Religion

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Religion

Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, wrote in 1939: "A definitive history of the Negro Church … would leave practically no phase of the history of the Negro in America untouched." Understanding African-American religion—or more accurately, the religious history of peoples of African descent in North America—is crucial for any rounded view of the African-American experience. Religion is often inseparable from culture, as was the case in traditional Africa, and encompasses more than institutional expressions. B. B. King once said that he felt closest to God when he was singing the blues, and African-American art, dance, and literature incorporate and reflect symbols, values, and themes. This essay will focus primarily on some of the principal issues, institutional and intellectual developments, and periods in the study of African-American religious history and culture.

A guiding principle for understanding this topic is that African-American religion is not simply an extension or form of Euro-American Christianity. Early historical work on African-American religion, such as that of Carter G. Woodson on "the Negro Church," focused almost exclusively on the institutional history of Protestantism. Yet to view African-American religious history as merely another chapter in the expansion of European Christianity would be to ignore the special circumstances of the religious pilgrimage of African Americans and gloss over the impact of other religious traditions.

A second guiding principle is that African-American religion is an evolving phenomenon that has taken shape over three centuries of slavery and that has continued to develop since the late nineteenth century. Today African-American religion takes on a variety of expressions, institutional and intellectual, creative and mundane, yet always acknowledging the past, while addressing the present and envisioning the future.

A final guiding principle is the fact that African-American religion is not monolithic. The differences within African-American religious culture are as important as the similarities. The religious outlook of someone of African descent in the Low Country of Carolina and Georgia about 1710, before the impact of the Great Awakening, might understandably be different from that of someone subject to the religious instruction of a white Presbyterian clergyman active in organized plantation missions after 1829. The religious profiles of a member of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1880, a communicant of St. Cyprian's Roman Catholic Church in Chicago in 1924, of Zion Baptist Church in rural Mississippi in 1954, and of the Pentecostal C. H. Mason Temple in Memphis today will have significant differences. Generalizations about African-American religion must account for changes over time, including changing demographics and geographic variables.

Indeed, regional geography is an important qualifying factor in understanding the uniqueness of the African-American religious experience in the United States. Vaudou in Haiti, the Trinidadian cult of Shango, the practices of Santería in Cuba, and the Candomblé rituals found in Brazil exemplify a high degree of syncretism, or perhaps better what James Noel calls "creolization," between West African traditions and Euro-Christian, principally Roman Catholic, culture. In contrast, Africans who were brought or born into the predominantly British environment of North America were more likely to adapt or remodel their religious beliefs and practices in terms of the prevailing regional religious culture—low church Protestant Evangelicalism. Except for the Sea Islands of the Georgia coast, and a few other places where African slaves were isolated from the dominant white society, the children and grandchildren of those who survived the ordeal of the Middle Passage created a new syncretic religious worldview in America.

Slave Religion

Most Africans who were brought into the colonies of British North America originated from the coast and interior of West and West Central Africa. Approximately 60 percent of the slaves imported into the territory later known as the United States arrived between 1720 and 1780. Legal United States involvement in the international slave trade ended in 1808. Unlike what occurred in much of the Americas, the growth of the slave population in the United States, particularly in the American South, was by natural increase. The end of the slave trade did little to retard the increase of this population. In fact, in 1825 the United States had approximately 36 percent (1,750,000) of the slaves in the Americas, despite the dramatic increase in the arrival of new imports. For many of these individuals, knowledge of Africa was acquired indirectly and was only one of many cultural influences. Therefore, an understanding of the formative influences on the religious experience of African-American slaves, while recognizing the importance of the African cultural base, must take into account the New World cultural experience.

Traditional African languages had no single word for religion—religion was synonymous with a way of life. The importation of Africans into the Americas marked a transference of African ways of perceiving and responding to the spirit world, but just how strongly African influences or Africanisms survived is subject to debate. Proponents of the retention of African beliefs and practices, such as Melville Herskovits, Lawrence Levine, Sterling Stuckey, and Albert J. Raboteau point to spirit possession, musical forms, dance patterns such as the "ring shout," mounded-grave decorations, conjuring practices, and the identification of African divinities with specific saints in Roman Catholic folk piety as evidence of the survival of African traditional religion in the New World. The slaves' preference for the baptismal ritual of total immersion ("river baptisms") is often cited as an especially strong link with the West African river cults.

Other scholars, such as the early Herskovitz, E. Franklin Frazier, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Robert E. Park, have taken the view that traditional African beliefs and practices gradually weakened and in some cases died as the result of the complex interplay of forced acculturation, voluntary adaptation, and assimilation. The terrors of the Middle Passage called into question the omnipotence of the African gods and the ability of the ancestors to come to the aid of the distressed. Dealers in slaves intentionally broke up families and kinship groups and sought to create cultural anomie and linguistic confusion among the new arrivals. Slave buyers shunned the purchase of individuals who had operated as religious specialists in Africa and waged a destructive campaign against all religious practices, including the use of ritual drums that might serve as the focal point for the reconstruction of traditional African social groups on the plantations.

A third group of scholars navigate the complex issue of African influences by interpreting African-American religion as a modern phenomenon that emerges from the encounter of African slaves with European slave traders and slave holders. Charles Long, a historian of religion and the preeminent proponent of this view, maintains that African-American religion is black people's collective awareness of their own autonomy and experience of a divine other, not just a version of Christianity or any other faith tradition. This communal experience is also not confined to institutions. It is a way of being, a perspective on life that allows African Americans to liberate themselves from the oppression of Euro-Americans and to seek new and authentic expressions of human consciousness and community that take into account their value and origins. What is specifically African in African-American religion, then, is a religious consciousness that emerged out of the encounter of African slaves with Europeans.

