African Americans and religion in British America

As Eliga H. Gould (‘The Christianizing of British America’, in Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire [Oxford: OUP, 2005]) summarizes it, Atlantic slavery violated and uprooted Africans, but it also distorted and broke the shapes and powers of many socials frameworks and traditions. While there were places in the Colonies in which blacks were able to replicate some traditional social groupings, ceremonies, titles, etc., which contributed to some of the acts of slave resistance (New York 1712, Antigua 1736, “Maroon War” in Jamaica 1665-1739), in general the systems qua systems were destroyed.

Compounding the tragedy of enslavement with a further gospel tragedy…

‘Despite the possibilities for evangelization, Protestant religious leaders and slave owners responded ambivalently to this crisis. In part, this reluctance to proselytize reflected the assumption that ‘slavery was unlawfull for any Christian – as the SPG’s [Society for the Propagation of the Gospel] Anthony Gavin wrote in 1738 – and that slaves who converted automatically became free. Although colonial legislatures passed laws barring faith-based manumissions from the mid-seventeenth century onward, the association of salvation with freedom continued to worry slaveholders, a group that included George Whitfield and the SPG . Not surprisingly, there were few Christian slaves on the SPG’s own estate on Barbados.’ (Gould, pp.33-34)

Further ironies in this practice and discussion of slavery by white evangelical and conservative Christians revealed themselves over time…

‘Two developments helped to produce an upsurge in slave Christianisation starting in Virginia during the 1740s and proceedings several decades later in South Carolina and the West Indies. The first was the SPG’s repudiation of Christian liberty for the doctrine that slaves owed their masters ‘absolute obedience’. As Thomas Bacon observed during the 1740s, slaves were obligated to do whatever their owners command as if they ‘did it for God himself’. Although not all Anglicans accepted this harsh principle, the SPG emphasis on slave obedience set the dominant tone both for its own clergy and the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who inundated the region from the eighteenth century's middle decades. Despite their emphasis on a spiritual equality of all humanity, even Moravians preached submission of the Christian slaves who worked on their settlements in North Carolina. Consequently, slave conversion came to seem much less threatening to colonial planters. Only in the West Indies and only at the century's end these evangelicals become an abolitionist phalanx. Yet on the eve of slavery’s abolition, the humanitarianism of evangelicals like William Knibb of Jamaica and Antigua's Anne and Elizabeth Hart remained suspect in the eyes of many Protestants, including evangelical missionary societies in Britain and the islands’ Anglican clergy.’ (Gould, pp.34-35)

On the plus side, African Americans and whites did worship together in the early 19^th century, particularly in the Methodist and Baptist congregations. This slowed the growth of distinctive Black churches and had effects on the powerful, too…

‘...according to Mechal Sobel, African death rituals and reverence for ancestors even influenced white religion, encouraging Southern Baptists and Methodists to reconceptualise Heaven is a place of reunion ‘with those we love’ and to make deathbeds into scenes of ecstatic happiness and joy.’ (Gould, p.35)

Fascinating. Not least because I feel the influence of those ideas on my theology of deathbeds and heaven (or, more properly, the intermediate state and the New Creation!) More reading to be done here –

– starting with Catherine Hall, ‘William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds, Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous People 1600-1850 (Philadelphia, 1999)…