Colonial Anti-Blackness: Spain's Inquisition Culture in the New World
Inquisition culture practiced among colonial settlers sanctified the Christian white male's right to discriminate, murder, and confiscate the wealth of those they called heretics. It also allowed them to racially reject settlers who were believed to be lacking limpieza de sangre or blood purity. The whole of New Spain therefore was subjected to spiritual discipline. In particular, the enslaving, genocidal, culturicidal and epistemicidal tendencies of the settlers aimed to suppress and extinguish the spirituality of the Indians and the Africans. Their cultural ways were deemed to exist outside the white Christian moral authority that the settlers thought to reflect God's Will.
Despite the Pope and some officials in Spain who argued for excluding the Indians of New Spain from the Inquisition, it was the settlers of New Spain who pressed for inquisitional operations to play a role in disciplining Indians. Consequently, the Indians, (and later the Africans), were subjected to white Christian cultural standards imposed by what this project defines as an inquisitional culture. Such a culture began to characterize New Spain when a systemic inquisitional structure was erected by 1522 granting "ecclesiastic jurisdiction" to prosecute Indians on matters of faith:
In effect, throughout the entire colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, there existed an institution expressly dedicated to punishing the Indians' religious offenses, identified by various names: Office of Provisor of Natives, Tribunal of the Faith of Indians, Secular Inquisition, Vicarage of the Indians, Natives' Court. This institution generated an enormous number of trials, very few of which have come to light.
The numbers formally prosecuted were few and incorrectly might be presumed low impact. For Klor de Alva found that when the most Indians were tried between 1536 and 1543, only 75 were accused and just 19 were brought before the inquisitors. Later, inquisitors brought only one more case against Indians between 1547 and 1574. But the Holy Office procedures were costly in money and time, so the disciplining of Indians became a far more generalized practice of churches and Christian people.
The spiritual oppression of curanderos is a good example. Despite the fact that they used their cultural and spiritual knowledge to provide health services to the majority of colonial Mexico, the curanderos - indian folk healers - came under attack. It was known that Spanish curanderos and Indian curanderos relied on deities specific to their own culture, but this difference of deity was not why they were charged. It more often was the case that "The curanderos appeared as transgressors of established morality, because they participated in condemned practices of relationality such as concubinage, homosexuality, and promiscuity." In other words, it was the gendered sexual practices of the Indian curanderos that came under attack. Where other disagreements existed, the inquisitional authorities sought to repress these particular indigenous practices while the curanderos strove to defend them.
But disciplining gendered sexuality was not the only obession of the establish inquisitional culture. The idea of blood purity, previously reserved for the Spaniards, also was applied to Indians because of what the settlers perceived as the threat of interracial marriage.
Marriage between races was not a new concern. It existed in Spain before this feature of inquisitional culture arrived in New Spain. Consider, for instance, a report stored in the Library of Congress that Mallorca officials in 17th century Spain arrested and jailed Pedro. They did this to pre-empt Pedro's promise to marry Maria, a stained-blood Jewess, until a Spanish woman of suitable blood purity could be found. In another colonial case, a qualified New Spain man was forbidden to assume the royal position of headmaster of the Cathedral School in Mexico City because the Council of the Indies that governed Spain's American territories believed he had tainted blood although he was an Old Christian and had no such ancestry.
Today's Christian nationalists who take no orders from royals or Popes have the same propensity to impose inquisitional standards. They declare themselves Holy Warriors who still are quite concerned with the same two issues. They believe they righteously are defending God's Will when trying to crush the LGBTQIA movement and minorities skeptical about their view, not to mention their fierce offensive against the smaller movement for BIPOC trans equality.
The Christian nationalists and others who share their fascist leanings prefer to see America's constitutional republic transformed by destroying democracy, where a majority rules, in order to foster a more authoritarian merger of Church and State under a dictator like Donald Trump. Then they would seek retribution by punishing others who oppose them under the authority of a king, as some have said they would prefer, as was the case during the inquisition under the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella. They seem to believe that all faithful Christians should accept and defend America as a white (or whitened) Christian nation where Indians, Blacks, and LGBTQ practices and concerns are closely policed.