The Christianity of Europeans is the faith tradition with which African Americans are most associated. African slaves in the Americas did not receive intensive indoctrination in Christianity for several generations. Europeans at first doubted that Africans had souls worth saving, and owners of slaves in the English colonies initially opposed the introduction of Christianity, not only because of lingering doubts about the religious capacity of the African but also because of fears that offering baptism to Africans implied spiritual equality and might spark resistance. European missionaries, such as those of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, who sponsored preaching among Africans in the Carolinas, persisted, and over time converts were made. The conflict between proponents of chattel slavery and the church diminished after the mid-1600s, when new laws partially relieved owners' anxieties by stating that baptism did not alter the civil estate of a slave. By 1706 at least six colonies had legislation stipulating that baptism did not make any change in the slave's status "as to his bondage, or freedom."

In the New World environment, Africans adapted and transformed European language and religious beliefs and in the process created a new African-American identity. The southern-born children and grandchildren of the Africans who participated in the transatlantic passage had to find religious meaning and seek religious expression within the predominantly white Protestant evangelical environment. The outburst of religious revivals in the 1740s and again in the early 1800s helped dismantle the colonial establishment of Anglicanism in the South and Congregationalism in New England and proved attractive to many African Americans, slave and free. Black converts and lower-class whites shared in the evangelical emphasis on conviction of sin, individual salvation, ecstatic worship, and the recompense of heaven.

An African-American Christian population of significant size and, in some places, of surprising independence developed during and after the American Revolution. Most black Christians belonged to mixed congregations where the egalitarian legacy of the Great Revival lingered on, despite inroads made by white racism among evangelicals. Independent African-American preachers, such as the Rev. Andrew Bryan of the First African Church of Savannah, established in 1788, planted numerous congregations, mostly Baptist, until a frightened white South curbed the religious freedom of blacks in the wake of the Denmark Vesey insurrection of 1822 and that led by Nat Turner in 1831. No reliable figures exist for the number of African Americans who became Christians during the era of the pioneer black preachers, but it is important to acknowledge that this experience of relative religious independence and a shared evangelical ethos provided a benchmark by which blacks could judge later efforts to use Christianity as a means of social control.

Although growing numbers of blacks, slave and free, had embraced Christianity by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the camp meetings and other mechanisms used by the evangelical preachers were limited in scope. In some places, such as among the Gullah peoples of the Sea Island district of South Carolina, and in Louisiana, where Roman Catholicism and West Indian-derived practices of voodoo intermixed, religious syncretism or creolization was so strong as to violate mainstream Christian sensibilities. Even in parts of the South, where free blacks and whites experienced common fellowship in local churches, little effort was made to reach the plantation slave.

Although many slave owners were made uneasy by some of the radically egalitarian implications of Christianity, many became convinced that Christianity, properly catechized, could make slaves more docile. In 1829, the Reverend William Capers appealed to plantation owners in South Carolina to allow him to go to their slaves. Supporters of the plantation missions were motivated by the biblical mandate to share the gospel, but they also wanted to rid the slaves of their "heathen" ways, and, as Capers argued, improve plantation efficiency on the premise that a Christian slave would be more obedient.

Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831 cast doubt on Capers's assertion, but gradually many in the white South were won over to the notion that "lessons on salvation and lessons on duty" were compatible and that the South had a divine mandate to convert and civilize the "children of Ham"—as Africans were often called because of the pro-slavery interpretation of the story told in Genesis 9. When abolitionists chastised southerners for the sin of slavery, the apologists of "the peculiar institution" pointed to plantation missions as evidence of their fulfillment of the Christian duty to civilize and convert and of the legitimacy of their custodial rule over "the darker race."

Just how strongly, if at all, African-American slaves internalized the religious model placed before them by whites is a difficult question. Was the Christian slave successfully indoctrinated with the notion that piety and obedience were inseparable? Or did Christianity, as expressed in the secret or "hush arbor" meetings of slaves, in their prayers and in their songs (spirituals), offer a basis from which both individual psychological independence and organized resistance could spring forth? Frederick Douglass reported that he observed fellow slaves who scoffed at the religious pretensions of whites; personally he found hypocrisy at the root of slaveholding Christianity, which he termed "bad, corrupt, and wicked." But he thought of the Christianity of Christ as impartial and "good, pure, and holy." If we are to judge by the testimony of ex-slaves, many of whom eagerly sought to read the Bible for themselves once freedom came, they had successfully appropriated Christianity in order to give meaning to their lives and cope with systematic efforts to deny their humanity. Estimates are that one in seven of the adult slaves belonged to an organized church, primarily Baptist or Methodist, by the time of the Civil War, and many more had been exposed to the influence of Christianity.

The religious outlook of the African-American slave was a complex and highly creative adaptation of European Christianity and African traditional religion to everyday needs. A few rejected Christianity altogether and retained Islam or their traditional African religion, or became persistent skeptics. Many slaves originally sought the protection and power of the conjurer, but after a period of religious instruction and Christian baptism, many came to the conclusion that conjuration was the work of the devil. Although masters attempted to enforce discipline through the use of Christianity, the slaves heard the sermons preached in the plantation chapels with a critical ear, sorted out the wheat from the chaff, and constructed a religious story in which they were the chosen of God. Although they might have, as the spirituals reflect, trouble and sorrow in this world, they could hope for the joys of heaven where "de' bottom rail become de' top rail."

