Afro-Christianity II

In the continuing investigation into the originals and defining characteristics of the "Black Church" and Afro-Christianity in in the United States. I stumbled upon some thoughts by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, a researcher and academic on religion with a special focus on Af-Am religion.

By 1810 the slave trade to the United States had come to an end. With fewer migrants who had experienced Africa personally, these transformations allowed the myriad cultures and language groups of enslaved Africans to blend together, making way for the preservation and transmission of religious practices that were increasingly "African-American."

Beginning in the 1770s, increasing numbers of slaves converted to evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of God, a message that provided hope and sustenance to the slaves. They also encouraged worship in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even spirit-possession.

In the slave quarters, however, African Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called believers to "hush harbors" where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity. It was here that the spirituals, with their double meanings of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, developed and flourished; and here, too, that black preachers, those who believed that God had called them to speak his Word, polished their "chanted sermons," or rhythmic, intoned style of extemporaneous preaching. Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion, these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future.

When the Civil War finally brought freedom to previously enslaved peoples, the task of organizing religious communities was only one element of the larger need to create new lives--to reunite families, to find jobs, and to figure out what it would mean to live in the United States as citizens rather than property. For both Southern and Northern blacks, Emancipation promised a meeting between two African-American religious traditions that had moved far apart, in terms of both theology and ritual, and sociological transformation in the previous seventy years.

A long history of antislavery and political activity among Northern Black Protestants, White Quakers, and other religious and morally convicted White individuals. In a massive missionary effort, Northern black leaders such as Daniel A. Payne and Theophilus Gould Steward established missions to their Southern counterparts, resulting in the dynamic growth of independent black churches in the Southern states between 1865 and 1900. Within a decade the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) churches claimed Southern membership in the hundreds of thousands, far outstripping that of any other organizations. They were quickly joined in 1870 by a new Southern-based denomination, the Colored (now "Christian") Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by indigenous Southern black leaders. Finally, in 1894 black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention, an organization that is currently the largest black religious organization in the United States.

In many ways this missionary effort was enormously successful. It facilitated a remarkable increase in Southern black literacy (from 5% in 1870 to approximately 70% by 1900), and, as had been the case in the North, it promoted the rise of many African American leaders who worked well outside the sphere of the church in politics, education, and other professions. But it also created tensions between Northerners, who saw themselves in many respects as the superiors and mentors of their less fortunate Southern brethren, and Southerners, who had their own ideas about how to worship, work, and live. Not all ex-slaves welcomed the "help" of the Northerners, black or white, particularly because most Northern blacks (like whites) saw Southern black worship as hopelessly "heathen." Missionaries like Daniel Payne, an AME bishop, took it as their task to educate Southern blacks about what "true" Christianity looked like; they wanted to convince ex-slaves to give up any remnants of African practices (such as drumming, dancing, or moaning) and embrace a more sedate, intellectual and whitewashed style of religion. Educational differences played a role in this tension as well: Southern blacks, most of whom had been forbidden from learning to read, saw religion as a matter of oral tradition and immediate experience and emotion; Northerners, however, stressed that one could not truly be Christian unless one was able to read the Bible and understand the creeds and written literature that accompanied a more textually-oriented religious system.

Generally, poorer and more rural churches tended to cling more tenaciously to older customs, and to more experiential forms of worship, and since the vast majority of Southern blacks remained in rural areas, many of the traditions inherited from the "hush harbors" of slavery--including root work, chanted preaching, and particularly musical styles--remained a part of church life. In Southern cities, as the numbers of educated and middle-class African Americans grew, so too did the interest in a more codified and uniform religious experience like that of the North.

Meanwhile, African American religion in urban areas of the North was also being changed by the infusion of Southern Blacks who were migrating for opportunities. These churches provided the vital spiritual link that helped to establish a support structure and a taste of home for the many less educated Blacks that re-joined their relatives in the north. In truth, besides the established lower middle class Blacks, most Blacks in the north had little more opportunity than southern Blacks. However, they did understand trades, work, and a growing cash economy system forced upon Blacks by segregation and increasingly divisive governmental policies.