ABSTRACT
In his monumental study, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made,” Eugene D. Genovese asserted that religion was central to shaping the slave community. Slaves used the power and emotional security of religion as their primary means of protection in a society that believed in a rigid social order. According to Genovese, their religion imbued with a powerful sense of community. He showed that the slaves’ religion, a religion that “taught them to love and value each other, to take a critical view of their masters, and reject the ideological rationales for their own enslavement,” was a weapon of defense against dehumanization.1 He also noted that the slaves used their religion to “resist being transformed into the Sambos they had been programmed to become,” and that “it fired them with a sense of their own worth before God and man.”2