As in inquisitional Spain, the focus of white Christian fundamentalists has shifted away from Christian values of brotherly love to a more hostile conception of human relations. In this interview, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a pastor and professor of History at Calvin University, discusses "how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism." According to a recent news report, conservative Christian church members are now rejecting the teachings of Jesus as "liberal talking points" that impede their aspirations to regain white Christian control of America and remake it in their image. Some far right officials are calling for Civil War to rally extreme political violence to achieve their goals of racial and gender oppression.
Starting in the 1980s, neoliberal Americans began retracting the social contract. Today, far-right Christianity and its politic is the primary ideological site of retrenchment. Cedric Robinson locates the origin of their anti-blackness in pre-colonial Europe, particularly in Spain. Robert P. Jones also traces it to Spain in 1493. Doing their part to establish God's Kingdom on Earth, the white Christian Spaniards inseminated their inquisitional practices into New Spain. The ecclesiastic jurisdiction they established encompassed a land mass nearly a third of the current United States and included a large part of Central America. And like the Christian Spaniards who earlier established a Christian New Spain, the protestant colonialists who began importing slaves in 1619 similarly saw themselves divinely ordained by God to create New Jerusalem in America.
Both the Spanish Catholics and the British protestants converged in the formation of an inquisitional Christian culture. The white American society they were creating would assault Indian and African spirituality on the ground of Christian morality with their specific anti-black goal of disciplining what it decreed to be evil forms of gendered sexuality.
Anti-blackness Initially Blames and Targets Jews
How does religious anti-blackness operate, who has used it, and to what uses is it put?
Many churches, synagogues, mosques, temples provide sacred space to LGBTQIA people in general, and to BIPOC trans communities, in particular. That any such churches and other sacred institutions try to support American communities of sexual orientation, gender variance and race instills the most resentment on the far right, and not only there.
The far right resents leaders of a globalized liberal society who provide new freedoms to a range of people broader than their imagined white religious society previously allowed. They tend to think that long term democratization and expanding freedom undermines their religious ordained historic far-right practice of domination. Typically they seek to restrict the vote so that leadership is constrained towards right-wing values and so that fewer democratic thinkers prevail.
Liberal and progressive policies make the far-right advocate feel disrespected as the self-appointed upholders of the white Christian patriarchy. They want liberal authority revoked among minorities and their own inquisitional authority restored. Today they believe that refreshing authoritative repression will make America great again and they don't mind if their efforts to achieve this goal requires them to be violent, both in policy and person, to trans people and other non-dominant groups they see benefitting from the current liberal agenda. They oppose mass refugee immigration because the influx of such numbers allocates resources to others that they do not want to share and potentially grows the electorate voting against, not with them.
When far-right elements of the electorate felt too many German Jews had gained wealth and status during a drastic economic downturn, the German Nazi Party rose to power. Hitler tried earlier to seize power, failed and spent five years in jail. Although he lost a presidential election, he later was appointed to high office, not elected. Finally, he and those thinking like him just took over. According to Christoper Browning, the Nazi's relied on "the politics of legality" to install Hitler by manipulating electoral politics after their attempted coup failed.
Today it seems that the far-right cares less about legality. American anti-blackness was on display in the 2017 case of Neo-Nazis parading in Charlottesville, Virginia. They carried hateful signs and rammed cars into counter-protestors (killing one). They declared their intention to invalidate the 'Black Lives Matter' chant by chanting 'White Lives Matter.' Along with a slew of racist slogans that included anti-semitic ones they also chanted: "Blood and soil, blood and soil, you will not replace us; Jews will not replace us."
