Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

The religious history of the island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the eastern Caribbean Sea is complex and indelibly linked to issues of migration, displacement, colonization, slavery, and the search for nationhood and freedom. The first inhabitants were the Taintos (Arawaks), a group of agricultural people who originated from the Orinoco Basin in South America. They were replaced by the Callinagoes (Caribs) who also migrated from South America. The religious beliefs of both the Taintos and the Callinagoes are characterized as Amerindian shamanism: having a Supreme Being, who did not directly interact with the people; lesser divine being(s), who exerted power over their daily lives; and priests, who functioned as spiritual intermediaries between the deity and humans.

With the arrival of the Europeans and Africans, the religious terrain of the islands began to undergo dramatic changes. First, there was the introduction of Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism. For many Spaniards and the French who followed them, the servitude or enslavement of the Amerindians and Africans was justified in the context of civilizing and evangelizing them. As a result, their Christianization efforts took the form of making sure that the Amerindians and slaves received Catholic instruction and were baptized. However, this baptism was to have no bearing on their subordinate status as part of the encomienda. They were laborers or slaves in this labor system that the Spaniards implemented during their colonization of the Americas.

Second, there was an emergence of indigenous religious expressions. Throughout much of the 17th and the 18th centuries, St. Vincent remained a site where Callinagoes actively resisted European colonization. However, it also functioned as a refuge for African slaves who had either been shipwrecked or escaped from the islands of Barbados, St. Lucia, and Grenada. The offspring of the miscegenation between African slaves and Callinago women was a group called the Black Caribs. For some of these offspring, their religious beliefs are the product of the syncretism of various aspects of their African and Callinago religious heritage.

When the British gained ownership over the islands in 1763 and again in 1783, another phase in the religious history of the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines was inaugurated—the coming of Protestant Christianity and emergence of Afro-Christianity. Unlike their Roman [Page 1114]Catholic predecessors, the established Protestant churches made very little attempt to Christianize the slaves. Thus, the work of evangelizing the slaves did not become a priority until the arrival of nonconformist denominations—primarily the Methodists. The century and a half of inattention, however, created an environment in which the slaves continued to practice their African religions—albeit in a modified form that suited their current environment. When the slaves eventually interacted with Christianity, they found a religious faith that resonated on several levels with their modified African religious heritage in terms of the veneration of saints, style of worship, and other beliefs. As a result of this resonance, they were able to use the interpretive framework of their previous religious experience to decode and understand the Christian message; the result of this process was the emergence of Afro-Christian religious traditions such as Spiritual Baptist.

...