Labeled as "otherworldly" and "compensatory," this use of Christianity has been judged dysfunctional by those who emphasize the need for radical political and social transformation. Discussed in the manner of Gary Marx and others, the "opiate-versus-inspiration debate," as it is sometimes referred to, forces our view of the religious culture of the African-American slave into opposing and limiting channels. By recognizing the multiple dimensions of the sacred cosmos operative in the slave quarters and "hush-arbors," we come close to understanding what the African-American slaves meant when they spoke of their beliefs in God as helping them to "keep on keeping on." They testified that they had a "home in glory land" and that no earthly master could close them out of God's house. As historian John Boles wrote, "There was a fateful ambiguity at the heart of the slave response to Christianity, and the fervent rebel, and the passive, long-suffering servant were equally authentic expressions of black religion." Once they had been "killed dead" in the spirit and were reborn, African-American Christian slaves became participants in another community than that which numbered them with cattle and cotton. This suggests Charles Long's view that African-American religion is black people's awareness of their own autonomy and experience of a divine other independent of whites.

Christianity in the Antebellum North

By focusing too exclusively on the South, we run the risk of missing important facets of the antebellum African-American religious experience. There were individual African-American Christians of note in the North, such as Lemuel Haynes, the first African American officially ordained to the Christian ministry and who served as pastor of white congregations in New England; Phillis Wheatley, who wrote religious verse read in both America and Europe; and Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, who counseled Christian endurance in the hope of heaven. Though few in number until after 1800, independent black churches were organized in the North. Separated from the bulk of the country's black population, African-American Christians in the North kept the plight of their sisters and brothers in chains in their prayers; supported causes such as temperance and education, so as not to provide the apologists for slavery with an argument that freedom would ruin the slave; served as Underground Railroad stations; and assisted in the cause of abolition. They organized voluntary associations to support educational endeavors and to care for widows and orphans, and they served as the focal points of black life in the northern city, where prejudice and discrimination were prevalent.

The northern religious landscape took on more definition with the formation of the first black denominations. Following the pattern of white Christians in the post-Revolutionary era, black Christians organized into denominations. Sometimes the struggle for denominational independence was a particularly dramatic one, as was the case with black Methodists in the Philadelphia area led by Richard Allen. A former slave and convert to Christianity, Allen was convinced that the plain and simple gospel as preached by the spiritual heirs of John Wesley, the English founder of Methodism, was best suited to the unlettered black. However, white authorities resisted when Allen and other Philadelphia black Methodists in the 1790s sought greater control over their own religious affairs by establishing their own church. Armed with a decision from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1816, to the effect that Allen and his coadjutors had a legal right to the church property and self-governance, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination was organized in 1816. About six years later, black Methodists in New York City likewise achieved denominational independence under the banner of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. As suggested by the label "Methodist," both groups replicated much of white Methodist ritual, doctrine, and polity while seeking to liberate themselves from the prejudicial control of white Methodists.

By the Civil War, the AME church had about twenty thousand members and had planted new missions as far west as California. Urged on by the zealous efforts of Daniel Alexander Payne, the AME church established its first institution of higher education, Wilberforce College (now Wilberforce University) and theological school, Payne Seminary, at Xenia, Ohio. The AME Zion denomination numbered about five thousand and would not expand significantly beyond the Northeast until after the Civil War, when the denomination's representatives worked aggressively among the freedmen. Eventually the denomination transferred most of its central operations to North Carolina, where it established a church newspaper and publishing house, and at Livingstone College in Salisbury.

The earliest separate black Baptist congregations appeared in northern cities in the early 1800s. Blacks customarily worshiped with white Baptists, but the "Negro Pew" was tolerated and eventually blacks sought to organize their own congregations. In 1805, Thomas Paul became the first pastor of the First African (or Joy Street) Baptist Church of Boston, and in 1808 he assisted in the organization of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. Independent black Baptist congregations eventually emerged in most northern cities, but the traditional Baptist emphasis on local autonomy retarded the development of regional associations until the formation of the Providence Association in 1834 and the Union Association in 1836, both in Ohio, and the Wood River Association in 1839 in southwestern Illinois.

Sparked by interest in developing missions in Africa, black Baptists gradually moved toward more national organizations. The American Baptist Missionary Convention became the first such cooperative arrangement in 1840. In the decades after the Civil War, black Baptists debated whether or not to continue partnerships with northern white Baptists in foreign missions and the publication of religious literature. The nationalist or independent spirit finally triumphed in the formation of the first truly national black organization, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. Inc., in 1895. The cooperationists formed the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention in 1897.

Because of Baptist disunity during most of the nineteenth century, the African Methodist story tends to assume center stage in accounts of the institutional history of African-American religion. Better organized than the Baptists—and fortunate to have denominational historians such as Bishop Daniel A. Payne and Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner—the northern-based African Methodists dominate the documentary record. But statistics of denominational membership published by the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that black Baptists outnumbered black Methodists as the century drew to a close. This was largely due to expansion in the South after Emancipation when the ex-slaves, though heavily recruited by agents of the northern-based denominations, black and white, elected to form new congregations in which they could hear preachers familiar with the religious style found in the antebellum plantation congregations.

