Planters withheld Christianity from enslaved people fearing it would incite resistance

Evidence

Peter did not allow Samuel Davies, who almost single-handedly brought the Awakening to Virginia, to minister to his children or his captives. It is likely that Peter believed—like many of his slaveholding peers—“that Christianizing the Negroes makes them proud and saucy, and tempts them to imagine themselves upon an equality with the white people,” as Davies reported in his most celebrated sermon in 1757. Some American planters had been sold on Davies’s viewpoint that “some should be Masters and some Servants,” and more were open to converting their captives than ever before. But not enough of them to satisfy Cotton Mather’s likeminded missionaries, who agreed with Davies that “a good Christian will always be a good Servant.” Enslavers commonly “let [slaves] live on in their Pagan darkness,” fearing Christianity would incite their resistance, observed a visiting Swede, Peter Kalm, in the late 1740s. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of testing when ideas seem to precede policy — here the fear that belief precedes behavior is itself the policy justification.
• DEFINE: Illustrates a non-obvious causal direction: withholding a ‘good’ (religion) not from cruelty but from a rational fear of its liberatory effect.