As in inquisitional Spain, anti-blackness does not just oppose people of African descent. It smears people of color or other presumed heretics with a blood stain. Recall how former president Trump declared Mexican immigrants are poisoning American blood. Similar American's sentiments blamed Covid-19 on Chinese people. But using the blood purity argument is always a cover-up or distraction. What if that virus was not from Chinese wet markets and escaped an American-funded "gain-of-function" laboratory research project in Wuhan? It is not truth that matters to the anti-mmigrant religious far right. Hence, Anti-asian hate crimes grew by 164% in 2020, and such statements are phrases used in Nazi Germany.
Reproducing the same anti-blackness that festered during the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis mandated Deutschblütigkeitserklärung, Blood Certificates. Since the Spaniards required certified proof of blood purity (from non-whites and non-Christians who sought positions in business, education, church or government), Nazi Germany embraced a similar policy to deal with Jews and other minorities. Just like most Conversos, Marranos, and Moriscos could not prove having stain-free blood, Germans said to have a stained ethnic heritage found it hard to prove they had enough pure German blood to qualify for appointments in government or business.
Just like the Spanish Inquisition persecuted those who were not like the white Christian Spaniards, the Nazis persecuted those who were not white Christian Germans. How the Spanish racialized and treated religious minorities provided a model for how the Nazis treated Germans labled mischlinges (partial non-white German heritage). Obtaining a purity of blood certificate would designate them deutschblütig (of German blood) and exempt them from Germany's racial exclusion laws based not on religion (Judaism), but on blackened ancestry.
While Iberia's Old Christian and New Christian dualism was gone, the German blood certificates traced back, not just to US racial segregation, but farther back to the Spaniards' limpieza de sangre laws and the purity certifications required by the Spanish Inquisition.
Nothing could be worse in Nazi Germany than the double jeopardy of having a Jewish grandparent and being a member of the LGBTQIA society.
The Myth of White Christian Discovery Upholds Christian Nationalist Patriarchy
BIPOC trans people experience the same double jeopardy of being racialized while at the same time persecuted for their expression of gendered sexuality. They often are treated as if who they are and the rights they claim renders them not just irreligious but un-American. The long-standing claim that America belongs to the Christian white colonizers is terribly incorrect because it ignores the multiple different parties involved with creating the nation.
Far-right Christians and politicians like Govenor De Santis of Florida do not want people to recognize the equal value of all. That is why De Santis has arranged for students in his state to be taught in school that slavery was beneficial to Africans and America belongs to whites, and mainly to white men. This denial of equal value flies in the face of the equal value feeling that BIPOC trans people get when they find themselves in radically inclusive sacred spaces.
Myths play a role in imposing unequal value. Schools still inaccurately teach, and the media perpetuates the myth, that the first American colonizers were the protestant Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock. British colonizers supposedly appreciated the indigenous people who saved their lives during a harsh winter and celebrated a first Thanksgiving with them to mark the depth of their friendship.
That is the myth, but the facts, available at the Cape Cod National Seashore Park, tell a different story. In exhibitions or in park records there is data about the deceit and violence of the Puritans whose arrival to this continent fused their own version of gendered anti-blackness with the Inquisition culture from Spain that had been in the Americas for more than a hundred years.
It therefore is not a myth that non-Christians arrived in Spain with Spanish Christians long before the Puritans showed up. Many Hispanic Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain went elsewhere. Some (free and enslaved) were sent to the Americas as slaves or indentured servants, for lacking transport fees to pay the Crown, starting in 1492. As Guthrie wrote in 1899:
"When America was discovered, Spain was at war with the Moors, who were driven and followed into Africa. The captured Moors and Negroes taken with them, called Black Moors, were enslaved, and many of them were transported to Spanish settlements in the Western world."
Commenting in 1892, Coppe writes that the black Moors from Spain, not the Protestant Pilgrims, were the first French Huegonots in America:
"It has been asserted that, when the Moors were driven out, thousands took refuge in the south of France, who, afterward abhorring the Roman Catholic persecutions, became Huguenots, and that of these many emigrated at a later day to South Carolina."
Guthrie correctly states that some Moors were shipped to Spain's American colonies, but not all Moors arrived as slaves. Some previously well-to-do Moors left Spain poor because the Crown confiscated their wealth before they were expelled. A few had been aristocrats, as indicated by the high end and popular blackamoor style of Rennaisance era jewelry featuring the black elites as models.