Civil War to World War II

When slaves deserted their masters during the Civil War or became contraband as Union troops advanced on Southern soil, a new religious landscape began to emerge. Eager to read the Bible on their own and worship without white oversight, the freed slaves were convinced that their emancipation was tantamount to the deliverance of the Children of Israel from the pharaoh of Egypt. African-American Christians seized the moment and left the denominations of their former masters in large numbers. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in 1870 at Jackson, Tennessee, and was comprised principally of former members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who did not desire to join the northern-based African Methodists. As if by spontaneous combustion, black Baptist congregations appeared in great numbers throughout the South. These Baptist churches and their Methodist counterparts in the small towns and rural areas represented the core religious culture of African Americans in the South between the Civil War and World War I. Heavily influenced by the folk practices of the "invisible institution" and often criticized for its demonstrative religious style—with emphasis on dramatic conversion experiences, emotional preaching and "testifying"—southern African-American religion developed its own internal dynamic. African-American churches in the North, with their educated ministers and more formal worship styles, developed differently. On the eve of World War I, therefore, two African-American religious cultures existed: one northern and urban, the other mostly southern and rural.

Despite the cultural differences between the northern and southern black religion, most observers agreed that the church was central to African-American life as the twentieth century dawned. "The Negro Church," Booker T. Washington wrote in 1909, "was the first institution to develop out of the life of the Negro masses and still retains the strongest hold upon them." "The Negro church of today," W. E. B. Du Bois had written six years earlier, "is the social center of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of the African character." An institution so central to African Americans could not escape internal discussion of the prevailing social and political issues raised in the larger society.

One of the most important issues concerned the role that women should play in male-dominated institutions such as the church, where the pulpit had been traditionally defined as "men's space" and the pew as "women's place." The AME Zion church authorized the ordination of women in the 1890s, the AME church in 1948, and the CME church in 1954. Appealing to the principle of congregational autonomy, the major black Baptist conventions avoided legislating policy on the ordination of women. Conservative attitudes at the congregational level, where gender bias among the male clergy is strong, has proved to be an obstacle to many women who have sought ordination. The Church of God in Christ, the largest black Pentecostal body, prohibits the ordination of women.

Historically, women have been in the majority in the mainline black denominations, yet men have dominated the leadership. Women serve as "mothers of the church," are active in missionary societies, educational efforts, and a wide variety of charitable causes, and serve local congregations in numerous capacities, such as teachers, stewardesses, and deaconesses. Yet men hold denominational offices and monopolize the clergy rosters to a greater degree than in the more liberal white Protestant churches. Women who wish to exercise the gift of the spirit have had to operate as independent evangelists, such as Jarena Lee did after an originally futile appeal to Richard Allen and

the African Methodists in the early 1800s. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Rebecca Cox Jackson (who eventually joined the Shakers) possessed spiritual gifts that the established black denominations did not formally recognize. Amanda Berry Smith left the AME Church in order to exercise her ministry more freely, joined the Holiness Movement, and thereby served as a precursor for the many women who found the freedom to develop their own ministries within the orbit of the burgeoning Pentecostal and Holiness movement, which flourished in the "sanctified" storefronts of the urban North. For example, Elder Lucy Smith (1874–1952) founded All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago and conducted a multidimensional ministry that dealt with the material as well as the spiritual needs of her members.

African-American women such as Maria W. Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Ida Wells-Barnett channeled their gifts for ministry into social justice causes outside of the male-dominated churches. Stewart and especially Watkins Harper became well known in their time as champions of abolition, temperance, the civil rights of African Americans and women, and the education of African-American children. In the late nineteenth century, Wells-Barnett championed these causes, and also became well known for her anti-lynching campaign. Although working independently of established black churches, these women nevertheless remained affiliated with them, particularly African Methodism. Watkins Harper, whom Carla Peterson calls a "poet-preacher," published her poetry, stories, and essays in the major papers of the AME church throughout her long career.

The majority of reform- and ministerially-minded black women, however, formed auxiliary organizations in churches that maintained and supported the financial and spiritual health of these institutions. For example, the Women's Parent Mite Missionary Society of the AME Church, founded in 1874, supported new churches in the western United States and in South Africa. Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner, an active member of this group whose son was active in AME missions in South Africa, and whose husband was Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, witnessed to the efforts of these churchwomen in an 1896 article in the A. M. E. Church Review. Black Baptist women also founded organizations that served as the "backbone" of their churches and communities. Baptist women led by Nannie Helen Burroughs formed the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention in 1900, and operated the National School for Girls in Washington.

Many of these church women—AME, Baptist, and otherwise—were also active in the club movement, which stressed self-help, charitable, and civic work, and served as a focal point for women's independent identity. Beset by racism in the larger society and confronted by patriarchal attitudes within their denominations, African-American churchwomen had to confront multiple challenges. They played an especially important role in bridging the gap between church work as traditionally defined and secular reform activity. The demands upon them intensified with the outbreak of World War I.

The centrality of women in the local congregation became all the more apparent because of external social forces in the flight from field to factory once the call for labor went out from the North. After 1910, in the early years of the Great Migration, males, particularly young males, went north lured by the promise of better jobs. Women and the young were left to carry on congregational life. Urbanization proved to be no panacea. Indeed, in poor urban areas, church adherence was increasingly the sphere of women and children. This is especially true of the independent churches, known as "storefronts." In an extensive study done in the 1980s, researchers found that in 2,150 black churches, of various denominations, women outnumbered men by a factor of 2.5 to 1. Some observers have spoken of the "feminization of the black church" because of the relative absence of males, especially young males, in urban congregations.

The urbanization of African-American religion also precipitated an institutional crisis in the existing black churches. In 1910 nearly 90 percent of the nation's black population lived in the South, mostly in rural regions and small towns. Since the end of the Civil War, the church had assumed a dominant position in the life of southern blacks, whose institutional development in other areas was restricted by racial apartheid. By default, then, the churches served multiple purposes—worship, education, recreation, and socialization. Northern black leaders, as well as some Southern leaders (e.g., Booker T. Washington) pointed to such problems as overchurching, undereducated ministers, pastors with multiple charges, congregations too small to maintain programs and property, and too little emphasis on the social and political problems of the day. Carter G. Woodson referred to rural churches as "mystic shrines" while writing approvingly of northern urban churches as progressive centers of "social uplift." This debate over the mission of the black church was heightened by the Great Migration because it placed new demands upon existing denominational and local church resources and programs.

