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. Historians generally agree that the religious life of Black Americans "forms the foundation of their community life." Before 1775 there was scattered evidence of organized religion among blacks in the American colonies. The Methodist and Baptist churches became much more active in the 1780s, and growth was quite rapid for the next 150 years until they covered a majority of the people. After Emancipation, Freedmen organized their own churches, chiefly Baptist, followed by Methodists. Other Protestant denominations, and Catholics, played smaller roles. By 1900 the Pentecostal and Holiness movements were important, and later the Jehovah Witnesses. The Nation of Islam added a Muslim factor in the 20th century. Powerful pastors often played prominent roles in politics, as typified by Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others.

Women in a Pentecostal worship service.

Colonial era

By the 1770s, no more than 1% of the blacks in America were connected to organized churches. The numbers grew rapidly after 1789. The Anglican Church had made a systematic effort to proselytize, especially in Virginia. and they spread information about Christianity, and the ability to read the Bible, without making many converts.

Some Africans brought traditional religious practices, especially regarding magic. No organized African religious practices appeared in the colonies, but there was a surreptitious or underground practice of magic. Scholars debate whether there are African elements in the area of Black religious music, which is distinct from traditional Anglo religious music, using dances, ring shouts and emphasizing emotion and repetition more intensely than European 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.

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 Baptist congregations contained as many as 25% slaves.

Ante-bellum South

Central to the growth of the Black Community was the Black church, usually the first community institution to be established. Starting in the early 1800s with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community. The Black church- was both an expression of community and unique African-American spirituality, and a reaction to discrimination. The church also served as neighborhood centers where free black people could celebrate their African heritage without intrusion by white detractors. The church also the center of education. Since the church was part of the community and wanted to provide education; they educated the freed and enslaved Blacks. Seeking autonomy, some blacks like Richard Allen (bishop) founded separate Black denominations.

Free blacks also established Black churches in the South before 1860. After the Great Awakening, many blacks joined the Baptist Church, which allowed for their participation, including roles as elders and preachers. For instance, First Baptist Church and Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia, both had organized congregations by 1800 and were the first Baptist churches in the city.

Raboteau describes a common style of black preaching first developed in the early nineteenth century, and common throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries:

The preacher begins calmly, speaking in conversational, if oratorical and occasionally grandiloquent, prose; he then gradually begins to speak more rapidly, excitedly, and to chant his words and time to a regular beat; finally, he reaches an emotional peak in which the chanted speech becomes tonal and merges with the singing, clapping, and shouting of the congregation.

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."

AME put a high premium on education. 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. By 1880, AME operated over 2,000 schools, chiefly in the South, with 155,000 students. For school houses they used church buildings; the ministers and their wives were the teachers; the congregations raised the money to keep schools operating at a time the segregated public schools were starved of funds.

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. It emphasized "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.

Baptists

Further information: Progressive National Baptist Convention

A large majority of Black Christians belong to Baptist churches. Baptist churches were locally controlled by the congregation, and selected their own ministers. They chose local men-- often quite young-- with a reputation for religiosity, preaching skill, and ability to touch the deepest emotions of the congregations. Few were well-educated until the twentieth century, when Bible Colleges became common. Until the mid twentieth century, few of them were paid; most were farmers or had other employment. They became spokesman for their communities, and were among the few Blacks in the South allowed to vote in Jim Crow days before 1965.

Raboteau describes a common style of black preaching first developed in the early nineteenth century, and common throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries:

The preacher begins calmly, speaking in conversational, if oratorical and occasionally grandiloquent, prose; he then gradually begins to speak more rapidly, excitedly, and to chant his words and time to a regular beat; finally, he reaches an emotional peak in which the chanted speech becomes tonal and merges with the singing, clapping, and shouting of the congregation.

National Baptist Convention

Main article: National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.

The National Baptist Convention was first organized in 1880 as the Foreign Mission Baptist Convention in Montgomery, Alabama. Its founders, including Elias Camp Morris, stressed the preaching of the gospel as an answer to the shortcomings of a segregated church. In 1895, Morris moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., as a merger of the Foreign Mission Convention, the American National Baptist Convention, and the Baptist National Education Convention. The National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., is the largest African-American religious organization.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was highly controversial in many black churches, where the minister preached spiritual salvation rather than political activism. The National Baptist Convention became deeply split. Its autocratic leader, Rev. Joseph H. Jackson had supported the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, but by 1960 he told his denomination they should not become involved in civil rights activism. Jackson was based in Chicago and was a close ally of Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Chicago Democratic machine against the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his aide the young Jesse Jackson, Jr. (no relation to Joseph Jackson). In the end, King led his activists out of the National Baptist Convention into their own rival group, the Progressive National Baptist Convention. It supported the extensive activism of the King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

See also

• Black church
• Black theology
• National Black Catholic Congress
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Further reading

• Brooks, Walter H. "The Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church." Journal of Negro History (1922) 7#1 pp: 11-22. in JSTOR
• 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
• Jackson, Joseph H. A Story of Christian Activism: The History of the National Baptist Convention, USA. Inc (Nashville: Townsend Press, 1980); official history
• Johnson, Paul E., ed. African-American Christianity: Essays in History (1994).
• Montgomery, William E. Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (1993)
• 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)
• Paris, Peter J. The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Fortress Press, 1985)
• 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).
• Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (2005) on the politics of the National Baptist Convention
• Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2005)
• Smith, R. Drew, ed. Long March ahead: African American churches and public policy in post-civil rights America (2004).
• Sobel, M. Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1979)
• Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History (1997)
• 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).