Note that the blackamoor style of jewelry took two forms. One form was low-cost terracotta jewelry and house ornaments in the form of enslaved Africans. This is the type of blackamoor some white Europeans preferred, because their blackness was a signifier of subservience. But another form of blackamoor jewelry tells a different story. Some Black Jews and Moors were wealthy enough before their expulsion to form a market for fine jewelry featuring their own images as black elites and putting their wealth on display. Whereas the former styles "personify fantasies of racial conquest," the latter styles gave voice to black elites with whom Spanish whites would compete and not accept as social equals even after they converted to Christianity.
Just like some enslaved blackamoors, some elite blackamoors also likely were LGBTQIA. Asserting that none of them were LGBTQIA would be preferring yet another myth.
For 126 years, Catholic Spanish imperialism was the only European cultural paradigm in the Americas. Between 1493 - when Spanish settlement began - and 1619, when the British colonists who settled Jamestown in 1607 imported their first shipload of enslaved Africans, the Spanish settlements were sparse and small but set a solid cultural imprint on what they called New Spain.
The Spanish monarch Charles V (1500-1558) had a biographer called Fray Prudencio de Sandoval. Writing in 1604, Coppersmith quotes Sandoval regarding a stereotyped tenacity of Jewish blackness: "Just as in Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark color of the father. ...[Therefore] it is not enough to be of a Jewish father and mother...half is enough and even if not that much, a quarter is sufficient or even an eighth."
Sandoval's racialization of Hispanic Jews is telling. The myth that Columbus sailed only with Spaniards homogenized his expedition. The more diverse fact is that Columbus secured a successful journey using a newly minted astrolabe, and a recently created astrological table called an ephemeride. The Hispanic Jew, Rabbi Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto, compiled and fashioned these sailing tools. He was such a famous scientist when he expelled from Spain for failing to convert that he was next appointed a mathematician and astronomer in the royal court of Portugal.
While it's customarily said that Queen Isabela funded Columbus' expedition with her jewels, it actually was financed by two wealthy aforementioned Hispanic Jews who provided loans and persuaded the court to let Columbus sail. One financier was Don Isaac Abravanel. As a distinguished biblical scholar, philosopher, and statesman, Abravanel held a high position in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand. Yet, he was expelled from Spain for remaining faithful to his religion. Luis de Santangel, another Hispanic Jew, lent the Crown nearly five million maravedis. He was a New Christian by birth because his grandfather became a converso before he was born to sidestep Spanish persecutions of the Hispanic Jews.
Moreover, Columbus initially journeyed with three ships and a 90-man crew that included not just white Old Christians, but also New Christians, Jews and Moors. The best-known Hispanic minorities to sail with Columbus were the Afro-Spaniard Niño brothers from Moquer in Andalusia. Pedro Alonso Niño was the pilot of the Santa Maria, Juan Niño was master of La Niña, a ship he owned, and Francisco Niño is thought to have been a sailor on La Niña. The mythical tendency is to presume they each were heteronomative men. For his second voyage, Columbus hired 1,500 men, including Hispanic Jews and Moors. They landed in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America; and never set foot on the North American continent, as those explorers and settlers who followed them certainly would.
Bilinqual people in Moorish Andalusia would have known Hebrew and Spanish or Spanish and Arabic. Given the larger number of moors sailing with Columbus than Jews, it is the moors who most likely would have played the role of interpreters in New Spain. The point to be made here is clear as one author observes: "The first words to pass between Europeans and [indigenous] Americans...were in the sacred language of Islam." Columbus' voyages, and later Spanish expeditions planted the genetic and racially blackened Iberian Moors and Jews in the Americas.
Upon arriving in the Americas as free, enslaved, or soon-to-be-freed African descent men (moors), these settlers played various roles, mainly as warriors and explorers. Most were conquistadors defending Spaniards and living among them (never entirely accepted as equals), or, in some cases, were counter-conquistadors who fought alongside the Indians against the Spaniards who feared them.