The population shift put severe strains upon existing denominational structures. Home missionary boards lacked adequate resources to cope with the need in the North, and congregations in the South were left depleted and deserted. Competition among the three major black Methodist bodies prevented a cooperative effort in addressing the needs of the migrants. The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., underwent a contentious division in 1915, which resulted in the formation of a rival body, the National Baptist Convention of America Unincorporated, later named National Baptist Convention of America in 1916. The internecine war continued for years, draining away critically needed resources. The secretary of the Home Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., reported in 1921: "We have quite a number of destitute fields both North and South and in many cases no opportunity for religious worship."

The regional shift in America's black population portended difficulties because as World War I began the black denominations were heavily weighted to the South. In 1916 the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies credited the National Baptists with 2,939,579 members, 89 percent of whom were in the South. The AME Church had 548,355 members and was 81.2 percent southern. The AME Zion Church was 84.6 percent southern with a total membership of 257,169. The CME Church, composed principally of the descendants of ex-slaves, was 95.5 percent southern and 245,749 members strong. None of the Pentecostal or Holiness bodies, which became so important in the urban North after the Great Migration, receive recognition in the 1916 religious census.

In addition to placing strains upon ecclesiastical structures inherited from the nineteenth century and oriented primarily toward the small town and rural church, urbanization offered African Americans new religious options. Baptist and Methodist preachers now had to compete with the agents of the Pentecostal and Holiness churches. These churches put great emphasis on an intense personal experience of the Holy Spirit. The Church of God in Christ, led by Charles Harrison Mason, held its first Pentecostal general assembly in 1907. Having started as a rural church in Mississippi, the denomination grew to become a fixture in the northern city. Ill at ease in the more formal worship services of the established northern churches, many migrants organized prayer bands, started house churches, or moved into the storefronts where speaking in tongues (sometimes referred to as the practice of glossolalia) received the blessing of the Pentecostals. The Church of Christ (Holiness), U.S.A., under the leader-ship of Elder C. P. Jones, likewise expanded as a result of the burgeoning black populations of urban industrial America. Other Holiness and Pentecostal churches were founded by denominationally independent religious entrepreneurs who recognized that the migrants from the South desired something that the northern black middle class churches did not offer.

Many of the migrants wanted religious environments that reminded them of their churches back home, where they were known by and part of an extended family. The ecstatic worship services and musical styles favored by the Pentecostal and Holiness preachers caught the attention of these ex-southerners. When hard times befell them in the North, migrants sought out spiritual havens in the urban wilderness. Holiness and Pentecostal churches multiplied everywhere, and existing Baptist and Methodist churches split or sponsored daughter congregations as the migrant population swelled. On occasion, northern black Christians criticized their "brothers and sisters" from the South for falling short of northern cultural expectations and the existing class norms. In turn, migrants shunned some northern black churches, where the elaborate and elegant services made them feel out of place. Some fell away from organized religion all together. Others responded to their crisis of faith in the city by transplanting churches from the South led by the pastors who had followed them northward.

The tension between the two cultural streams that came together after the beginning of World War I is illustrated by the reluctance of the older African-American congregations in Chicago to accept gospel music. Gospel music was popularized by Thomas Dorsey, the "father of gospel music," who joined Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago in 1921. Unlike the purveyors of commercialized gospel today, early gospel music was church centered. Yet as Mahalia Jackson, the best-known singer of gospel, learned while growing up in New Orleans, the musical distance between the honky-tonk and a Holiness revival with its beating and tambourine shaking is not that great. Dorsey, building on the work of predecessors such as Charles Albert Tindley, was the principal force behind the introduction of blueslike gospel songs into the northern black churches. About 1930, observers of the Chicago scene reported that "Negro churches, particularly the storefront congregations, the Sanctified groups and the shouting Baptists, were swaying and jumping as never before. Mighty rhythms rocked the churches. A wave of fresh rapture came over the people." Jackson earned worldwide acclamation for her solo renditions of gospel classics, and the pioneering touring groups such as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi helped make gospel so popular that today it is rare to find a black church, of whatever denomination or class composition, that closes its doors to the gospel sound.

Religious diversity, even dissonance, resonated from the large, densely crowded, black urban centers after World War I. After examining data from the 1926 Federal Census of Religious Bodies, Miles Mark Fisher exclaimed: "Almost in every center, particularly urban, is some unorthodox religious group which makes a definite appeal to Negroes." The Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey discouraged talk of founding a new church, but he and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (1918–1927) had many followers who sought collective redemption in the back-to-Africa ideology. There were also some supporters, such as George Alexander McGuire, the founder of the African Orthodox Church, who did initiate Garveyite-inspired demonstrations. The UNIA collapsed after the deportation of its "Black Moses" in 1927, but other charismatic personalities came forward offering often exotic visions of heaven on earth. Father Divine set up a series of Peace Missions during the Great Depression, offering his devotees the unusual mix of "God" in the flesh and a refuge from society's problems. Scores of religious entrepreneurs opened shop in the black ghettos, where they competed with the mainline denominations. Frequently referred to as cults and sects, the groups led by these new messiahs often died when their founders did, but some managed to survive under different leadership, as, for example, the one led by Daddy Grace (the United House of Prayer for All People). Representatives of the mainline churches frequently decried the proliferation of these alternative groups, arguing, as the Baptist Miles Mark Fisher did, that the principal message of the cults and sects was "Let us prey," not "Let us pray."

