Religion and race in the greater south, 1500-1800

This chapter examines Roman Catholic and Protestant race-making in the colonial South and Caribbean. Religion was both a site for defining race and resisting racial definition. Protestants and Catholics held similar ideas about the exclusive rightness of their religious beliefs, and both groups sought to convert enslaved Africans and indigenous people. Enslaved Africans and indigenous people used Christianity to resist enslavement and other European abuses, though enslaved Africans retained their own beliefs as well. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South and in the Caribbean, race and religion were categories that Europeans had to strive to create and recreate. Religion proved a crucial component in defining and making race.