In addition to African conquistadors, a large mass of the racialized New Christians enslaved by Spain or reduced to slavery in Spain began trickling into the Americas in 1505 just twelve years after Columbus' first voyage. By 1508, news travelled to the Crown that "The New World was rife with 'Hebrew Christians.'" King Ferdinand ordered the transfer of another 250 in early 1510.
Over the next hundred years, Spain imported 75,000 to 150,000 colonizers into Spanish America before 1619. Most remained in middle America or South America, but many explored and settled the North American continent. After 1510, when the influx grew, "Spanish officials in the colonies soon wrote of black slaves and servants as 'indispensable' to the empire, its "strength and sinew."
Blackness in the Colonial Era
It therefore is imperative, as the BIPOC perspective views it, to recognize that America was not discovered by European colonizers and was not built only by Europeans. Actually, the first inhabitants were Asians who crossed the Aleutian land bridge many thousands of years ago and created civilizations here. The indigenous peoples' legends also say that many of their people were swept to American shores by a tremendous flood that sunk their Atlantic homeland. So, it is possible two populations comprised the original North American Indian civilizations quite long before Columbus arrived.
Second, it is necessary to acknowledge what most white Hispanic and non-Hispanic white academics sweep under the rug, that Columbus records in his diary he met Indians who reported that earlier black explorers came trading spears tipped with guanin and formed settlements in the Americas long before he arrived. Columbus noted the Indians saying they learned from dark-skinned visitors how to make guanin for their speartips. Guanin was a signature alloy of West Africa in the B.C era. Evidence also suggests that Africans were capable of travelling to America before the Christian era and some pre-Columbian drawings depict Meso-Americans fighting in alliance with Africans against whites (Vikings or Celts) long before Columbus arrived. These dates jibe with the Taino people of Puerto Rico having learned to make the same silver, gold and copper alloy - guanin - between 70 and 374 A.D. when or after the Africans would have arrived.
The argument here is not to claim American Indians were Black. Rather, the argument is that it appears that pre-Mayan contact with non-violent African explorers upgraded indigenous civilization through a process of cultural exchange. Africans arrived by boat in the distant past not as enslaved people but as tradespeople, craftsmen, merchants, and non-violent explorers. The material evidence is documented but this set of facts is suppressed. It has been discussed in academic papers, and one academic publication acknowledges the genetic markers of Africans in the New World before Columbus. So, by the time Columbus arrived, the pre-Mayan Africans who had integrated into local Indian populations posed no threat to Spanish conquest, and Indians knew of their descendants.
The Spanish Inquisition had been underway for 15 years when Ponce de Leon, from Spain, began to explore the United States. After defeating the Andalusian Moors in 1492 and sailing west with Columbus in 1493, he named the American land that he explored La Florida and St. Augustine was his settlement. He and the other Old Christians with him also likely sailed with blood-stained Muslims, Jews, and Africans with other spiritual backgrounds.
Enslaved Africans accompanied Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, another Spanish colonizer, who mapped an area between La Florida and Delaware in 1525 and settled near Sapelo in the Georgia Sea Islands in 1526. After moving that year into the Carolinas, Ayllón abandoned the area he earlier had explored and returned to Santo Domingo, leaving behind the Africans who had explored with him, many of whom had run away to join with the Indians. Esteban the Moor may have been among them. He walked from Florida with Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca between 1528-1536 to become the first non-native in New Mexico.
At age 19, Hernán Cortés arrived in the Americas in 1504. He explored Cuba and arrived in Mexico in 1518 when 33 years old. A few Africans fought Indians with him, including the well-known Juan Garrido, during Cortés' conquest of Tenochtitlán. Entering Baja in 1535, Cortes was accompanied by 300 Spaniards and nearly 300 Africans. Most died soon after he planted a colony in La Paz (Santa Cruz).
