Attitudes Toward Religion: An Overview

Slave exposure to Christianity, the only religion whites presented to any significant number of them, varied greatly in the first 200 years of American slavery. Consequently historians debate the breadth and depth of Christian religious development in slave communities before 1830. Throughout the antebellum period of the nineteenth century, however, there were many slaves who adopted forms of Protestantism during the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, although, as one can see in William Wells Brown's (1814–1884) narrative below, it was not difficult for slaves to discern hypocrisy in a religious outlook supporting bondage:

It was not uncommon in St. Louis to pass by an auction-stand, and behold a woman upon the auction-block, and hear the seller crying out, "How much is offered for this woman? She is a good cook, good washer, a good obedient servant. She has got religion!" Why should this man tell the purchasers that she has religion? I answer, because in Missouri, and as far as I have any knowledge of slavery in the other States, the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave that he must never strike a white man; that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault,—for the Bible says, "He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!" And slaveholders find such religion very profitable to them. (Brown 1847)

American slaves' relationship to religion was consistent; they proved in many ways that religion was vital for enduring the abominations of their enslavement. Historians have also thoroughly documented slaves' ability to shape their religious needs to support their circumstances. Slaveholders' willingness to support religion among slaves, however, changed dramatically over time. Much evidence from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slave owners indicates they remained indifferent to the religious condition of slaves or believed slaves were incapable of any reasonable religious thought.

The Anglican Church made some effort in the eighteenth century to convert slaves, particularly in South Carolina where rice and indigo agriculture supported importing a large African population. Planters did not welcome this mission work and the effort never reached more than a few hundred individuals over many years. Significant change came with the development of early American evangelicalism spawned by the sermons of ministers including William Tennent (1673–1746), Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), George Whitefield (1714–1770), Francis Asbury (1745–1816), John Wesley (1703–1791), and later Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) and Lyman Beecher (1775–1863). Although their success ebbed and flowed over more than a century, these men helped develop revivals that spread from the free community to the slave quarters. First with castigations of sinfulness and damnation and then with an emphasis on the conversion experience, evangelical Protestants sought individuals across class, race, and condition of servitude.

The success of the evangelicals converting slaves was not entirely their doing. Africans did not lose their religious understandings in the transatlantic slave trade, as many historians writing in the twentieth century believed. On the other side of this debate Melville Herskovits maintained early that "in the very foundations of Negro religion, the African past plays full part" (1958, p. 207). Also countering the idea of religious loss, historian Donald Mathews argued antebellum slaves invoked African and Christian ideas "through four channels: folk religion, autonomous black congregations, black constituencies associated with white churches, and black memberships of mixed, white-controlled churches" (1977, p. 208). Author Mechal Sobel addresses the great variety of African religious cultures claiming that the transition to America amalgamated many distinctions into an "ideal-type West African Sacred Cosmos" (1979, p. 4). The new form was dynamic and possessed features similar to the evangelical Christian movement.

Slaves found hope, self-affirmation, endurance, and communal sharing through their religious endeavors. Their enthusiasm and engagement literally made headlines. Historian Jeffrey Crow (1980) observed that the early 1800s revival movement in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina generated rumors of religiously inspired unrest along the paths of the revival meetings. When so much was unpredictably denied them by the desires of slaveholders, religion proved a source of great personal and community empowerment. Baptist minister, national activist and leader Benjamin Mays (1894–1984) claimed religion was, "possibly the most significant technique of survival developed during the days of slavery" (1975, p. 1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Brown, William W. Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847.

Burton, Orville Vernon. In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Butler, John. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Comminey, Shawn. "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and Black Education in South Carolina, 1702–1764." The Journal of Negro History (Autumn 1999): 360-369.

Crow, Jeffrey. "Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina." William and Mary Quarterly (January 1980): 96.

Frazier, Franklin E. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken, 1974.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past [1941]. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Mathews, Donald G. "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis." American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 23-43.

Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Mays, Benjamin E., and Joseph W. Nicholson. The Negro's Church [1933]. New York: Beaufort, 1975.

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

Sobel, Mechal. Trabelin' On, The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

                                        David F. Herr