by Tom Goodman
One of the lazy assumptions of our age is that Christianity is a “white man’s religion.”
There are reasons people say this. Some of them are painful and undeniable:
White slaveholders quoted Scripture while holding men, women, and children in bondage.
White foreign missionaries sometimes confused the gospel with Western culture.
White churches too often blessed what Christ would have judged.
But history has a way of complicating our lazy slogans.
I doubt you’ve ever heard of Joseph “Jesse” Island, a formerly enslaved Black man in Indian Territory. His story begins in one of the most sorrowful chapters in American history. During the removal of the Five Tribes to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, Native peoples brought with them the thousands of African slaves they owned. Roughly 5,000 to 7,500 enslaved people walked the Trail of Tears with their Native owners.
After the Civil War, Jesse Island was free from his Indian master. And what did he do with his freedom? He went around preaching Christ. Not only to other Black freedmen, but also to the Muscogee and other Native people.
This was no safe hobby. So many Native people were turning to Christianity that Muscogee leaders expanded their “lash laws”—punishments originally designed for cattle rustling and rape and murder—to include those who held or attended Christian meetings.
A first offense could bring fifty lashes. A second could bring one hundred. A third could mean death.
Five tribal police caught Jesse Island. They bared his back, roped him by the wrists, and hoisted him until his feet barely touched the ground. One asked where he had gotten this “new religion.”
Island answered, “In the Old Nation.”
In other words, the nation that had sold him to his Native owners in the first place.
The reply came back: “You have set half of our people to praying and this is what we are going to whip you for.” They lacerated his back fifty times—and then struck him five more times to make their point.
Here was a Black man, enslaved by a Native master, being whipped by Native police for preaching Christianity to responsive Native people.
Is your mind spinning? Are your assumptions upended?
Whatever the faults of white Christians, when those tribal police punished Jesse Island, Christianity was not functioning as the religion of white social control. It was the faith of a freedman who could not stop telling others about Jesus despite withering torture.
Jesse Island’s story does not erase the hypocritical use of Christianity by whites. It exposes it. But it also shows that Christ cannot be reduced to the worst people who exploited his name. The oppressed often saw something in Jesus that their oppressors had missed, buried, or betrayed.
Jesse Island understood that.
I found the story of Jesse Island while reading Donald Fixico’s excellent history of tribal law enforcement called The Lighthorse Police. I am a member of the Western Writers of Amercia, and I was given the book to write a review for Roundup magazine. His book is about the history of Native law enforcement, not Native attitudes to Christianity. But his account of how tribal police treated Jesse Island was compelling.
To read more about the spread of Christianity among Black and Native populations, I recommend the following articles:
- “Why the Enslaved Adopted the Religion of Their Masters—and Transformed It”
- “Christianity is Not a Colonizer’s Religion”
- “Christianity and Indigenous Peoples in Canada”
Tom
Today’s devotional is my own, but the illustration imagining Jesse Island preaching to Freedmen and Natives was generated by ChatGPT.
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A deadly train stunt. A pistol-packing preacher. A UFO crash in 1897. A town that outlawed dancing. In Ten Texas Tales, you'll find stories like this from turn-of-the-century Texas. I mine that seam of history for my novels and for anecdotes to put in my monthly newsletter. Each month, I’ll give you nuggets of history, recommended books and films, and behind-the-scenes looks at my novels.