In 1537 Hernando de Soto brought 50 enslaved Africans to assist with his failed foray into Florida. Francisco de Ibarra had Africans with him when he arrived in Mexico in 1554 and pacified southern Mexico before moving north into Mexican areas now part of the United States and known as San Juan, New Mexico, Durango, and Santa Barbara. Luna y Arellano had the help of enslaved Africans when he failed to settle in Florida in 1559-1562. And in 1565, Mendez de Avila took enslaved Africans into that area.
Some of these New World Africans were Muslims and some were Jews, and others likely were Christians. Some enslaved in Spain or Africa came with their own ethnic spiritualities before they converted to any western religion. The historical record is silent on this question but it is unlikely that all of these people were heteronormative cisgender people. The third gender, and certainly some eunuchs, most likely were among them and played significant roles of their own, even as warriors and explorers.
The Spanish colonizers strove to repress competition. For instance, French Huguenots (including Moriscos and Marranos who earlier fled from Spain into France) arrived to Florida in 1513 and set up Fort Caroline in 1563 as their first North American settlement. Two years later, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés ordered his conquistadors to massacre most of them (between 140 dead).
Huguenot protestants came to America having been repelled by Catholic repression in France. The Spaniard colonizers killed the French Huguenots in Florida to drive them out of an area that the Spanish Catholics wished to dominate. The Huguenot protestants (Lutheran converts) were killed not just for being French but because in Spanish Christian eyes, anyone who was not Catholic was deemed to be a heretic. This would include the indigenous people and the unconverted non-Christian Africans.
The killing of competitors in Spain by calling them heretics was Crown policy (and would be Spain's Indian policy in America). That became clear when after killing the Hugeunots, Aviles hung a sign stating that his Conquistadors had not killed Frenchmen but heretics. Some survived the initial attack when about 300 Huguenots fled into the forest seeking safety with Indians or back onto their six ships. A week later, Pedro Menendez led another fifty men to kill all Hugeunots hidden in ships except a few who, facing death, suddenly declared themselves Catholic.
The Conquistadors who were Catholic Spaniards also may have relished killing Huguenots as retribution for a well-known French proverb: Africa begins at the Pyrenees. This persistent proverb stung Spaniards by expressing northern Europe’s contempt for Spain - eight miles from Africa with the Pyrenees mountain range as its northern border shared with France. Spain was disdained for not being white enough to be in league with France and the rest of northern Europe, so this proverb was taken as an insult to Spain.
Were the Old Christian Spaniards really as white as the Inquisitors desired them to be? Were they of pure blood according to their limpieza de sangre ideology in which only the Jews and Muslims having a drop of African blood were regarded as impure or stained?
The Spaniards certainly viewed themselves as white Christians against the blackness they ascribed to the Muslims and Jews who they vanquished in Spain. For them, this meant that any wealth accumulated by the Iberian Muslims and Jews in New Spain should belong to Spain’s white Christians. They applied this logic in the Americas: that any land held or wealth created by Indians or Africans rightly belonged to white Spanish Christians, or to other Christian whites who later arrived from Europe.
The proclaimed purity of Spanish whiteness actually was an assertion impossible to prove. That especially was the case when Strabo and later, Ibn-I-Khattib AL-Makkary (writing in 1834) both claimed that Pharoah Sesotris, the Aegyptian, who died 1839 B.C., led an expedition from Egypt to the Iberian peninsula. Moreover, Al-Makkary states that Taharqa, the Prince of Nubia and future Pharoah of Egypt (known in Europe as Tearco the Aethiopian), established "a garrison" in Spain when he left Egypt for that land in 702 B.C. African incursions into Spain left a black stain on Spanish genes quite early in Iberian history.
Such facts reveal the repressed historical truth that Spain's africanization had been underway long before the Moorish empire of Al Andalus occupied the Iberian peninsula in 711 and much of southern Europe.
When inquisitional witchcraft accusations no longer were being prosecuted in Spain after 1614 and no more expulsions of blackened Muslims and Jews were occurring, that is when the Spanish Inquisition’s religious race-killing and racial wealth theft were well established in the Americas.