The appearance on urban street corners of black adherents of Islam and Judaism added to the perception that African-American religion was undergoing a radical reorientation in the interwar period at the expense of the historic black denominations. The first black Jewish group recognized by the federal religious census was founded in 1896 by William S. Crowdy, a Santa Fe Railroad cook, in Lawrence, Kansas. African Americans wearing the yarmulke and speaking Yiddish came to the attention of a wider public in the 1920s. Located primarily in the boroughs of New York City, these teachers of black Hebraism appropriated and adapted the rituals and teachings of Orthodox Judaism. Though never large in number, the followers of Rabbi Arnold Ford and other proponents of Black Judaism generated a great deal of interest among the curious and the skeptical.

Islam was not entirely unheard of among African Americans before the mysterious figure of Wallace D. Fard appeared in the "Paradise Valley" of Detroit in 1930 to wake up the sleeping "Lost-Found Nation of Islam." There is increasing evidence that a small but not insignificant number of enslaved Africans brought knowledge of the Qur'an and Islamic law to North America. But modern Islam among African Americans begins with the career of Noble Drew Ali, a native of North Carolina and founder of Moorish Science in Newark, New Jersey, about 1913. However, the man who most popularized Islam for African Americans was the one-time disciple of Wallace Fard, Elijah Muhammad, who capitalized on the interest of urbanized blacks in the religiously exotic. Himself a migrant from Georgia, Muhammad (formerly Elijah Poole) assumed leadership of the Nation of Islam after Fard's disappearance in 1934, and moved its headquarters to Chicago. The Nation's version of Islam did not fare well under the scrutiny of orthodox scholars of the Qur'an, and eventually the sect broke into rival factions. Nevertheless, it has had a significant impact upon many African Americans, chiefly the young and angry like Malcolm X who believed that traditional black Christianity was a "pie-in-the-sky" religion.

Attention to the new religious options that appeared in black urban America during the period between World War I and World War II should not be at the expense of the story of the mainline black churches. Stimulated by the crisis brought about by the influx of thousands from the South, the established churches struggled with a redefinition of mission during these decades. Richard R. Wright, Jr., examined the record of black church involvement within the public sphere in 1907 and concluded that only a few churches had "attacked the problems of real city Negroes." His own work in Chicago's Institutional Church and Social Settlement, founded by Reverdy Ransom, and later at Chicago's Trinity Mission and Culture Center, which Wright organized in 1905, convinced Wright that black churches needed a more compelling definition of urban mission than presently at hand. Prior to World War I outreach primarily involved mission and charity work with the intent of recruiting new members. As Wright and Ransom discovered for themselves, pastors who addressed contemporary social problems born of urban and industrial growth were deemed too radical by denominational officials.

Most black preachers, urban and rural, still thought of sin and salvation in individualistic terms. The black denominations lagged behind their white counterparts in adopting the theological message of the social gospel movement with its focus upon the problems of urban America. Beginning with the era of the Great Migration, however, many more black churches incorporated programs into their understanding of "church work" that went beyond the traditional emphasis on praying and preaching. They assisted with needs in housing, employment, education, recreation, and health care. The instrumentalist use of the church to better the community is today so widely accepted that black clergy or congregations who show no interest in everyday problems have little appeal or credibility among African Americans.

Although black denominations were spared the bitter internecine battles that erupted in the 1920s between the white fundamentalists and modernists over such issues as the interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis, their efforts to merge have failed. Concerned about institutional inefficiency and lost opportunities to influence the larger society and motivated by the ideal that Christ's church be one, representatives of the three principal branches of black Methodism began meetings in 1915 to discuss the possibility of merger. But leaders of the CME church (formerly the Colored Methodist Episcopal church and since 1954 the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church), balked at union because of fears of being dominated by the two larger northern black Methodist bodies: the AME and the AME Zion churches. Division among black Methodists was widened by the segregation of 315,000 in the Central Jurisdiction, a nongeographical entity, of the predominantly white United Methodist Church in 1939 after the merger of the northern and southern branches of Methodism (the segregated structure was abolished in the 1960s). Black Baptists likewise have been unable to heal the divisions within their ranks. The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., remains the largest of all black church connections, claiming about 7.5 million members and 30,000 local churches in the late 1980s.

The contemporary black Baptist story is still best told in terms of the local congregation. Ministerial alliances at the local level have fostered interdenominational cooperation where there has been sufficient need for common action. In many congregations, the minister is still the dominant personality. Critics have argued that the domineering role played by the pastor in black congregations has retarded the development of lay leadership. The preeminence of the black minister in African-American religious culture has historical roots. Because of the class and caste attitudes of whites in the South, the ministry remained one of the few professions accessible to blacks. Even in the North, where political boundaries were defined by patterns of residential segregation and black political participation was restricted, black ministers were called upon to speak for their community before local authorities. Participation in electoral and protest politics has engaged the energies of many contemporary black clergy, but they have had to divide their time between their civic roles and their pastoral roles.

