Early missionary Christianity framed slave conversion as overriding slave service.
Evidence
From his British ministerial post in Kidderminster, Richard Baxter urged slaveholders across the ocean to follow God’s law in making slaves into Christians in his well-traveled treatise A Christian Directory (1664–1665). He told them to “make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their Souls.” Be sure to “let their Salvation be far more valued by you than their Service.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 114
Categorization
- XREF: This is a concrete early example of assimilationist logic — conversion into Christian ‘civilization’ while keeping the enslaved subordinate — useful for the reader’s test of Kendi’s scheme. — connects to: A Macon Baptist church financed operations partly through selling slaves — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 591; Christian conversion prepared some slaves for passive resistance, others for revolt. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 809; Antebellum American slavery used forced Christian conversion to define civilization and belonging (+2 more)
- DEFINE: Baxter’s missionizing is proto-assimilationist: it values the enslaved soul over service yet never questions the institution itself. A precise boundary case for the three-way scheme.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: A Macon Baptist church financed operations partly through selling slaves — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 591; Christian conversion prepared some slaves for passive resistance, others for revolt. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 809; Antebellum American slavery used forced Christian conversion to define civilization and belonging (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Slaveowners saw Christianized slaves as more rebellious and poorer workers
#complicates(0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 828