Dividing the Faith. Richard J. Boles

at least seventy-eight people were clearly identified as blacks in the baptismal records between 1730 and 1749. One of these people was “Pompsey, an adult negro slave belonging to ye minister of ye parish.” Additionally, at least two Indians were baptized in 1733: “John, Son of Peter & Margret Moutanne, an Indian,” and “Anne daughter of Amoritta, Mr. Lawrence’s Indian woman.” Of the black people baptized, forty-two were male and thirty-six were female. These people appear to have been, moreover, equally divided between adults and children/infants. The high proportion of adult baptisms contrasts sharply with the typical trend among whites. English Anglicans were much more likely to have been baptized as children. Many of these black people were forcibly abducted and carried across the Atlantic as slaves, so they did not necessarily learn about Christianity from their parents. In fact, many enslaved Africans practiced Islam or other West African religions. Enslaved adults, as well as children, were targets of the Church of England’s outreach.75

      In most cases, black people who were baptized in the Church of England parishes were identified by their race, status, and master’s name. Identifying black men, women, and children in this manner meant that their legal status as slaves and perceived racial identity was reinforced at the very same time white society recognized them as Christians. There were, however, some exceptions to this pattern. In a few cases, the enslaved parents were listed for a child’s baptism with or without the owner’s name. For example, “Salisbury, son of Richard & Dinah slaves of Griffith,” was baptized in 1748 at Christ Church Philadelphia. Although black families under slavery always faced the possibility of being separated, black family relationships were, to an extent, acknowledged by churches. The white ministers implied that parents, as well as the masters, had a responsibility to raise the enslaved children in the Christian faith.76

      In addition to the parishes located in cities and coastal areas, Anglican priests also ministered to Indians, Africans, and colonists on the outskirts of Britain’s North American empire at missionary chapels. Reverend Henry Barclay recorded nearly three hundred baptisms at Queen Anne Chapel located at Fort Hunter, New York, between 1735 and 1746. Fort Hunter marked the border between English settlements west of Albany and Mohawk territory. In the setting of a military and commercial outpost, Barclay ministered to and taught Indians (he could speak some Mohawk) until he left in 1745 to become rector of Trinity Church New York. Not only was this a place of interracial trade and diplomacy, but it was also a site of interracial religious exercises, supported by the SPG.77 Although the racial notations in these records appear haphazard and inconsistent, at least four “negroes” were baptized at Queen Anne Chapel, all slaves of John Wemp or Captain Hellen. Some of the Indians baptized there were identified as Oneida, Tuscarora, or simply as Indian. Although English and Dutch last names predominate in the records, there are dozens of Indian last names recorded.78 These families and baptized individuals of different ethnicities likely worshipped and occasionally took communion together. Even at the edges of the empire, or perhaps especially at the edges of the empire where different cultures collided and where shared rituals facilitated trade and politics, religion often occurred in interracial contexts.

      Some Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Mid-Atlantic also ministered to blacks or Indians between 1730 and 1749, but fewer blacks and Indians affiliated with these churches than with Anglican and Congregational ones. Lutheran and Moravian churches, most of which were ethnically German, were relatively young transplants from Europe, and there were fewer black people in German American communities. Nevertheless, their participation in some of these other denominations suggests that early African American and Indian forms of Christianity were not limited to one or two types of churches and were not limited to the churches that promoted the Great Awakening revivalism.79

      During the 1730s, German Lutheran churches in Pennsylvania were struggling to become well established, but blacks occasionally participated in Lutheran churches. German and Swiss migrants were growing in numbers and were spreading out from Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but there were few ordained clergy among them. From 1733 until 1742, there was only one ordained German Lutheran minister, Casper Stoever, in Pennsylvania. In these nine years, Stoever baptized at least 1,418 people, some of whom were identified as English rather than as German congregants. The first German Lutheran church in Pennsylvania was organized in 1717, but dozens were planted across Pennsylvania by the 1740s.80

      The circumstances of German colonists and their churches did not make them natural centers of interracial religious experiences. Given the early years of German congregations in Pennsylvania and the immigrant status of most Germans, their Lutheran churches baptized few blacks or Indians during the 1730s and 1740s. Most of the recently arrived German and Swiss immigrants lacked the money to purchase slaves. Some of the German migrants were themselves bound to years of service as payment for the cost of transportation to America. German farmers generally preferred indentured Germans over enslaved blacks, at least while the supply of indentured servants remained steady, so there were fewer blacks among Germans than among English or Dutch colonists. Pennsylvania Germans’ pattern of eschewing slavery was similar to the practices of German colonists elsewhere. Lutherans in Ebenezer, Georgia, feared the effects of having enslaved people in their community, and they supported continuing the ban on slavery in Georgia. After 1750, when slavery was allowed into Georgia, Ebenezer Lutherans owned fewer enslaved people than was typical for southern communities. Some Germans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere owned slaves, but they owned fewer slaves on average than did English and Dutch colonists.81 Overall, circumstances particular to German colonists hedged against black and Indian participation in their churches.

      Black people were baptized in a couple of Pennsylvania Lutheran churches before 1750; there was a higher concentration of black people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania than in the Pennsylvania countryside. At St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church in Philadelphia, “Wilhelm Peter son of Peter & Mary (free negroes)” was baptized in 1747 (the earliest baptismal records available for this church are from 1745). At the Swedish Lutheran Church of St. Gabriel’s, located about forty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia in Berks County, four black children were baptized in 1741.82 Pennsylvania Lutherans baptized few blacks from 1730 to 1749, but the absence of blacks was mostly due to the low levels of slave ownership among German and Swedish migrants in Pennsylvania and not to a disposition to exclude blacks.

      The Lutheran Church of New York, which included German, Dutch, and Scandinavian Lutherans, “was weak and struggling” until the first years of the eighteenth century, but it was accessible to blacks and Indians. Soon after his 1725 installment as the minister in New York, Reverend Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer wrote to the Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory requesting their opinion about how to administer the rite of baptism. Lutherans, unlike Congregational churches, believed in the doctrine of “de necessitate baptismi,” whereby it is necessary to baptize children as soon as possible to avoid the possibility of children dying before their baptism. In the context of New York, with its many religious groups and nationalities, Berkenmeyer wanted the opinion of theologians and church officials in Europe as to how widely this doctrine applied. He wrote to ask about whether or not the rule that “pastors must baptize all children that are not baptized when they are requested to do so” applied to children “born of savage parents.”83

      The Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory responded with statements that indicated the Lutheran stance on baptism; Lutheran churches should have, in theory, baptized some blacks and Indians. The Consistory argued that children should almost always be baptized, even if born out of wedlock, because “withholding baptism is a punishment for the child, for one deprives it meanwhile of the merits of Christ; one leaves it in a state of unbelief, since baptism is a means of planting faith in the hearts of children and thereby enabling them to accept Christ.” This recommendation to baptize children extended to Christians outside the Lutheran Church, including children of Reformed parents (Reformed churches, conversely, placed more limits on who could be baptized). The requirement to baptize regardless of the parents’ denomination did not, however, extend to indiscriminately baptizing Indians. The Consistory instructed that if Indian children were to “remain in the blindness of heathenism” with their parents, then they “cannot be baptized.” However, “if such children at and after their baptism become Christians, to be brought up and instructed by them, they can and must be baptized, as such children, by right of cession, adoption, gift or purchase,