Origin Of American Black Church Explored Through Woman’s Biography

June 14, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As blacks and others celebrate Juneteenth this weekend, the role of the church in the emancipation of the slaves will not be forgotten.

A new book by a University of Florida history professor explores the origins of the black Protestant church in America through the life of an 18th-century former slave named Rebecca Protten, who converted to Christianity and later became a missionary. Juneteenth, observed on June 19, commemorates when the last slaves in America were freed in Texas in 1865.

Because of their living conditions, many slaves looked to the church for reassurance and the possibility of a better life after death. The church also was the one place a slave could express himself or herself freely without the fear of punishment or death.

In his book, “Rebecca’s Revival,” professor John Sensbach argues that Protten‘s conversion to Christianity and preaching efforts among enslaved workers helped lay the groundwork for what would become the black church more than a century before emancipation in the United States.

“We know that the black church is the vessel of African-American culture and has been for several centuries,” said Sensbach, who began researching Protten and her connection with the black church in 2001. “The more I began to look at her, I realized that she was a very important figure who can help us to understand this larger issue.”

Sensbach found information on Protten’s life in records kept by the missionaries and writers from her time, translating them from German, Dutch and Danish. Through those records, he found that Protten was born around 1718 of mixed racial descent and was sold into slavery in the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands.

“There, the records say she had a religious experience, when she was very young, perhaps in early adolescence,” said Sensbach, whose book was published in March. “She was freed by her master and began to preach to women on her plantation around the same time.”

In 1733, missionaries from the German Moravian church began preaching to the St. Thomas slaves, and Protten became immersed in the movement, Sensbach said.

“She went to meet the missionaries on the island, and they realized she was already a preacher,” he said. “She was exactly what they were looking for, so she joined their movement and became a missionary to the enslaved women.”

Sensbach added that Protten’s involvement was crucial because the Germans did not know the language of the Caribbean islands and had a hard time reaching out to the slaves, who spoke a mixture of Dutch and African tongues.

“They depended on converts like Protten and others to join the movement to the plantations and recruit slaves,” he said. “It became an indigenous movement to convert to Christianity that Protten and other black preachers helped spread.”

Through his research, Sensbach found that Christianity became prominent in black society because it was a religion of empowerment and spiritual freedom that sustained them through the ravages of racism and slavery.

“Her life is important in a couple of ways,” Sensbach said. “She was an essential figure in generating the movement that would lead to the spread of black evangelical Protestant Christianity throughout the Americas. Second, her life was unique in that it was virtually impossible for a black woman to make the travels she made.”

Up to Protten’s time, there were many black Christians in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but most were Catholic because Protestants had had little success converting people of African descent, Sensbach said. When the evangelical German missionaries arrived on St. Thomas, they were on the forefront of trying to emulate what the Catholics had done. As a result, they established a beachhead through the efforts of Protten and others like her, making possibly thousands of converts in one corner of the Caribbean.

“This proved inspiring to the other Protestant evangelicals like Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians who looked at this experiment,” Sensbach said. “So they sent out missionaries in North America, during a time that’s known as the Great Awakening, when the origins of the black church in North America began.”

Protten’s role in the origins of black Christianity is echoed by Sensbach’s colleagues.

“Jon Sensbach’s bold historical imagination has produced an important book rich with fascinating insights about the role of African-Americans in the international movement of evangelical Protestantism and the centrality of women in this movement,” said Sylvia Frey, a history professor at Tulane University and author of several books on similar topics.