African American Christianity during Slavery

Some slaves were already Christian before colonization, as the Bakongo people of Central-Africa had converted to Catholicism shortly after Portuguese contact in the late-15th century.^[1] Others were Muslim from West-Africa, such as the Mandinka, Fulani, and Wolof.^[2] Edmund Ruffin believed that slaves who came from Africa rarely became Protestant Christians, and the significant numbers of conversions started with the first generation born in America.^[3]

Protestant Christianity was the dominant religion of Colonial America and then the United States, including the slaveholding areas and the individual planters. Slaves learned about Western Christianity by attending services led by a white preacher or supervised by a white person. Slaveholders often held prayer meetings at their plantations. In the South, until the Great Awakening, most Christian slaveholders were Anglican. In praise settings where whites supervised by worship and prayer, they used Bible stories that reinforced people's keeping to their places in society, urging slaves to be loyal and to obey their masters. In the 19th century, Methodist and Baptist chapels were founded in many of the smaller communities and common planters.^[4]

The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts which was founded in 1701, concentrated more on slaves within the West Indies, which had a certain amount of success in South Carolina.^[5] Leadership roles for slaves were often restricted in Episcopalian churches. "Episcopal congregations accepted slaves and free African-Americans as subordinate members, kept African-Americans segregated, and saw black members as suitable objects for mission work but unsuitable for leadership.^[6] Abolitionist propaganda portrayed low rates of church participation by slaves, although W. E. B. Du Bois used church records to estimate that about one in six slaves was owned to a denomination, which was about equal to Southern white participation.^[7]

Following slave revolts in the early 19th century, including Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, Virginia passed a law requiring African American congregations to meet only in the presence of a white minister. Other states similarly restricted on exclusively African American churches or large groups of Black Americans in large groups unsupervised by white individuals. Nevertheless, Black Baptist congregations in cities grew rapidly, and their members numbered several hundred each before the American Civil War. While mostly led by freedmen, most members were slaves.

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

The First Great Awakening in the late 18th century led to changes in Americans' understanding of God, themselves, the world around them, and religion. In the southern Tidewater and Low Country, northern Baptist and Methodist preachers converted both white and black people -both free and enslaved. These new members were appealed to directly and a few thousand were converted and they were welcomed into white churches, with their religious experiences. While also admitting them to active roles in congregations as exhorters, deacons, and even preachers, although the last was a rarity.^[8]

The message of spiritual equality appealed to many enslaved people, and, as African religious traditions continued to decline in North America, black people accepted Christianity in large numbers for the first time.^[9]

Evangelical leaders in the southern colonies had to deal with the issue of slavery more frequently than those in the North. Although in the early years of the First Great Awakening, Methodist and Baptist preachers argued for manumission of slaves and abolition, by the early decades of the 19th century, they often had found ways to support the institution.

George Whitefield's sermons reiterated an egalitarian message but only translated into spiritual equality for Africans in the colonies, who mostly remained enslaved. Whitefield was known to criticize slaveholders who treated enslaved people cruelly and those who did not educate them, but he had no intention to abolish slavery. He lobbied to have slavery reinstated in Georgia and proceeded to become a slaveholder himself.^[10] Whitefield shared a common belief held among evangelicals that, after conversion, slaves would be granted true equality in heaven. Despite his stance on slavery, Whitefield became influential among many Africans.^[11]

The Presbyterian Samuel Davies was noted for preaching to African enslaved people who converted to Christianity in unusually large numbers, and he is credited with the first sustained proselytization of enslaved people in Virginia.^[12] Davies wrote a letter in 1757 in which he refers to the religious zeal of an enslaved man whom he had encountered during his journey. "I am a poor slave, brought into a strange country, where I never expect to enjoy my liberty. While I lived in my own country, I knew nothing of that Jesus I have heard you speak so much about. I lived quite careless what will become of me when I die; but I now see such a life will never do, and I come to you, Sir, that you may tell me some good things, concerning Jesus Christ, and my Duty to GOD, for I am resolved not to live any more as I have done."^[13]

Davies became accustomed to hearing such excitement from many black people who were exposed to the revivals. He believed that black people could attain knowledge equal to that of white people if given an adequate education, and he promoted the importance of allowing slaveholders to permit enslaved people to become literate so that they could become more familiar with the instructions of the Bible.^[14]

The emotional worship of the revivals appealed to many Africans, and African leaders started to emerge from the revivals in substantial numbers soon after they converted. These figures paved the way for the establishment of the first black congregations and churches in the American colonies.^[15]

During this era, there is evidence of Christian practice and "specific dedicated places for worship called praise houses from before the first organized African American Christian denominations.^[16]

In plantation areas, slaves organized underground churches and hidden religious meetings,^[17] the "invisible church", where slaves were free to mix Evangelical Christianity with African beliefs and African rhythms. With the time, many incorporated Wesleyan Methodist hymns, gospel songs, and spirituals.^[18] The underground churches provided psychological refuge from the white world. The spirituals gave the church members a secret way to communicate and, in some cases, to plan a rebellion.

Christianity played a complex and often contradictory role in the lives of slaves. During the era of slavery in the United States, many slave owners strategically used Black churches and Black preachers to propagate messages of obedience, submission, and compliance among enslaved people. This was part of a larger system of control that sought to use religion as a tool to maintain the institution of slavery,^{[citation needed]} although Christian teaching as well as maintaining the social order also brought in concepts such as equality before God and spiritual freedom that were corrosive to master-slave relations.^[19]

Slave owners often introduced Christianity to enslaved Africans, selectively emphasizing biblical teachings that they believed justified slavery and encouraged submission to masters. Scripture verses such as (Colossians 3:22 Ephesians 6:5) ("Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear...") were frequently cited to reinforce the idea that slavery was divinely sanctioned.^[20]

During the early decades of the 19th century, they used stories such as the Curse of Ham to justify slavery to themselves.^[4] They promoted the idea that loyal and hard-working slaves would be rewarded in the afterlife. Slaves who were literate tried to teach others to read, as Frederick Douglass did while still enslaved as a young man in Maryland.

Many slaves, of Kongo origin, retained and continued to practice their traditional religion, which had been syncretised with Catholicism in Africa. These include belief in the Kongo Cosmogram, which they inscribed on the Church floors and expressed through the Ring Shout. ^[21]

As they listened to readings, slaves developed their own interpretations of the Scriptures and found inspiration in stories of deliverance, such as the Exodus out of Egypt. Nat Turner, a slave and a Baptist preacher, was inspired to guide an armed rebellion against slavery, in an uprising that killed about 50 white people in Virginia.^[22]

Free Black communities in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York helped freedom seekers escape from slavery. Black Churches were stops on the Underground Railroad, and Black communities in the North hid freedom seekers in their churches and homes. Harriet Tubman was one of the most famous “conductors” of the Underground Railroad, personally leading hundreds of enslaved people to freedom without ever being captured. Historian Cheryl Janifer Laroche explained in her book, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad The Geography of Resistance that: "Blacks, enslaved and free, operated as the main actors in the central drama that was the Underground Railroad."^[23]

Along with white churches opposed to slavery,^[24] free black people in Philadelphia provided aid and comfort to slaves who escaped and helped all new arrivals adjust to city life.^[25]