Presumably the New Testament narrative of Paradise in the next world had a certain appeal as well.
I have little doubt that the church groups pushing their brand of Christianity onto the slaves also pushed the notion that any freedom for the slaves would come in the next life.
Underlining added – there’s your problem. Christianity is not monolithic. Don’t be fooled by the label, there’s a lot of diversity in Christian theology and practice. The versions practiced by the slave masters, the slaves, and formerly enslaved people were not the same.
No, the slaves drew that message themselves, from the Bible stories.
Do you mean the Bible stories that most of them couldn’t read? The type of Christianity pushed on and promoted by white religionists didn’t involve a whole lot self-reading of the Bible, I’m afraid.
In “Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl”, a slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs published in the late 1850s, she makes it very clear that the slaves drew a clear distinction between the “Christianity” of the white masters, which was a tool of oppression, and “authentic” Christianity, which was redemptive.
To parallel the above point, among slaves, a major motivation for learning to read was to read the bible. Jacobs goes into great detail about teaching an old slave to read in secret only and entirely so that he can read the bible. Slaves set up their own secret churches and had their own (secret) ministers, and this in a time period when slaves meeting secretly lead to the harshest possible punishments (as the assumption was that they were meeting to plan How To Kill Whites).
In general, Christianity wasn’t seen as a white or European thing. It was seen as something perverted by white Europeans.
Technically speaking…
And that’s how Rastafarians and some other sects see it today.
I know! That was my point, which I may not have made explicit enough.
Not sure where you are getting this from. Your own wiki citation says as follows:
[Emphasis added]
In short, there was clearly an influential strand of anti-slavery associated very early with the conversion of slaves to Christianity. Later, white Christian congregations essentially rationalized their religion and the practice of slavery, but there is at least some evidence that the slaves themselves thought differently about it.
As for not reading the Bible - it is true that literacy among slaves was discouraged, but it is complete nonsense to think that slaves did not know the Bible stories because of that limitation. There was a rich, shared oral culture - which shows up in the form of a disctinctive style of music - that is very much concerned with the theme of liberation. While for the masters’ consumption the slaves could plausibly state that all that was meant was liberation in a religious or spiritual sense, the slaves themselves often thought differently - the “promised land” being, not in Palestine, but in Canada.
Not so, at least among the Catholics during most of the relevant historical period. In 1435, Pope Eugene IV issued the Papal Bull Sicut Dudum which called for a ban on slavery in the Canary Islands, which had just been discovered by explorers. After the discovery of the Americas there was a short period in which the papacy spoke on the issue as you described, but in 1537 Paul III issued Sublimus Dei, taking a clear stance against slavery in the Americas.
Interestingly, part of Pope Eugene IV’s thinking seems to have been that “if we enslave them, they’ll never want to convert to Christianity” – see the bolded part below:
You’ll notice the African-American Christians in the 19th Century spent a lot more time talking about Moses and him leading his people out of slaver than White Christians of the time.