Civil Rights Era to the Present

The internal life of African-American churches probably escaped the attention of most of white America until the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began to catch the eye and ear of the news media. Rooted deep in the black Baptist tradition, King was schooled in the preaching tradition of the black church of the South. While doing advanced theological training in the North, he became proficient in the major currents of thought among liberal, socially aware Protestants. This made it possible for him to appeal to the conscience of white America during the civil rights struggle and to enlist the aid of allies from the more liberal white denominations. Yet the grassroots participation of thousands of black churchgoers who marched and sang and prayed transformed King's protest of racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, into a mass movement. From the vantage point of these people of faith, a civil rights march was as much a religious crusade as a social movement. While the cause of civil rights united black religious leaders across denominational lines and cemented alliances with progressive forces in the predominantly white Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities, there were disharmonious chords. The Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, who served as president of the National Baptist Convention from 1953 to 1982, resisted the attempt of King and others to move the largest Protestant denomination in the world into activist or protest politics. As a result, King, with the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Gardner C. Taylor, and others, formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961 under the motto: "Unity, service, fellowship, peace."

One of the most important influences on King's thought and activism was Howard Thurman, an African-American churchman of major stature in his own right. A theologian, mystic, professor, and founder of the first interracial church in the United States, Thurman knew King informally through his father. Like many others in the civil rights movement, though, King was compelled by Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited, a small but powerful book that Thurman wrote in the late 1940s in the wake of his meeting with Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The civil rights movement, of course, was not confined to institutional church circles. Nor are its religious dimensions fully measured by focusing, for example, on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by King. Organizations with a more secular orientation, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), also had crucial roles to play. But even the members of SNCC were animated by a vision of the grassroots black church, especially in the South, an institution that propelled the crusade that eventually broke down the barriers of legalized segregation. While a form of religious sectarianism among many African Americans has led to withdrawal and isolation from the public sphere, orthodox or mainline black churches have for the most part been instrumental in bringing America closer to Dr. King's dream of the "beloved community."

A dramatic scenario for the re-envisioning of America unfolded in the decade of the 1960s, when the call for Black Power was heard. Originating among young radicals, many of whom were estranged from the traditional black church, the largely secular Black Power movement quickly drew a theological response. It came first from individuals such as James Cone, who were situated in academic environments, but it eventually engaged the thinking of denominational representatives. Their statements revealed both agreement with the diagnosis of the wrongs of American society as portrayed by advocates of Black Power, but also some uneasiness regarding the means necessary to achieve a just society. King had taught that nonviolence was ethically essential given the witness of the New Testament. During the civil rights crusade, local churches served as training grounds in nonviolent resistance. In contrast, the more strident advocates of Black Power carried weapons and, rhetorically at least, endorsed their use in conflicts with the police and others in authority. Steeped in the traditional Christian doctrine that the use of violence is a betrayal of the ethics of Jesus, most black Christians remained skeptical of the means the militants justified.

Nevertheless, the Black Power advocates made a lasting impact on black churches. By raising cultural awareness, black nationalists—as Garvey had done in the 1920s and earlier back-to-Africa proponents such as Bishop Henry M. Turner of the AME church did in the 1880s—stimulated interest in and debate over the essential question of "how black is black religion?" Black Muslims also played a significant role in this challenge to black Christian churches. African-American clergy in the predominantly white Protestant groups organized caucuses in which they examined their historic and contemporary relationship with their host denominations. This analysis led to demands for representation in the higher echelons of institutional life, for more black clergy, and for the incorporation of distinctively African-American religious styles in worship. Black Roman Catholics also experienced a renaissance of pride in "blackness," variously defined. Representations of a Black Jesus appeared in Roman Catholic sanctuaries, and the refrains of gospel music could be heard during Mass sung in English following the reforms of Vatican II (1963–1965). In other religious traditions such as the Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Lutheran, African Americans also pressed for a greater appreciation of the rich African and African-American religious heritage.

Womanism is one of the most important intellectual and activist traditions of the black Christian churches to emerge from the civil rights, black theology, and women's movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the late 1980s Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Geneva Cannon, Delores Williams, and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, some of the major figures of this black feminist movement, confronted the paternalism of the black churches, the racism of white feminist theologians, and the sexism, racism, and classism of American society at large. Recognizing their roots in the struggles of generations of black women, and taking their name from an expression in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, they identify themselves as thinkers, teachers, activists, and preachers with a commitment to the well being of African-American women, men, and children. These pioneering women have initiated a powerful and growing movement in seminaries and divinity schools throughout the United States. By training both male and female ministers to think more holistically, they have made an impact—however modest—on both black and white denominations.

One of the most prominent and successful ministers in this tradition is the Reverend Vashti Murphy McKenzie. A graduate of Howard University's divinity school and a member of a prominent black Baltimore family, McKenzie is the first black woman preacher to speak at the democratic national convention. She is one of a few female ministers to lead a large AME congregation, and more important, one of the few black women to be appointed to the office of bishop in the AME church. McKenzie is also a much sought-after speaker.

For all of the gains of womanists such as McKenzie, Grant, Cannon, and others—including being part of the leadership of mainline African-American churches, sitting on the faculty of major seminaries and divinity schools, heading venerable professional organizations such as the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and sitting on the boards of powerful educational organizations such as the Association of Theological Schools and the Fund for Theological Education, African-American women still fight for recognition in black churches. Obtaining such recognition means getting congregants to revise their sense of a male, preacher-centered culture.

At the core of the complex religious pilgrimage of peoples of African descent in America is the importance of the local congregation of believers who celebrate together the rites of passage of its members from baptism to Christian burial. Most black churches, however, emphasize preaching over the sacraments, in contrast to liturgical traditions such as Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. The spoken word, whether in sermon or song, is at the core of black worship, and the male preacher remains the embodiment of the word. Indeed, the roster of celebrated black preachers is long. The Rev. C. L. Franklin of Detroit is but one example. Called "the most imitated soul preacher in history" by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Franklin shepherded more than ten thousand members of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church at the height of his popularity. He carried the sermon to an art form, was heard on the radio by a large audience, and sold millions of records.

