such as Jeannette Mack met individually with Indian women, discussed religious beliefs with them, and encouraged their spiritual growth. When Indians were baptized in the Moravian church during the 1740s, white Moravians served as sponsors or godparents for Indian children, and correspondingly, Indians sometimes served as sponsors or godparents for white children. These relationships facilitated spiritual as well as physical support among the Indians and Europeans at the Moravian missions. The central role played by Moravian women in missionary work among Indians in the 1740s and 1750s was one of the key factors that made these missions successful examples of interracial Christianity.92
The Moravian missionaries who created personal friendships with Indians in Pennsylvania and elsewhere show one way in which interracial religious activities flourished in the 1740s, but such experiences were fragile and not shared by all whites and Indians in Pennsylvania and New York. New York officials persecuted the white Moravian missionaries at Shekomeko in 1744 by charging that they were in league with French Catholics and by expelling white Moravians. The migration of the white and some Indian Moravians effectively ended this Moravian interracial religious community in New York. Some religious societies that were interracial and that practiced some measure of equality occasionally existed in the early eighteenth century, but these endeavors came into conflict with the inequality and injustice that more often characterized relations between whites and Indians.93
In contrast to the other Mid-Atlantic churches, most Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian churches did not baptize or admit to membership black or Indian peoples during most of the eighteenth century. Graham Russell Hodges, who examined baptismal records from more than fifty Reformed churches from 1680 to 1776, was able to find only “scattered black baptisms.” The Dutch Reformed Church of Albany, New York, baptized at least ten black people between 1733 and 1745, but those baptisms appear to be the largest concentration of black baptism in a Reformed church before the 1780s. The Old Tennent Presbyterian Church of Manalapan (formerly Freeport), New Jersey, baptized five black adults upon their professions of faith and four black children, whose parents had been baptized previously, between 1740 and 1749. Few other Presbyterian churches followed their lead. Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church and the Old Tennent Presbyterian Church were exceptions.94
Most Reformed and Presbyterian churches did not baptize blacks or Indians because of parishioners’ direct opposition to doing so and because church policies made these sacraments relatively inaccessible, even for enslaved people in Christian homes. Writing in February 1728, James Wetmore, Anglican missionary at Rye, New York, noted that “some Presbyterians will allow their servants to be taught, but are unwilling they should be baptized.”95 Reformed and Presbyterian churches would baptize only children of members (not other household members such as servant children), and they required adults who wanted to be baptized to be admitted as communicants at the same time, which made baptism more difficult to obtain. Presbyterian and Reformed churches did not have the equivalent of the Congregationalists’ Halfway Covenant, which separated adult baptisms from the requirements of full membership. More so than among English colonists, Dutch slaveholders feared that baptism would imply equality or undermine their ownership of slaves. Reformed churches also lacked missionary activities directed toward blacks and Indians, which played such a central role in the number of black baptisms in other churches.96 After the American Revolution, however, Reformed and Presbyterian churches changed their baptismal policies, and African Americans joined these churches, sometimes in substantial numbers (see chapters 4 and 5).
In the Mid-Atlantic colonies as a whole, most Anglican and some Lutheran and Moravian churches ministered to blacks and Indians between 1730 and 1749. Their theology of baptism and missionary activities help explain why these churches included blacks and Indians, even though Germans, in general, owned fewer slaves, and German churches were often less well established than other denominations.
Throughout New England, most Congregational churches and most Church of England parishes were interracial religious communities between 1730 and 1749. Blacks and Indians regularly participated in these churches as attendees and through the rituals of baptism and communion. The presence of blacks and Indians in all these types of churches was not solely the result of Great Awakening revivals because they participated in churches before the Great Awakening began and were participants in churches whose leadership emphatically opposed the Great Awakening. Rather, blacks and Indians found various types of Protestant Christianity appealing for the spiritual and material benefits they could confer. In the middle of the eighteenth century, many of these trends continued. However, European exploitations of Indians and blacks also strained the dynamics in these churches, leading to conflicts and even the dissolution of some interracial religious communities as Indians increasingly opted for separate churches in the 1750s.
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