THE NAME "JESUS" DIDN'T SAVE US FROM ENSLAVEMENT: THEY NAMED THEIR SLAVE “JESUS”: ALL RELIGIONS ENSLAVEED US IN THE NAME OF THEIR GODS. "We must remove the fish bones out of all religions, or we will continue to choke on them."
One of the earliest English royal ships used in the trafficking of African people was called the Jesus of Lübeck. The ship was built in the German city of Lübeck and later became part of the English royal fleet. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth I allowed John Hawkins to use this large royal ship on a slave-trading voyage to the coast of West Africa. Hawkins and his men captured or purchased African men, women, and children, carried them across the Atlantic, and sold them in Spanish-controlled parts of the Americas for profit. This was the first English slave-trading voyage directly supported by the Crown.
The ship was not first built for slavery, and it had already been given the name Jesus before John Hawkins used it. However, that does not remove the painful meaning of what happened. A ship carrying the name of Jesus was used to carry African people in chains. European rulers claimed to serve a God of love while using royal power, guns, ships, laws, and religion to support the buying and selling of human beings.
JOHN HAWKINS AND THE BUSINESS OF HUMAN SUFFERING
John Hawkins had already made money from an earlier slave-trading voyage in 1562. After powerful people saw how profitable the trade in African bodies could become, he received greater support for his next expedition. Queen Elizabeth permitted him to use the Jesus of Lübeck, a ship of the English Navy, and wealthy investors helped finance the voyage. African people were treated as products, while sugar, hides, pearls, and other goods were brought back to Europe.
Hawkins obtained African captives through trading, kidnapping, attacks, warfare, and by taking advantage of conflicts that were already happening in parts of Africa. Some African rulers and merchants also participated in selling captives, and we should not hide that truth. However, European nations created, expanded, armed, financed, and protected the larger Atlantic system. Europeans owned the ships, controlled the overseas markets, built the plantations, wrote the racial laws, and collected most of the wealth.
Hawkins was not treated as a criminal for trafficking African people. He was honored for making money and increasing England’s power. His family coat of arms included the image of a bound African person. What our ancestors experienced as kidnapping, family separation, terror, and suffering was described in Europe as trade, adventure, business, and national progress.
OUR ANCESTORS WERE NOT BORN SLAVES
We must be careful with the words we use when telling this history. Our ancestors were not born slaves because slavery was not their natural identity. They were African people who were enslaved. Somebody captured them, somebody sold them, somebody transported them, somebody wrote laws against them, and somebody inherited wealth from their suffering.
The word enslaved places the responsibility where it belongs. It reminds us that slavery was an action committed against human beings. Our ancestors had names, families, languages, nations, spiritual systems, skills, and histories before Europeans placed chains around their bodies.
AFRICANS RESISTED FROM THE BEGINNING
The full story is not only about African suffering. It is also about African resistance. Africans fought kidnappers on the coast, resisted aboard ships, jumped overboard rather than accept captivity, escaped from plantations, formed independent Maroon communities, protected their spiritual traditions, and led rebellions throughout the Americas.
During Hawkins’ third major slave-trading expedition, which began in 1567, the Jesus of Lübeck was used again. Francis Drake, who would later be praised in British history, also took part in the expedition. Africans resisted Hawkins and his men along the coast, and the English fleet later suffered a major defeat by Spanish forces at San Juan de Ulúa in present-day Mexico. The ship called Jesus was badly damaged and lost from English service.
KEITH PIPER AND A SHIP CALLED JESUS
Black British artist and Sankofaru Keith Piper directly addressed this history in his powerful 1991 art installation called A Ship Called Jesus. Piper examined the difficult relationship between Christianity, slavery, colonialism, African people, and the Black church. His work reminds us that the name Jesus was not only painted on a ship. It became part of a larger religious system that was often used to support European political and economic power.
Piper also showed that our ancestors did not simply accept Christianity in the same form in which it was forced upon them. African people changed it. They placed African rhythm, music, movement, healing, call-and-response, community, emotional release, and the desire for freedom inside the religion. They found Moses standing against Pharaoh, Jesus standing with the poor, and the promise that Babylon would someday fall.
Our ancestors took a religion that had been used to control them and, in many cases, turned it into a source of survival and resistance. However, we must still ask whether changing the songs was enough. We may have taken control of the choir, the pulpit, and the church building, but have we taken control of the direction of the ship?