In spite of their paternalism, black churches historically have served as the centers of African-American life and identity. Benjamin Mays, the distinguished educator in Atlanta and mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote of the church of his youth in rural South Carolina: "Old Mount Zion was an important institution in my community. Negroes had nowhere to go but to church. They went there to worship, to hear the choir sing, to listen to the preacher, and to hear and see the people shout. The young people went to Mount Zion to socialize, or simply to stand around and talk. It was a place of worship and a social center as well. There was no other place to go."

The black mainline denominations so central to the lives of persons like Benjamin Mays experienced a renewal in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that was largely spawned by a growing black middle class. Churches such as Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago under Jeremiah Wright reinterpreted the ongoing issues of civil justice and economic empowerment in terms appropriate to an African-American laity with college and graduate degrees, middle-class aspirations, and professional careers. This educated and upwardly mobile laity, also known as buppies, demanded an equally educated and professionalized ministry with graduate degrees from prestigious institutions such as the University of Chicago Divinity School. By the same token, this prosperous laity itself brought resources of its own to these churches. As Cheryl Gilkes and Beverly Hall point out, such churches, many of them large complexes or megachurches, have health and wellness programs, day care and fitness centers, job training, and men's, women's, and youth's programs staffed by qualified professionals from among the laity.

The nondenominational Word of Faith Movement, which exploded in the 1980s, and continues to thrive into the twenty-first century, also draws adherents from the black middle class. This movement, however, appeals to a larger cross section of African Americans, and preaches a theology of prosperity. According to its adherents, God wants his people to be prosperous, even wealthy. But in order for one to obtain material prosperity, one must have unwavering faith in God's promises and follow God's commands. While not exclusively an African-American phenomenon, blacks nevertheless constitute a large part of the leadership and the membership of these Word churches. Fred Price of South Central Los Angeles is one of the most prominent black ministers in this movement. Milmon Harrison notes that blacks are attracted to this movement because it foregrounds the material well-being that has always been a part of black religious traditions.

In spite of their differences, the Word of Faith churches and revitalized mainline churches share a common criticism. Critics contend that neither the revitalized mainline black denominations nor the Word of Faith churches are concerned about poor blacks. Both groups succumb to the lure of middle-class America and leave the poorest of the poor behind. Such critics often credit the Nation of Islam with being able to reach into the ranks of the youthful street gangs and to make converts among African Americans in the country's prisons. While there is some truth to their criticisms, they overlook the various street ministries sponsored by mainline black churches or independent evangelical preachers and the extensive community services such as "meals on wheels" programs, Head Start schools, and recreational facilities, found in most places where black churches are active.

The work that black churches do to meet the needs of African Americans often entails a kind of grassroots ecumenism. In his study of a group of small congregations in northern California, theologian and pastor James Noel noted that "it is quite common for members of a particular Marin City congregation to have members of their immediate or extended family represented in … other Marin City congregations. Consequently, when it comes to things like pastoral care, and even more self-conscious corporate efforts such as economic development, Marin City pastors [of different denominations] have been involved in 'an ecumenical team ministry' directed toward the community." This kind of collaborative effort and pooling of resources across denominational lines has always characterized black religious institutional life, and is even carried on in the academy, where, as Cheryl Gilkes rightly observes, African-American seminarians in field education placements regularly work across denominations. In professional organizations, African Americans of different denominations and faiths also collaborate with their Hispanic, Asian, and Euro-American colleagues. Examples of the latter are exemplified in anthologies such as Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens, edited by Katie Cannon, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Letty Russell, and The Ties That Bind, edited by Anthony Pinn and Benjamin Valentin.

Formal expressions of ecumenism on the order of Euro-Christian institutions, however, have been minimal. The major black denominations have indeed been involved in ecumenical agencies such as the National Council of Churches. But there exists no national organization made up exclusively of representatives of the black denominations that could work for a reduction in competition and redundancy at the local level, as well as speak more authoritatively on matters of public concern. The partially successful attempts at African-American ecumenism include: the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches (1934–early 1950s); the Black Power–oriented National Conference of Black Churchmen (1967–1973); the Congress of National Black Churches (1978–present). One of the most successful formal ecumenical efforts by the black church is the Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of six primarily black denominations at the Atlanta University Center.

However successful these ecumenical efforts might be, whether formal or informal, they do not diminish the fact that the needs and issues facing most black churches are often overwhelming. HIV/AIDS, troubles facing black youth, especially black males, women and welfare reform, and the like outstrip the resources of these institutions, and often exacerbate the churches' own inability to address the sexuality and gender issues at the core of many of these social ills. Recently, financial assistance has come from the conservative wing of the federal government. Only time will tell whether this kind of support will fuel the biblical conservatism dogging these churches and testing their fifty-year-old identity as grassroots civil-rights organizations. Robert Franklin, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Cornel West bring these matters to the fore and offer fresh assessments and challenges.

During the 1950s, when the crusade to break down the walls of prejudice and discrimination crested, some observers wondered what the fate of the black churches would be if racial assimilation replaced racial apartheid. Since the historic African-American denominations had originated in protest to the exclusionary policies prevalent among white Christians, so the argument went, the rationale for separate black religious institutions weakened as the predominantly white denominations became more egalitarian. That African-American religious institutions continue to expand some four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. trumpeted the call for a new day in the relationship between black and white America should signal that African-American religion has been more than a simple reaction to the religious experiences and practices of Americans of European descent. It stands as an enduring witness to the multicultural texture of the entire American experience.

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