Sensbach review

Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, 302pp.

Rebecca’s Revival is the tracing of the emergence of Black Protestant Christianity in the Atlantic world. Sensbach uses one woman’s story as a loose guideline to the early history of the black church in North America, specifically in the Caribbean. Rebecca is not the start of the Black Church, but an inspiration. Sensbach states that she “occupied a pivotal place…for she and her cohort of preachers ushered in a radical new stage” for Christian conversions by Africans held in bondage (239). Sensbach chooses this woman because, as he puts it, “Rebecca’s story is the unique record of one person steering her way through the worlds of slavery and religious faith in the eighteenth century…. But her own fortunes are also a mirror on a larger narrative – the origins of the black church itself” (7). Using a variety of primary sources from Dutch, German, and Danish records, as well as letters written by Rebecca, her husband Christian Protten, and journals kept by various Moravian Church diarists and missionaries, Sensbach pieces together not only the life of Rebecca Protten, but a short history of the international evangelism of the Moravian Brothers.

The book begins not with Rebecca, but with the 1734 slave revolts on the Caribbean island of St. John, a close neighbor to St. Thomas. Beginning here, Sensbach sets up the atmospheres on the islands, the relationships of slaves (the island’s majority) and masters (the minority), and of the brutality rampant on the islands which left slaves open to embrace the tenets of Christianity when it was offered to them. The early chapters of this work are all set upon this backdrop. Sensbach then proceeds with the life of Rebecca, née Shelly, a mulatto girl born into slavery in Antigua and then brought (or kidnapped) as a young child to St. Thomas. She was able to obtain her freedom as a teen, whether she was manumitted, or bought her freedom is not clear. Rebecca held a special position as a free mulatto woman in a slave society, as such she was able to take on the evangelical mission she did.

Rebecca may just have been in the right place at the right time to set her life on the course it took. Her interest in Christianity, her literacy, her ability to navigate several cultures and languages, and her position as a free person made her in unusual in her society and perfect for evangelizing for the Moravians. Moravians, as Sensbach notes, considered women “spiritually equal to men” and allowed for female leadership in the church, although female leaders ministered only to other females, and not to males (47). Rebecca proved to be a driving force in leading the slaves of St. Thomas to Christianity and was at the forefront of the islands religious movement, even preparing to become a martyr when imprisoned for her beliefs.

Sensbach uses Rebecca and St. Thomas, to examine the difficulty in obtaining religious syncretism between Protestantism and African, or Afro-Caribbean, religious traditions. Unlike areas in the Americas that were settled by Spain and France which had strong Catholic traditions which could easily equate “African spirit gods with Catholic saints, African rituals and icons with Christian counterparts” the Protestants had no such structure and had to find “cognates” between Protestantism and African religions. This was accomplished by the emphasis on Jesus’ blood, the revelation of divine word through visions, and baptism by water (85-89).

For the African and Creole slaves a conversion to following Christ did not allow them to retain their own (African) customs, culture, and rituals. It required them to become something new all together. They were not white Christians, they were not Africans; they were a new entity: Black Christians. This is the crux of Sensbach’s larger narrative. This transatlantic community was just that. The Black Christians of St. Thomas were not of their old world and not native to the New World, but something new created out of necessity and out of their situation. Sensbach is suggesting here is that transatlantic history is about these contacts and changes. It is about the Africans brought to the Americas and interacting with the Europeans who brought them, creating new languages (Creole Dutch, for example) and religions, like Black Christianity. It is also about the changes wrought within Europe and Africa as the ships moved back and forth across the Atlantic. Sensbach uses Rebecca’s life again to tie Europe once more to Africa and the Americas by looking at her experiences as a Black Christian in the Moravian enclaves in Germany and then as a missionary with her husband in Africa’s Gold Coast. Rebecca represents a kind of transatlantic everywoman. She is the product of a transatlantic union, a vibrant force in a new religious movement born in the Atlantic world, and dies in an ancestral continent over four-thousand miles from where she began.

The strengths of Sensbach’s work here is the meticulous piecing together of this forgotten woman’s life and using this one woman to illustrate the larger narrative. His writing style is easily read by the scholar and layman alike. The story moves along in a mix of chronology and theme, often skipping back and forth in time as new characters are introduced and explored. This book is a good introduction to the brutal Danish Caribbean slave holding system in the eighteenth century and to the Moravian Church. It is also a good example of the rise of Christianity among slaves in this same time period.

The weaknesses come from the omission of the religious roles of women in the slave societies. Sensbach could have elaborated on them and the correlation between them and the roles women play in religion in African society. He also could have elaborated more on African society and religion in general. It would have provided a nice contrast to the Protestant example given.