This essay examines the impact of the eighteenth century’s developing rhetoric of racial difference on Protestant attitudes toward the religious salvation of Africans across the Atlantic world. As English colonies passed legislation that widened the legal and social gap between blacks and whites, missionaries and theologians called for more robust and wideranging efforts to evangelize African men and women. I show how speculation into the fate of bodies of color in the afterlife helped some Protestant authors navigate this apparently contradictory situation. Reading the work of two Massachusetts puritans (Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather), and one Connecticut Anglican associated with the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (John Beach), I demonstrate that the fine details of these writers’ eschatological and millennial schemes often belied their overt insistence that ethnic distinctions would be entirely transcended in the world to come. Each suggested, in his own way, that it was impossible to imagine that a resurrected body could be black, thereby underlining the subordinate status of Christians of color during mortal life.

中文翻译：

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十八世纪大西洋世界复活的种族政治

本文考察了 18 世纪不断发展的种族差异修辞对新教对跨大西洋世界的非洲人宗教救赎的态度的影响。随着英国殖民地通过的立法扩大了黑人和白人之间的法律和社会差距，传教士和神学家呼吁采取更强有力和更广泛的努力来向非洲男人和女人传福音。我展示了对来世有色人种命运的猜测如何帮助一些新教作者驾驭这种明显矛盾的情况。阅读两名马萨诸塞州清教徒（塞缪尔·西沃尔和科顿·马瑟）和一名与英国福音传播协会（约翰·比奇）有关的康涅狄格圣公会的著作，我证明，这些作家的末世论和千禧年计划的细节常常掩盖了他们公开坚持的种族差异将在未来世界完全超越的说法。每个人都以自己的方式暗示，不可能想象复活的身体会是黑色的，从而强调了有色人种基督徒在尘世生活中的从属地位。