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Sensbach should have been more circumspect and precise in his reachings. Time and again, the actual detailed account that Sensbach provides of Rebecca's wondrous, courageous, multilingual, interracial life undercuts the case for her paradigmatic stature. Rebecca was extraordinarily unusual, and this distinctiveness—even as it gives her story compelling interest—renders her role as emblem debatable, or at least more complex than Sensbach allows for. The biggest example of this, ironically enough, concerns the St. Thomas church which she founded.

As Sensbach acknowledges, the most critical dynamic in the development of African American religion in all parts of the Americas was the range of ways in which slaves transformed the Christianity they were exposed to by incorporating myriad remnants of different African religions. Scholars such as Albert Raboteau, Mechal Sobel, and Robert Farris Thompson have taught us that the manner in which African religions survived—from whole systems of thought to discrete religious practices—varied greatly from place to place. In Protestant North America, for reasons (among others) having to do both with the lack of saints in Protestantism as well as the decidedly smaller size of plantations, African survivals were less systematic and coherent than in places such as Brazil or Haiti. But even the many scholars who characterize the devastation done to slaves' traditional African beliefs as a type of spiritual holocaust also acknowledge the presence of many African retentions—such as the ethos of congregational solidarity, music, dance, spiritual possession, and specific practices (in the marriage ceremony, for example).

Sensbach makes clear that Rebecca's church on St. Thomas fell within this basic dynamic: "black women and men began to blend Christianity with the religions they had brought with them from Africa, creating a faith to fortify themselves against slavery." Yet, Rebecca, as Sensbach shows at numerous turns, "probably identified more with European practices than with African ones," fundamentally disavowing and even "suppress[ing] lingering African religious practices." Sensbach points out that one of the reasons the Moravians were so accepting of Rebecca is that "it appeared as though her cultural blackness had disappeared."

Indeed, Rebecca's seemingly ready identification with Europeanisms is a constant theme in her life. Rebecca's first marriage in 1738 was to a white Moravian missionary, and while this does not stand as evidence of her racial identification, it should remind us that Moravians, despite believing that all people could be saved, thought that slavery was divinely sanctioned; it was a theology Rebecca would have necessarily accepted. Rebecca's second marriage (after her first husband died) was to an African Moravian of mixed-race descent, and here, too, these same tensions persist. Sensbach tells us that while her husband, Christian Protten, "struggled constantly to reconcile his African and European identities, Rebecca showed no such doubts." When the couple moved from Europe to the African slave city of Christianborg to educate and missionize the city's mixed-race children, Rebecca taught girls "the skills they would need in European- style patriarchal households," along with "a steady diet of biblical passages, prayers, and a catechism." Meanwhile, we are told that many "mulatto" children resisted her work as they continued to worship African gods.

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