My question regards the early slaves mainly in North America presumably before US independence. It might stem from an ignorance about how Christianity was communicated to (mainly) Africans being brought over to the US, so I apologise beforehand if my question is flawed or departing from incorrect assumptions.
In my layman mind, I'm assuming it was white slave owners who imposed Christianity upon the slave populations, assuming that the latter had no notion of Jesus Christ (or even Moses), before being enslaved. So, were the early slaves simply “forced” to obey Christian ways of life, or were priests and others humble/rhetorical enough to "convince" slaves into accepting Christianity and Jesus as their saviour?
Spontaneously, I’d think that there’d be a large resistance towards replacing one’s faith from previous (presumably) pagan faiths, but in conflict with this thought I also have the idea that Christianity prospered a lot amid the slave populations, being a positive driving force in their lives and eagerly passed on within slave populations, presumably orally.
But maybe I am too influenced by how strong an adhesive american black Christianity became within its communities after the civil war and into the 1900s?
So, in essence, how did Christianity gain a foothold among the early slave populations in the US, which subsequently made Christianity the majority religion among those populations?
Well, the short answer is that slaveowners in the British colonies in the 1600s and 1700s were typically a lot less interested in converting slaves to Christianity than you might think. Why?
First, because slavery, at its core, is a system of brutal economic exploitation. (Later proslavery apologists would defend slavery as leading to the Christianization of slaves, but that was a later defense of the system, not a cause of it.) Colonists bought slaves to profit from them, and Christianizing slaves was unlikely to lead to immediate economic benefits. Religious instruction takes time. Resting on the sabbath takes time. If enslaved people became Christians, they might want to congregate on their own to pray together -- and slaveowners always worried about slaves congregating together for any reason. Their fear was that slaves, if allowed out of sight of their masters, would be likely to plot rebellion.
Second, slaveowners in the 1600s and 1700s were afraid that enslaved people would hear Biblical messages that they did not want them to know about. On the one hand, it is true that the Bible contains lots of messages about respecting hierarchy and authority. Paul explicitly commands wives to obey their husbands and slaves to obey their masters, for example.
On the other hand, other parts of the Bible can be read as quite egalitarian. Consider, for example, these other words of Paul: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 28). Or consider these words from Acts: "[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." Slaveowners were afraid that messages like this pointed toward spiritual equality, and they did not want to think of enslaved people as their spiritual equals.
Colonists also feared that slaves might try to use Christianity to claim their freedom as well. In the 1600s, the various colonial legislatures passed laws making it clear that becoming Christian would not help an enslaved person to become free. But these fears endured. In the early 1700s, one South Carolina minister, before baptizing slaves, required them to take an oath stating that they understood that baptism would not lead to their physical freedom.
The First Great Awakening (a massive series of revivals beginning in the 1730s) eventually began to encourage larger numbers of conversions among enslaved people. The denominations most strongly involved in the Great Awakening were the Baptists and Methodists. They promoted an emotional, heartfelt response to Jesus, and their services might involve people crying out, shouting, or falling into trances. They also said that God could (and did) reach out to touch people's hearts directly, and every soul was of infinite value to God -- whether the person in question was male or female, old or young, enslaved or free. Any person could have a direct experience of God.
For enslaved people, this message might have enormous appeal. Whatever the cruel circumstances of their lives, they could be certain that God loved them. Slaveowners, of course, were not always thrilled with this turn of events. They wanted to make sure that the slaves' Christianity would not threaten the institution of slavery.
So, one can see two different forms of Christianity develop. There is the Christianity of the masters, which was expressed to the slaves as, "Yes, God loves you. But God put you here to be obedient, and to work hard, and then you will be rewarded in the next life." And then there is the Christianity that African-Americans built, the Christianity that you can see reflected in the spirituals. In it, enslaved people claimed their dignity as children of God. They looked especially to the story of Moses, where God led the people out of Egypt to freedom. Was that freedom to be understood as coming in heaven? Or was it something to be hoped for in this world? It isn't always clear.
Some readings:
A classic work on religion among enslaved people in North America is Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978).
A book that suggests that enslaved people resisted Christianization until the later 1700s is Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998)
The anecdote about the South Carolina preacher is from Annette Laing, "'Heathens and Infidels'?: African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1700-1750," Religion and American Culture 12: 2 (Summer 2002), 197-228.