Religion of Black Americans

Religion in Black America refers to the religious and spiritual practices of blacks and people of African descent in the United States.

Women in a Pentecostal worship service.

Colonial era

Black Americans were evangelized primarily by lay Baptist ministers, and to this day a large majority are Baptist.

Enslaved Africans brought their religious traditions with them to the United States, which included principally traditional indigenous African religions. While this religious tradition largely died out under the regime of slavery, some remnants do remain, especially in the area of Black religious music, which is distinct from traditional Anglo religious music, emphasizing emotion and repetition more intensely than Anglo religious music.

Many clergy within evangelical Protestantism actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of God, a message that provided hope and sustenance to oppressed slaves. Worship was also allowed in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, and dancing.

Helped by the First Great Awakening and numerous itinerant self-proclaimed missionaries, by the 1760s Baptists were drawing Virginians, especially poor white farmers, into a new, much more democratic religion. Slaves were welcome at the services and many became Baptists at this time. Baptist services were highly emotional; the only ritual was baptism, which was applied by immersion (not sprinkling like the Anglicans) only to adults.

Emergence of African American churches

Scholars disagree about the extent of the native African content of Black Christianity as it emerged in 18th-century America, but there is no dispute that the Christianity of the Black population was grounded in evangelicalism.

The Second Great Awakening (1800-1820s) has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro-Christianity." During these revivals Baptists and Methodists converted large numbers of blacks. However, many were disappointed at the treatment they received from their fellow believers and at the backsliding in the commitment to abolish slavery that many white Baptists and Methodists had advocated immediately after the American Revolution.

Black Americans, once freed from slavery, were very active in forming their own churches, most of them Baptist or Methodist, and giving their ministers both moral and political leadership roles.

After the Civil War, Black Baptists desiring to practice Christianity away from racial discrimination, rapidly set up separate churches and separate state Baptist conventions. In 1866, black Baptists of the South and West combined to form the Consolidated American Baptist Convention. This Convention eventually collapsed but three national conventions formed in response. In 1895 the three conventions merged to create the National Baptist Convention. It is now the largest African-American religious organization in the United States.

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Main article: African Methodist Episcopal Church

In 1787, Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which, along with independent black Baptist congregations, flourished as the century progressed. By 1846, the AME Church, which began with 8 clergy and 5 churches, had grown to 176 clergy, 296 churches, and 17,375 members.

1918 A.M.E. Church, Cairo, Illinois

The church was born in protest against racial discrimination and slavery. This was in keeping with the Methodist Church's philosophy, whose founder John Wesley had once called the slave-trade "that execrable sum of all villainies." In the 19th century, the AME Church of Ohio collaborated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, a predominantly white denomination, in sponsoring the second independent historically black college (HBCU), Wilberforce University in Ohio.

Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, AME leader in Georgia

After the Civil War Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1934-1915) was a major leader of the AME and played a role in Republican Party politics. In 1863 during the Civil War, Turner was appointed as the first black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. Afterward, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction. He planted many AME churches in Georgia after the war. In 1880 he was elected as the first southern bishop of the AME Church after a fierce battle within the denomination. Angered by the Democrats' regaining power and instituting Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century South, Turner was the leader of black nationalism and proposed emigration of blacks to Africa.

While the AME is doctrinally Methodist, clergy, scholars, and lay persons have written works that demonstrate the distinctive racial theology and style that have come to define this Wesleyan body.

African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

Main article: African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

The AMEZ denomination was officially formed in 1821 in New York City, but operated for a number of years before then. The church-sponsored Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina was founded to train missionaries for Africa. Today the AME Zion Church is especially active in mission work in Africa and the Careibbean, especially in Nigeria, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, England, India, Jamaica, St. Croix-Virgin Islands, Trinidad, and Tobago.

