Once the African slaves converted to Christianity, their conversion was different from the conversion of their white owners.
if worship is inseparably connected with life, then we must assume that the worship services of slaves could not have had the same meaning as the worship services of slave holders, because they did not share the same life. They may have used the same words in prayers, songs, and testimony, or even preached similar sermons. But slaves and slave holders could not mean the same thing . . . because their social and political realities were radically different. (1986, 87)
These differences are expressed in two development in the period before the Civil War: the so-called invisible institution in the South and independent black churches in the North.
The slaves developed and kept their distinctive faith alive in intimate communication between friends and within families, as well as in larger secret meetings, which scholars call the invisible institution or the secret church. White preachers would say that God permitted or even ordained slavery, but black slaves refused to give up the idea that God willed their freedom. They risked a terrible beating and perhaps death to "steal away" into the woods or swamps at night in order to sing, preach, and pray for their liberation (1986, 88). These secret meetings, Cone tells us, were the birthing places not only of slave insurrections but also a black version of the gospel consistent with the search for freedom. So-called "Negro Spirituals" were the product of these secret meetings: "Go Down Moses/Way down in Egypt land/Tell old Pharoah/To let my people go." Liberation themes are also to be found in "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,"Oh Mary don't you weep," and "My lord delivered Daniel" (1986, 88).
Cone cites a slave inspired by these meetings, "White folk's got a heap to answer for the way they've done to colored folks. So much they won't never pray it away." Songs expressed the same point, "Dere's no hidin' place down here" and "You shall reap jes what you sow." (1986, 89)
Cone disputes the interpretation many scholars have given black religion when they emphasize its "otherworldly" dimension. Heaven in black religion, says Cone, signifies not only a reality beyond space and time, but also earthly places regarded as lands of freedom, particularly Africa, Canada, and the northern United States. Frederick Douglass already noted the double meaning of the black spirituals. The song whose words went "‘Oh Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,' meant more than the hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the north was our Canaan" (cited in Cone 1986, 89).
Independent black churches emerged very early in the North when in 1787 black members of Philadelphia's St. George Methodist church refused to accept segregation and discrimination within the church. The separatist movement, reflecting free blacks' rejection of the prejudices of their white coreligionists, led to the formation of the AME Church (1816), the AME Zion Church (1821), the Colored ME Church (1870) and many Baptist churches around the same time. In leaving the St. George Methodist Church in 1787 Richard Allen and others expressed . . . their view that segregation in the Lord's House was, to cite Rev. Allen's later reflections, "very degrading and insulting" (cited in 1986, 91-92).
Independent black churches became heavily involved in the abolitionist movement and were "stations" for runaway slaves during the period of the underground railroad. The AMEZ Church (whose Bowling Green church sponsored the Community Unity meeting two months ago) was so deeply involved it became known as the "Freedom Church." (1986, 92)
Some Northern blacks, including Rev. Francis Grimke whom I cited above about God's justice, remained within the white churches in order fight racism there. Cone notes that even when blacks remained within white churches, Christianity meant something to them quite different from what it meant for whites. Henry Highland Garnet was a Presbyterian minister, David Walker a Methodist layperson. Yet Walker's Appeal of 1829 and Garnet's Address to the Slaves of America (1843) shocked even radical white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison. Garnet wrote:
It is as wrong for your lordly oppressors to keep you in slavery, as it was for the man thief to steal our ancestors from the coast of Africa. You should therefore now use the same manner of resistance, as would have been just in our ancestors, when the bloody footprints of the first remorseless soul thief was placed upon the shores of our fatherland . . . Liberty is a spirit sent out from God, and like its great Author, is no respecter of persons. (Cited in 1986, 93)
The central theological question for black preachers was this: Why did the God of liberation, justice, and love permit millions of Africans to be stolen from their homeland and enslaved in North America? Nathaniel Paul, another black Christian who remained in the white church, put it in the following agonizing way:
Tell me, ye might waters, why did ye sustain the ponderous load of misery? Or speak, ye winds, and say why it was that ye executed your office to waft them onward to the still more dismal state; and ye proud waves, why did you refuse to lend your aid and to have overwhelmed them with your billows? Then they should have slept sweetly in the bosom of the great deep, and so have been hid from sorrow. And, oh thou immaculate God, be not angry with us, while we come into thy sanctuary, and make the bold inquiry in this they temple, why it was that thou didst look on with calm indifference of an unconcerned spectator, when thy holy law was violated, thy divine authority despised and a portion of thine own creatures reduced to a state of mere vassalage and misery? (1986, 93-94)
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Wednesday, August 25th 2010 at 3:50PM
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