Slaveholders rejected Christian conversion for fear it would stir rebellion

Evidence

“Is it possible that any of my slaves should go to heaven, and must I see them there?” Christian knowledge, one planter complained, “would be a means to make the slave more … [apt] to wickedness.” Cotton Mather’s counterpart in Virginia, Scottish minister James Blair, tried to induce planters to realize the submission wrought by Christianity. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 162

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kendi argues policy precedes ideas — here we see a practical planters’ resistance to the church’s ‘civilizing’ project, driven by fear of insurrection, which the reader can test against the book’s thesis.
• XREF: A concrete counterexample-worthy case: planters resisting an apparently ‘humanizing’ idea (Christianity) out of material self-interest — consistent with Kendi’s inversion. — connects to: Religious conversion made slaveholders more cruel, not less — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 246