Barbados

Barbados was England's first great sugar colony, and its religion was built to match: an established Anglican church of parish vestries that doubled as local government, eleven historic parishes that still name the island's districts, and a planter Christianity that for over a century saw no contradiction in catechism and chattel slavery. The enslaved majority was long excluded from the churches; it was Moravian and Methodist missionaries from the 1760s onward who first preached to them systematically, against planter hostility that once demolished the Methodist chapel in Bridgetown.

Emancipation in 1834 slowly turned the parish churches black in membership while their monuments stayed planter white, and the twentieth century brought the great diversification: Pentecostal and Adventist churches grew fastest, the Spiritual Baptists arrived from Trinidad, and Rastafari took root among youth in the 1970s. The island also holds the western hemisphere's oldest synagogue site, in Bridgetown, where Sephardic Jews fleeing Brazil settled in the 1650s and whose restored synagogue and mikvah are now a heritage centre. The Anglican establishment ended quietly in 1969, and when Barbados became a republic in 2021 the national service blended the cathedral's liturgy with gospel, drums and Rastafari poetry, a fair image of where four centuries had arrived.

When the planter Christopher Codrington died in 1710 he left two Barbados sugar estates to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Church of England's new missionary arm, directing that the income maintain professors and scholars to study medicine and divinity. The bequest made the church itself a slaveholder. For over a century the Society ran the Codrington plantations with hundreds of enslaved workers, whose deaths and replacements are recorded in its own account books, and in the early decades new arrivals were branded on the chest with the word Society, a fact the modern church has publicly acknowledged.

The estates funded Codrington College, opened as a grammar school and refounded in 1830 as a theological college, the oldest Anglican seminary in the western hemisphere, whose graduates staffed pulpits across the Caribbean, ministering to congregations descended from the very people the endowment had enslaved. The contradiction has become a central case in the reckoning of churches with slavery: historians made Codrington a textbook example of religious institutions' direct profiteering, the Church of England apologised formally in 2006 for its role in the trade with Codrington named, and the college, still training clergy above its sea cliff in Saint John, now carries the history in its own teaching, a working seminary that is also a monument to what its founders could not see.