Racist ideas softened slavery’s religious scruples to preserve enslaver interests

Evidence

Ligon lamented that Sambo was to be kept out of the church. But at the same time, he gave enslavers a new theory to defend their enterprise: Blacks were naturally docile, and slaves could and should become Christians. Planters had feared the conversion of slaves because they believed that if their slaves were Christian, they would have to be freed—and Elizabeth Key’s successful suit showed that the laws supported this belief. Ligon’s distinction between making “a Christian a slave” and “a slave a Christian” turned this idea on its head. Though it took time, eventually it became the basis for closing the religious loophole Key had exposed. Ligon lifted the biblical law of converting the unconverted over British law barring the enslavement of Christians. He promoted the idea of baptizing enslaved Africans through the docile figure of Sambo, and planters and intellectuals almost certainly got the point: submissive, confessing Sambo desired Christianity, and he should be permitted to have it. Indeed, Christianity would only make slaves more docile. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 105

Categorization

• DEFINE: Kendi’s core inversion in miniature: a legal outcome (Key’s suit) threatened planter self-interest, and the racial idea (docile Christian slave) was produced to serve that interest, not from ignorance.
• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s thesis that racist ideas are justifications produced after policy/interests — a clean case to hold against the reader’s ‘ideas precede policy’ counterexample. — connects to: Religious conversion made slaveholders more cruel, not less — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 246; Enslaved church members built and financed the churches that then excluded them — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 595; American racialization of slaves ran on labor and land, not on religion — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 207 (+3 more)