Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

In his cutting edge book, Jon Sensbach opens the reader’s eyes to a world often overlooked in historical writing.  Drawing from numerous sources, Rebecca’s Revival reconstructs and tells the exceptional life of Rebecca Protten.  Rebecca faces many challenges in her eighteenth-century world since she is mulatto, a woman, and a former slave.  Rebecca traverses cultural, societal, religious, racial, and geographic boundaries using her mulatto status privileges to evangelize in three separate continents.  Sensbach’s work is not a travel narrative, rather a biographical, religious, women’s, and transatlantic history constructed from primary source material from the archives of the United States, Germany, and Denmark.  The result is a brilliant, though contested, examination of the origins of the black church and the role of Rebecca Protten in its creation.  Ultimately, the main argument that Sensbach makes is that while Rebecca Protten is a single and exceptional example of New World Protestantism, her story is unequivocally tied to the nascent black church and its future development and impact in the Western Hemisphere.

Sensbach starts his work with a prologue that resembles a Hollywood introduction for a movie.  The reader is introduced to a vivid description of Fort Christiansborg, along the Gold Coast of Africa, with Rebecca near the end of her life.  Sensbach uses the rest of the prologue to summarize Rebecca’s life while boldly making claims of her impact on the Western world.  In this prologue is where Sensbach first likens Rebecca’s tenacity to that of the rest of the horridly abused people to whom she ministered.  Unfortunately, Rebecca is also portrayed as “never fitting in” (pg. 6) with the people she taught.  An extraordinary person in an ordinary black and white world, Rebecca was an exception to the rule that had almost been lost to oblivion save some archival material.  Rebecca’s greatest attribute was her mobility while still having a connection to the evangelized.  She was free and unbounded, though had the experience of being a slave.  She was Christian and rose to be ordained as a deaconess, though had the experience of no being Christian.  She was neither completely of white nor black ethnicity, though lived in worlds where people were.

In chapter one, Sensbach sets the table of the life and times of being a Dutch slave.  The cruelty of the Dutch is seemingly unmatched and there were two main slave revolts that Sensbach catalogues on the island of St. John.  The initial success of these rebellions has tie-ins to democratic ideals.  Women took part in the uprising as soldiers, which is something that did not happen in Africa at that time.  After the initial revolt, the land was divided up among the former slaves who did not destroy previous capital or institutions, except for slavery.  The second revolt was much more radical and less democratic in nature, and showed the desperation of the slaves of St. John to have freedom.  At the end of the chapter, Sensbach alludes to Rebecca, who is on the nearby island of St. Thomas, as a future instigator of a new type of freedom that slaves will embrace: spiritual freedom. 

The rest of the book chronicles Rebecca Protten and her life in the Moravian Brethren.  In St. Thomas, Rebecca preached in a very direct manner with the sole purpose of evangelizing.  Here, Sensbach describes Rebecca as revolutionary, but only in the sense that she is exceptional.  It was unknown if Rebecca was against slavery as “she knew quite well what it was to be a slave… but [never] spoke against slavery in public or private” (pg. 108), and therefore is not revolutionary in the traditional sense.  Rebecca marries two times and moves to both Europe and Africa, facing two distinct cultures, and learns to speak four languages and to write in two.  At the end of the work, Sensbach details how Rebecca dies in obscurity in Africa after turning down the opportunity to travel back to St. Thomas.  There, Rebecca’s memory remains relatively hidden until the recent research done by Sensbach in this work.

This work, while reconstructed well, is not without its limitations.  Throughout the work, Rebecca seems to disappear into her surroundings as she progresses through the course of her life.  Rebecca left very little primary source material, as only a few of her letters have survived.  Even those can be called into question whether or not they were revised, or whether or not she had to conform to conventional standards of that time.  Since so much of Rebecca’s life is hidden, the reconstruction of her life by archival data calls into question Sensbach’s interpretations of what Rebecca felt, where exactly she traveled, how she ministered, what she believed, and how she was accepted by others.  Sensbach also claims that the St. Thomas model serves as the basis for other evangelistic groups in their approach to slaves and the successful growth of the North American black church, but undermines his argument by stating that it “could have happened anyway” (pg. 240).  The work successfully conveys the interconnectedness and transatlantic nature of that time, with her traveling to all three continents and interacting with those cultures.  It also serves as a story of the growing role of women in Protestant churches and the community at large.  Rebecca’s Revival provides a good basis of knowledge for the scholarly and lay reader in studying women’s history and the African Diaspora.

With Rebecca’s Revival, Sensbach contributes to transatlantic thought in substantially different and unprescribed ways.  Rebecca’s travels between continents convey to the reader that the flow of people, ideas, and goods was multidirectional, helping to steer away from antiquated one-dimension thinking.  The role of religion in transatlantic thought has normally been prescribed as European missionaries, mainly those from the Catholic Church, branching out to the New World.  This book effectively conveys that Protestants played a large role in Christianizing the Caribbean and North America, and that missionaries traveled back to Europe, as well as to Africa from the New World.  Sensbach labels this as the “spiritual triangle of trade” (pg. 242).