Pentecostal and Holiness movements

Main articles: Pentecostalism and Holiness movement

Giggie finds that Black Methodists and Baptists sought middle class respectability. In sharp contrast the new Pentecostal and Holiness movements pursued sanctification, based on a sudden religious experience that could empower people to avoid sin, and recover good health. These groups stressed the role of the direct witness of the Holy Spirit, and emphasized the traditional emotionalism of black worship.

William J. Seymour, a one-eyed black preacher. Seymour traveled to Los Angeles where his preaching sparked the three-year-long Azusa Street Revival in 1906. Worship at the racially integrated Azusa Mission featured an absence of any order of service. People preached and testified as moved by the Spirit, spoke and sung in tongues, and fell in the Spirit. The revival attracted both religious and secular media attention, and thousands of visitors flocked to the mission, carrying the "fire" back to their home churches.

William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival.

The crowds of blacks and whites worshiping together at Seymour's Azusa Street Mission set the tone for much of the early Pentecostal movement. Pentecostals defied social, cultural and political norms of the time that called for racial segregation and Jim Crow . The Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland), the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World were all interracial denominations before the 1920s. These groups, especially in the Jim Crow South were under great pressure to conform to segregation. Ultimately, North American Pentecostalism would divide into white and African-American branches. Though it never entirely disappeared, interracial worship within Pentecostalism would not reemerge as a widespread practice until after the Civil Rights Movement. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), an African American Pentecostal denomination founded in 1896, has become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States today.

The Holiness Movement emerged out of the Methodist Church in the late 19th century, emphasizing "Christian perfection" —the belief that it is possible to live free of voluntary sin, and particularly by the belief that this may be accomplished instantaneously through a second work of grace.

See also

• Black church
• Black theology
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Further reading

• Calhoun-Brown, Allison. "The image of God: Black theology and racial empowerment in the African American community." Review of Religious Research (1999): 197-212. in JSTOR
• Chapman, Mark L. Christianity on trial: African-American religious thought before and after Black power (2006)
• Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Jesus, jobs, and justice: African American women and religion (2010)
• Curtis, Edward E. "African-American Islamization Reconsidered: Black history Narratives and Muslim identity." Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2005) 73#3 pp: 659-684.
• Davis, Cyprian. The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990).
• Fallin, Jr., Wilson. Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama (2007)
• Fitts, Leroy. A history of black Baptists (Broadman Press, 1985)
• Frey, Sylvia R. and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998).
• Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986).
• Giggie, John Michael. After redemption: Jim Crow and the transformation of African American religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 (2007)
• Harris, Fredrick C. Something within: Religion in African-American political activism (1999)
• Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Woman’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993), highly influential study
• Johnson, Paul E., ed. African-American Christianity: Essays in History (1994).
• Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-century African American Women (2001)
• Owens, A. Nevell. Formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Nineteenth Century: Rhetoric of Identification (2014)
• Raboteau, Albert. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (1978)
• Raboteau, Albert. African American-Religion (1999) 145pp online basic introduction
• Raboteau, Albert J. Canaan land: A religious history of African Americans (2001).
• Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2005)
• Sobel, M. Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1979)
• Spencer, Jon Michael. Black hymnody: a hymnological history of the African-American church (1992)
• Wills, David W. and Richard Newman, eds. Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission from the Revolution to Reconstruction (1982)
• Yong, Amos, and Estrelda Y. Alexander. Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (2012)

Historiography

• Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion (2008); traces ideas about Black religion from the antebellum period to 1950
• Frey, Sylvia R. "The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau," Slavery & Abolition (2008) 29#1 pp 83-110
• Fulop, Timothy Earl, and Albert J. Raboteau, eds. African-American religion: interpretive essays in history and culture (1997)
• Vaughn, Steve. "Making Jesus black: the historiographical debate on the roots of African-American Christianity." Journal of Negro History (1997): 25-41. in JSTOR

Primary sources

• Sernett, Milton C, ed. Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Duke University Press, 1985)
• West, Cornel, and Eddie S. Glaude, eds. African American religious thought: An anthology (2003).