Spirituality

Black North American spirituality lies at one end of a topographic continuum, a continuum composed of African diaspora-and-homeland religions and cultures. At the other extreme lie the African homelands of black peoples forcibly relocated to the Americas during almost four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. The intermediate sectors of the continuum comprise other cultures of the African diaspora, intermediate because black cultures in South America and the Caribbean exhibit stronger continuity with African traditional religions. Most obvious are Yoruba continuities in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé.

In this schema the Atlantic world constitutes the best ethnographic and historical context for understanding the nature and development of African-American spirituality. Europe and Britain are components of this world, too, of course. A triangulation of the Atlantic, then, comprising Africa, the New World, and Europe, represents not only commercial exchanges inaugurated in the slave trade, but also multiple sources of new spiritual traditions.

A minimal set of categories for delineating black North American spirituality, in terms of its multifaceted secular and religious expressions, includes aesthetic, ecstatic, and iconographic or "iconic" features. Compare W. E. B. Du Bois's description of black religion as "the music, the frenzy, and the preacher." The disparate religious traditions involved are predominantly Christian (Protestant and some Catholic), but also Islamic and Hebraic, folk or indigenous, spiritualist and other sectarian traditions, and even neo-African. Some aesthetic features are common throughout the diaspora, while other ecstatic and iconic features are heightened in certain traditions and thus demarcate contrasting modes of spirituality.

Musical expression is so central that it provides paradigms of creativity for other domains of black culture (e.g., improvisation, call-and-response). "It is only in his music," James Baldwin declared, "that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story." That story has multiple "scores," Ralph Ellison has further disclosed: "Often we wanted to share both: the classics and jazz, the Charleston and the Irish reel, spirituals and the blues, the sacred and the profane" (Smith, 1989, pp. 387, 389). Indeed, the desire to link black America with cultural expressions from other sources sometimes transcends even ethnic oppression, and perennially revitalizes spiritual experience.

In addition, such bicultural proficiencies reflect a performance rule characterizing ritual and communication processes in the diaspora. "Style-switching" (Marks, 1974) is the musical alternation between codes that signify black or African cultural contents and codes indicating white or European contents. It can also signal ritual transitions to spirit possession and trance phenomena in both religious and secular contexts. A psychosocial or cognitive basis for this aesthetic feature of African-American spirituality is the "double consciousness" articulated by Du Bois's phenomenon: the intersubjective experience of being both African and American. To generalize: Modes of expression (oral or musical, literary or dramatic, religious or secular) can alternate between forms identified as Afro-American, or "black," and polarized forms identified as Euro-American, or "white."

Spirit possession and ecstatic phenomena typify black religious expression in the New World. Many observers attribute the prominence of ecstatic behaviors in ritual, worship, and everyday life to a common African heritage in which possession "was the height of worship—the supreme religious act" (Mitchell, 1975). Parallel Euro-Christian practices allowed this African predisposition to adapt to the predominantly Protestant ethos of North America through the revival traditions of white Baptists and Methodists. Thus, Albert Raboteau (1978) has described spirit possession as a "two-way bridge" that enabled black Americans to "pass over" from African to Christian ecstatic expression.

A similar claim connects European magical traditions to African-American thaumaturgy and pharmacopoeia (e.g., conjure, as discussed below). Finally, ecstatic phenomena occur in secular performance and ritualized group interactions involving political movements and social and entertainment events. For example, Henry Mitchell (1975) has suggested that possession and trance behavior occur covertly in jazz clubs with comparable cathartic and therapeutic effects. Ecstatic performances by black preachers and other orators are renowned, and bear shamanic commonalities with American revival preaching generally.

On the other hand, not all African-American spirituality is ecstatic in character. Rastafarian spirituality, displacing possession phenomena with revelatory discourse and poetic biblicism, offers a Jamaican exception. Such examples distinguish the other major spiritual dimension expressed by black North Americans: the iconographic or "iconic" dimension. The term connotes the contemplative tradition in Western spirituality, in which not only pictorial but also textual icons—most notably biblical narratives, symbols, and figures—mediate divine significations and transcendent ideals.

African sources of this imagistic propensity comprise a "ritual cosmos" or ancestral worldview, in which "one must see every thing as symbol" (Zuesse, 1979). While (1) an iconic spirituality can be distinguished from (2) emotivist or ecstatic forms of spirituality, it is not necessarily (3) rationalist and discursive in the tradition of the European Enlightenment. Yet it can accompany either of the latter (2, 3) in modes that are iconic-ecstatic (for example, shamanic oratory) or iconic-analytic. Perhaps the spiritual-intellectual discourse of the African-American mystical philosopher Howard Thurman best exemplifies both combinations.

The major instance of iconic expression in black North American spirituality is the figural tradition that improvisationally employs biblical types to configure black experience: Moses (liberator), Exodus (emancipation), Promised Land (destiny). Black religious figuralism emerged in slave religion and bears traces both of Puritan typology and the magical folk healing-and-harming tradition of conjure. Conjure practitioners reenvision and transform reality by performing mimetic (imitative) and medicinal operations (using roots, herbs, etc.) on "material metaphors." Conjurational employment of biblical figures as experiential metaphors operated as recently as the 1960s civil rights movement, in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. represented himself as a Moses and configured the movement as an exodus.

Secular examples include iconic uses of democratic texts and their ideals as found in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Together these secular and religious vectors account for the "biblical republicanism" that black North Americans share with their compatriots. Even black nationalists and Pan-African political movements (e.g., Ethiopianism and black Zionism) derive from the missionary uses of such Bible figures as Ethiopia and Egypt. Black Muslim and black militant figuration of (Babylonian) exile or captivity in America converge with the Rastafarians' poetic iconography of postcolonial oppression. The iconic dimension, it is evident, conveys liberating and creative energies for future transformations of religion and culture.

See also Candomblé; Religion; Santería; Voodoo; Yoruba Religion and Culture in the Americas

Bibliography

Marks, Morton. "Uncovering Ritual Structures in Afro-American Music." In Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by Irving Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, pp. 60–134. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Mitchell, Henry H. Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Smith, Theophus H. "The Spirituality of Afro-American Traditions." In Christian Spirituality III: Post-Reformation and Modern, edited by Louis K. Dupré and Don Saliers, pp. 372–412. New York: Crossroads, 1989.

Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, 2d ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983.

Zuesse, Evan M. Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification of Life in African Religions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979.

theophus h. smith (1996)