Historian and Sankofaru Dr. Eric Williams taught us in Capitalism and Slavery that we must follow the money. The slave trade was not only about racial hatred. It was also about wealth, land, sugar, tobacco, cotton, gold, labor, and political power. Racism helped Europeans explain why their actions were acceptable, but profit kept the ships sailing.
The slave trade connected kings and queens, merchants, shipbuilders, plantation owners, government officials, banks, insurance companies, and churches. Religion helped many people feel righteous while they benefited from an unrighteous system. This is why we cannot study slavery only as a story about personal prejudice. It was a business protected by governments and defended by religious teaching.
WHICH JESUS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
Black theologian Dr. James Cone helped us ask an important question: Which Jesus are we talking about? There was a Jesus presented by slaveholders to teach Africans to obey, suffer quietly, forgive without justice, and wait for freedom after death. There was also the Jesus understood by oppressed Black people as standing with the poor, the prisoners, the rejected, and those fighting for freedom.
The name Jesus was written on the ship, but the spirit of justice was not guiding its mission. Slaveholders prayed, read the Bible, attended church, and still bought and sold African people. This proves that saying the name of God does not make a person or an institution holy.
The question is not only whether people believe in Jesus. The question is what their belief causes them to do. Does their faith free people or control them? Does it defend the oppressed or protect the powerful? Does it heal the wounded or teach them to accept their wounds as the will of God?
CHRISTIANS MUST BE WILLING TO FACE THE TRUTH
As Christians, we must be mature enough to examine the history of our own religion without becoming defensive. Telling the truth about how Christianity was used does not mean that every Christian is evil or that nothing good ever came through the Black church. It means that faith without truth can become another form of bondage.
Christianity was used to support slavery, colonial rule, the destruction of African cultures, the stealing of African land, and the teaching that European people were closer to God than African people. Missionaries sometimes traveled with traders, armies, and colonial governments. Africans were often told that their names, languages, ancestors, spiritual practices, and images of God were evil, while European culture was presented as holy.
We must ask how much of our present faith is truly spiritual and how much of it came from the people who enslaved and colonized us. We must ask whether we are worshipping God or simply repeating European ideas about God. We must ask whether our religion helps us love ourselves as African people or teaches us to reject everything connected to Africa.
WE MUST EXAMINE EVERY RELIGION USED TO ENSLAVE US
This reevaluation cannot stop with Christianity. African people have been enslaved, invaded, colonized, and culturally controlled under the banners of more than one religion. Christians, Muslims, and followers of other powerful religious systems have all participated at different times in slavery, conquest, and empire.
This does not mean every Christian, Muslim, Jew, or person of faith supported slavery. It means no religion should be protected from honest examination. Any religion that was used to enslave African people in the name of its God must be questioned. Any teaching that tells us to reject our African identity, forget our ancestors, obey injustice, or believe that another people are chosen above us must be challenged.
We should not replace one form of religious blindness with another. A religion must be judged by its fruit. Does it produce freedom, truth, justice, healing, dignity, and love, or does it produce fear, shame, dependence, division, and obedience to those in power?
SANKOFA REQUIRES SPIRITUAL COURAGE
Sankofa teaches us to return to the past and recover what was stolen, hidden, or forgotten so we can move forward with wisdom. We must study what African people believed before the slave ships, missionaries, and colonizers arrived. Africa had spiritual knowledge, moral systems, sacred science, community rituals, ideas about God, respect for ancestors, and ways of understanding life long before Europe introduced Christianity.
Going back does not mean we must copy every ancient practice. It means we should know what was taken from us before deciding what we truly believe. We cannot make a free spiritual choice when we only know the religion forced upon our ancestors.
We must give ourselves permission to study, question, compare, and grow. God should not be afraid of our questions. Truth should not require fear to protect it. A faith that cannot survive honest examination may be based more on control than truth.
LOOK BEYOND THE NAME ON THE SHIP
The slave ship was called Jesus, but it carried African people in chains. That history should teach us to look beyond names, titles, robes, crosses, scriptures, flags, and religious buildings. A sacred name painted on the outside does not make what happens on the inside sacred.
We must judge every religion and institution by what it does, who it serves, who it harms, and where it is taking our people. We must separate the God of freedom from the gods created by empires to protect their power.
Whoever tells the story gets the glory. Sankofa requires us to go back, retrieve the whole truth, honor the ancestors who resisted, and reevaluate every religious system that taught us to accept chains in the name of its God.
#TheSlaveShipWasCalledJesus #JesusOfLubeck #JohnHawkins #QueenElizabeth #KeithPiper #JamesCone #EricWilliams #Sankofa #AfricanSpirituality
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