In his influential 1835 work Slavery, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing noted of southern slaves: “Of all the races of men, the African is the mildest and most susceptible of attachment. He loves, where the European would hate. He watches the life of a master, whom the North-American Indian, in like circumstances, would stab to the heart. The African is affectionate.” The primary reason for this supposedly loving and affectionate nature of African Americans, in Channing’s view, was that “the colored race are said to be peculiarly susceptible of the religious sentiment.” As Curtis Evans notes in The Burden of Black Religion, Channing’s argument was seized upon by both abolitionists and proslavery thinkers alike. These groups thus bolstered the nineteenth-century view that blacks were naturally religious, which has continued to influence perceptions of African American religiosity.[1] This notion has had significant ramifications for scholarship on African American religion. The overwhelming focus of works on slave religion has been on variants of Protestant Christianity and their intersection with African religious traditions. During the early eighteenth century, most scholars note, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel attempted to Christianize the slave population but was unsuccessful because of resistance from masters, language barriers, and an emphasis on religious education that precluded many illiterate slaves from converting. This started to change during the First Great Awakening and accelerated during the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, as sects such as the Methodists and Baptists deemphasized religious education and posited the primacy of the conversion experience. Rituals such as baptism by immersion were similar to African traditions and thus also appealed to southern slaves. Scholars such as Edward Curtis IV, Michael Gomez, and Yvonne Chireau have added to this picture by demonstrating the importance of alternate faiths such as Islam and conjure throughout slave communities. Yet the assumption still remains that some form of religiosity was endemic to the enslaved population and that few if any slaves embraced religious skepticism.