete black obedience to white authority and justified the racial inequality of the Old South.
Nevertheless, Trondsen extensively documents the equally determined efforts by enslaved Africans to resist the tenets of Southern religion, via a host of creative and successful responses. These culminated in the establishment of the autonomous black churches, which met secretively in the slave quarters or in the relative seclusion of the brush arbors (the so-called "hush harbors"). These nascent black churches survived the ordeal of American slavery to become the "heart and soul" of the African-American community as well as its principal source of leadership in the ongoing struggle for full racial equality in America.
"Ole Satan's Church is Here Below" is now available in an updated edition, with additional references and stylistic changes.
