Overview:
The African-American experience began in the seventeenth-century slavery that brought various West African peoples involuntarily to the Americas, While these peoples were diverse, their religious heritage included common elements: a strong sense of community and communal responsibility, an equally strong tie with ancestors, a sense of the nearness of various intermediary Gods, a belief in the ultimate power of a noninterfering high God, and a ritual life that expressed both extraordinary and ordinary religion.
The Manyness of Religions in America
In America, blacks preserved a number of their religious customs and practices. More importantly in the long run, they continued to look at the world according to religious categories that Africa had given them. They mixed ordinary and extraordinary religion in tales of Tricksters like Brer Rabbit and in conjure. As they encountered Christianity, a few blacks became Roman Catholics, but -- after a slow start -- the largest number became Protestants. In the "invisible institution," these black Protestants created a religion of their own. They found sacred space in public praise houses or in secret hush harbors, and they created sacred time with sermons, spirituals, ring shouts, and various other rituals. As converts who proclaimed they had been "struck dead" by the power of God, blacks both affirmed and overcame the involuntary condition of slavery to express a sense of spiritual freedom.
Meanwhile, in the early nineteenth century, free blacks organized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and in what became known as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Under Baptist polity, some enslaved blacks in the South also controlled their churches to a degree. After the Civil War, a series of independent black churches came into existence, and by the twentieth century a religion of blackness was growing among African-American people. A nation within the nation, blacks had already tumed to a black Jesus in the northern cities where they belonged to various holiness and pentecostal churches. In numerous smaller movements, they honored blackness in their devotion to black charismatic leaders and to ideologies of chosenness such as those provided by the Nation of Islam. In the civil rights movement of the sixties and the creation of a black theology, the late twentieth century contributed newer versions of the religion of blackness. Meanwhile, in both American-born and immigrant-derived forms of spiritual practice, blacks engaged in prolific expressions of religious combination. Even as blacks combined, in some ways, with other Americans, though, the boundaries between themselves and the white world were still carefully drawn. African Americans continued to mingle ordinary and extraordinary religion in a separate black center.
Yet in the United States, there were other centers and other hopes. As
the slaves had been describing their visions of paradise and their children
had looked for ways to begin to build more modest versions on earth, some
Americans had staked a claim to their piece of a heavenly landscape. Nineteenth-century
new religions grew out of the visions of their founders. To imagine in the
United States seemed to mean to create and to construct.
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