The Spaniards racialized Indian and African identities and rolled their non-Christian spiritual practices into a culturicidal and genocidal process. Their goal was eradicating or subjugating the non-white communities to grab their labor and land. Working in this manner they seeded in the Americas what the noted historian David Brion Davis calls "Christian Negrophobic racism."
The Christian Spaniards’ ideology of blood purity or genetic cleanliness stigmatized blackness as evil as it informed a budding Spanish concept of whiteness. The legalized limpieza de sangre statutes enabled the Old Christian Spaniards to set themselves religiously apart and racially above others in Spain. The Inquisition likewise struck and secured a racialized religious boundary between the Spaniards' insider status of Christian whiteness in New Spain against religious outsiders regarded as non-whites.
New World colonizers in the 17th century adopted the Spanish word, negro (black) implying enslaved and only later would insert the word white (free) in some state constitutions. Just like Spanish Christians criminalized the spiritual beliefs and practices of the Muslims and Jews in Spain, New Spain colonizers, as well as those colonizers who arrived later in America, would discredit and seek to eliminate the spiritual practices of the Indians and Africans who in continuing their practices were charged with disturbing the moral order the colonizers imposed in in New Spain.
Gradually, the Bible would be used to pacify the enslaved and assimilate the conquered indigenous people whose lands were confiscated. In Mexico, indigenous people were allowed to have towns subordinate to Hispanic towns, unlike Native Americans who were killed and shunted off onto reservations, and then into American boarding schools.
Gabriel Klehr explains that the first enslaved Africans in Virginia "may actually have been Christians" since most who "arrived in the colony in 1619 had Christian names, usually Spanish ones, that probably indicated they had been baptized before being taken to Virginia." He goes on to report that many arrived in America with a firm belief in a supreme being who created and managed life on earth, but most of these same believers in God had little or no use for Christianity, the religion of slave owners.
This suggests that some enslaved Africans were familiar with Christian beliefs before arriving in America and possibly before leaving Africa. Settlers who opposed converting the enslaved feared that Bible reading and scripture debating would lead to reading other documents and would lead to insurrections.
Consider, for instance, Gabriel Prosser, who rebelled in 1800 with fellow revolutionaries in Richmond. When they were arrested and tried, his compatriots compared their goals and actions to those of George Washington and Patrick Henry. In 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher said that God had given him a sign to act when he joined forces with another enslaved man and a free man to lead their rebellion. In the wake of their rebellion where 57 whites were killed, some prominent Virginians used their knowledge of the Bible and classical history to assert the rightness and goodness of slavery.
John Brown was the first white Christian American to forgo his white privilege by pushing for an end of slavery when he was hung in Harper's Ferry, Virginia in 1859 for organizing an interracial gang to launch another rebellion against slavery. As a devout Calvinist who believed slavery violated God's law, Brown consecrated his life to ending slavery and lost it after the murder of fellow abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy. Harriet Tubman prayed and got daily visits from God who advised her. In other words, the notion of attaining liberation through Christianity slowly grew strong among the enslaved and their liberators.
The aim of anti-blackness was not simply religiously motivated. White Christians did desire to eradicate and minimize indigenous spiritual, sexual and gendered practices, but their primary goal was to block the ascendancy of the enslaved Africans. They achieved this by affirming the myth that African genes constitute a blood stain and that Africa is bereft of any true religion and spirituality. Settlers meanwhile concentrated on Indian removal, Indian culturicide, and Indian conversion. The oppressed Indians and Africans would gradually be Christianized.
Christian nation-building projects erected racial capitalism to secure the material and spiritual basis of white supremacy by denying equity and equality to non-whites and non-Christians. While the spiritual and cultural practices of the oppressed people were stigmatized and debased, Gabriel Klehr states that the Africans' mass conversion to Christianity would not start until the advent of evangelism. This religious movement took church administration and biblical interpretation out of the hands of the white Christian men in America called Anglicans who attended the colonizing Church of England.