Slaveholders were often furious, beating zealous new converts for praying with and preaching to one another. (Pentecostalism doesn’t arise until the early 20th century and began as an interracial movement.) As a result, the historical Black church is Baptist and Methodist, as these groups made up the majority of revivalists. The planters were right about that, by the way this is exactly what the enslaved argued after conversion! Rather than being evangelized by their slaveholders, some of the enslaved converted at the tent meetings of evangelical revivalists, and they went on to evangelize one another when they returned to the plantation. Many southern planters were fairly unchurched Anglicans who knew just enough Bible to know that Christian slaves could make a compelling biblical case for their freedom based on various warnings to the Hebrews never to enslave one’s brothers and sisters. Some of the enslaved were already Christians, as we see with the Stono Rebellion of Portuguese-speaking Catholics in South Carolina in 1739. I had assumed, for instance, that Black enslaved people became Christians through the efforts of slaveholders, but this is almost completely false. But after doing the research for the chapter on the Black church in Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, I realized I was far more ignorant than I had suspected. Having grown up in a multiethnic church with a Black pastor whose background was in the Black church, I assumed that I had a passing familiarity with this tradition. We ought to be celebrating it, learning its history, and bringing its legacy to bear for current struggles, both in the church and in our common life together as Americans. In spite of the decline of all church attendance across the United States, an overwhelming majority of Black Americans today identify as Christians, and they are the most likely demographic group to say they believe in God, pray, and read the Bible. It is this institution and this theological emphasis that gives rise to so much else, including some of the largest social organizations in the history of the United States, some of the most globally influential music in the history of the world, and one of the most ethically sophisticated political movements in all of history. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, authors of The Black Church in the African American Experience, call the Black church the “cultural womb” of Black America. That honor goes to something far more substantive: the Imago Dei doctrine of the Black church. While exclusion by whites provided the impetus for this cultural formation, oppression is by no means its central characteristic.
Black Americans are celebrating a shared historical experience, a history of cultural solidarity in the face of real oppression, and the particulars of a unique cultural legacy. Unsurprisingly, anyone who could make a case for themselves clamored to get into this category, including many immigrant communities that had never been thought white before.ĭistinguishing the use of the term “Black” as referring to a particular slice of American culture and “white” as referring to a historical legal category helps us solve the conundrum of that common online query, “What if we said the same thing for white people?” That is, what if we had a “Buy White” day, celebrated white excellence, or had a White Student Union in our university? The fact that such questions are patently absurd proves the culture-not-race point. Rather, the term is used in some academic circles to refer to the legal category that could, throughout much of the 20th century, afford one the fullest set of legal rights. In how many white churches, one might ask, do we refer to the wife of the pastor as the First Lady? And so, as it turns out, whiteness is not a particularly helpful category when it comes to describing a culture.
Sadly for them, Black Americans, like most southerners, are quite hierarchical, as is evident in parenting styles, in the use of honorifics when addressing one’s elders, and in ecclesial structure. It’s not at all that Black Americans are more egalitarian and whites are more hierarchical as that northeastern elites who draw up these lists about “whiteness” are egalitarians themselves and so want to associate their own culture with minority culture. It’s not so much that white people are punctual as that the northeastern great-great-great grandchildren of the industrializing Puritans are punctual, while people from agricultural economies the world over are more relaxed about time. Culture tends to be regional the vast majority of Black Americans hail from the southeast, while whites are found in every American region.
“White,” on the other hand, is a mere legal category.
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