STORIES OF LIBERATION IN SLAVE REVOLT & THE IMAGE OF MARY
By Robert Marus

Presenting papers as part of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) Annual Gathering in the Netherlands,
Caribbean-American scholar Delroy Reid-Salmon and Mexican-American Baptist academic Nora Lozano
interpreted the theme of liberation in presentations to the BWA Commission on Doctrine and Interchurch
Cooperation.
Reid-Salmon assessed the theological insights he has gleaned from writing a book about Sam Sharpe, the
main leader of the 1831-32 “Baptist War” slave rebellion in Jamaica. Sharpe, a Baptist deacon, and hundreds
of others were arrested and summarily executed for organizing a general strike at sugar-cane-harvesting time
that turned into an attempted rebellion against their owners. Sharpe was posthumously conferred with the
Order of National Hero by the Jamaican government in the 1970s, the country’s highest honor.
Some accounts say that Baptist missionaries and pastors helped Sharpe stir the upheaval, which came
after a series of prayer meetings and Bible studies in which the future rebels studied the liberation themes
found in Scripture.
Reid-Salmon, a pastor in New York and a fellow at Regent’s Park College at Oxford University in England,
said the work of God in history is evident in Sharpe’s story.
“It is indisputable that this rebellion has played a major role in the abolition of slavery,” he said. Abolition
came to Jamaica and the rest of the British Empire a few years after Sharpe’s rebellion and, nearly 30 years
later, in the United States.
The slaves’ decision to strike and, eventually, to revolt, was consistent with the Bible’s passages on
freedom, justice and oppression, Reid-Salmon said. “The biblical witness consists of the Exodus story, the
prophetic tradition and of course the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said.
During the gathering’s morning worship service in which participants remembered Baptist prophets, Reid-
Salmon read part of Sharpe’s defense of his actions.
“They may put some of us to death, but they cannot hang and shoot us all,” he quoted Sharpe as saying.
“In reading my Bible, I found that the white man had no more right to make a slave of me than I have to make a
slave of the white man. I would rather go out and die on that gallows than to live as a slave.”
After Sharpe was arrested, powerful white religious leaders told him he was wrong not to be content with
the station in life in which God had placed him.
But accepting such oppression would not have been in line with God’s nature, Reid-Salmon said.
“In the final analysis, Christians either behave as if they believe humanity is made in the image of God, or
else they practice a theology that essentially asserts God is a creation of human freedom,” he said. “Human
beings take responsibility for re-ordering society in response to God’s freedom.”
Lozano, meanwhile, found potential liberation for women – both Protestant and Catholic – in Latin America
and elsewhere by taking another look at the biblical story of Mary, Jesus’ mother.
She noted the Mexican story of the Virgin of Guadalupe – a purported apparition of Mary to an indigenous
peasant in Mexico City in the 16th Century – and how closely it ties the identity of the nation’s Catholicism with
Mary, who serves as a sort of “demi-goddess.”
Mexican Baptists and other Protestants, however, actively ignore Mary, to the extent of giving the biblical
character short shrift.
There are analogous Virgin Mary cults of devotion in other Latin American countries.
“It seems that there is a consensus among these Baptists to disregard, neglect or reject the Virgin Mary,”
Lozano said, speaking of an informal survey she had done of some of her global Baptist colleagues, asking
them how Baptists in their country dealt with Mary. Lozano is a professor at the Baptist University of the
Americas in San Antonio, Texas, in the United States.
PHOTOS: Nora Lozano;
During worship at the Annual Gathering, Delroy Reid-Salmon, a Caribbean-American scholar and pastor, reads
excerpts of an interview of Samuel Sharpe conducted shortly before his execution in 1832

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