Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)

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Description

This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain’s Caribbean and southern American colonies. Specializing in the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was once more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than in the past thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists’ attachment to spiritual continuity was once thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness.

Drawing on a mixture of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social have an effect on, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out get admission to to rituals to people of color. Right through, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each and every colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves.

This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early The usa.

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