This essay examines how three marginalized early American writers — Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano — used religious rhetoric as a strategy to legitimate their authorship. Writing from positions of social disadvantage as a woman or as African Americans, each author appealed to Christian humility and the equality of all souls before God to assert their right to speak. The essay analyzes key poems by Bradstreet and Wheatley alongside Equiano's memoir to show how the shared language of faith allowed these writers to challenge racial and gender hierarchies indirectly, while also noting the limits of that strategy, particularly in Wheatley's reluctance to directly confront slavery.
For some early colonial writers, America was a shining city on a hill. In the eyes of the Puritans, America was supposed to provide respite from oppression and the ability to create a new Jerusalem — a place of salvation away from the religious and political institutions of Europe. However, for women and African Americans, their role in this new project of creating an American identity was far more uncertain.
Authors such as the female Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet and the African American writers Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano all struggled with the question of whether they had a "right" to articulate themselves as writers. Religion was a common means of justification for socially marginalized writers. By appealing to God and the humility required of all authors regardless of sex or race, female and Black authors could justify their authorship. In taking a stance of humility, they could gently remind readers that all should be humble before the divine, and that all human beings had a right to be free.
Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan writer who used her verse to articulate her personal and religious concerns. In her poem "To My Dear and Loving Husband," Bradstreet states that love is priceless and prays that she will be reunited with her husband in heaven. However, since election is uncertain in the Puritan worldview, this desire is expressed as a fond dream rather than absolute certainty. Love of husband and God is to be prized above material wealth — a theme also present in "The Prologue."
"The Prologue" also makes a case for Bradstreet's right to speak as an author. Not ancient tradition, but only God, can confer the right to speak: "A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong, / For such despite they cast on female wits; / If what I do prove well, it won't advance, / They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance." Even though Bradstreet humbly acknowledges that men are considered the better writers, she also pleads for the ability to set down her thoughts: "Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays." This humility is befitting both a Puritan and a woman, yet despite her show of meekness, Bradstreet indicates that the religious subjects of her "mean pen" are still worthy of expression. This same humility appears in her poem "Contemplations," which stresses the interrelated web of God, humanity, and nature.
Arguing from a position of humility before God was also a central poetic technique of the African American poet Phillis Wheatley. By stressing her humility, Wheatley reminded readers that even those of supposedly superior race, class, or social standing were ultimately small in the eyes of the Almighty. Like Bradstreet, Wheatley used her ostensibly "lower" status to remind her audience that everyone was humble in God's sight.
In her poem "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," Wheatley writes of Jesus: "When the whole human race by sin had fall'n, / He deign'd to die that they might rise again." While she begins by referencing her color and African origin in a "land of errors," she ultimately reminds the reader that all human beings are fallen and must be justified before God — Black and white alike. Even more explicitly, in "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatley writes: "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin'd and join th'angelic train." She expresses gratitude for becoming a Christian while rebuking those Christians who do not extend charity to all, regardless of color.
"Equiano appeals to Christian readers to oppose slavery"
Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano each turned to the shared language of Christian faith to claim the right to speak and to remind their readers of a common humanity. For all three, religious humility was not merely a convention but a rhetorical strategy that allowed marginalized voices to enter a literary and political conversation from which they were otherwise excluded. Yet the degree of directness with which they challenged injustice varied considerably — from Bradstreet's quiet insistence on a woman's right to write, to Wheatley's carefully coded critiques of racial inequality, to Equiano's unflinching indictment of slavery. Together, their works reveal both the possibilities and the constraints of using faith as a foundation for social critique in early America.
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