Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The relationship between the African American community and the Christian Church has long been a complex one. Christianity was a tool of forced assimilation, used by slave masters and colonizers to coopt those under their rule—first, enslaved Indigenous people, then, those of African descent—to European values and the idea of White supremacy.

In the slaveholding South, Protestant ministers sometimes owned slaves and used the pulpit to encourage enslaved Black people to content themselves with their stations and remain obedient to their masters. Jacobs details the lectures of one such minister in an Episcopalian Church attended by locals. When he was replaced by another who paid special attention to the enslaved by making his sermons simple enough for them to understand, the White community persecuted him, even though he too was a slave owner.

By contrast, when Jacobs visited another Episcopalian Church in England, everyone in the congregation seemed to be treated equally—for instance, all followers took communion together. For the devout Jacobs, the problem did not lie with Christianity, but with those who used Scripture to justify corruption and abuses of power. She bristled, too, at the hypocrisy of those, like the Flints, who presented themselves as Christian while acting cruelly in private.