Unintentional Primitivism:
A Historical Review of African American Christianity

Without question, the biblical story of the Exodus is the most common paradigm by which African American Christians have described their experiences; like the Israelites enslaved in a foreign land, black slaves looked forward to God's deliverance from the cruelty of their slaveholders and the time when they would inherit The Promised Land. This theme is found in black spirituals like "Go Down Moses" and encouraging sermons like "But de Moses is a-comin', / An' he 's comin', suah and fas' / We kin hyeah his feet a-trompin', / We kin hyeah his trumpit blas'." It is even evident in the calling of Harriet Tubman, who helped slaves escape the South, "Grandma Moses." The redemption story of the Exodus provided slaves with a theology of hope which appealed to their longing for freedom.

However, most modern interpreters have overemphasized this theme, and have been monomaniacal in reducing the entire African American Christian experience to liberation; this emphasis has been partially due to reading "too much of the 1960s" back into the history of the black church. The resulting "black theologies" have been so monolithic and focused on liberation that they miss other facets of the African American church experience, and the black theology they describe would hardly be recognizable to many African American Christians. Patrick Bascio is correct when he asserts that "Black theology is not the intellectual product of a few theologians," but is a reflection of black experience and belief. But Bascio commits the same error as other intellectuals when he says that "Black theology began when the first African refused to accept slavery as consistent with Christianity." On the contrary, black theology is not dependent on protest (though protest may be a part of it), and thus it did not begin with protest. Rather, it began when the first Africans were converted to Christianity and sought to make sense of its message. To say otherwise and to make liberation and black theology inseparable is to reduce African American Christian history to a merely naturalistic and human phenomenon which is destined to perish. If black theology can only exist when tied to the struggle against oppression, then it becomes dependent on the thing that it fights against so that, if it ever should win, it would cease to exist.

The crucial aspect of the African American Christian experience that is overlooked by such black theologies is primitivism and piety. The black church in America was a unique primitivist culture; while other groups of Christians have intentionally and earnestly sought to replicate the life and faith of the early church, the African American church did so without necessarily intending to. Distinct cultural conditions created an environment in which black Christians underwent many of the same ordeals as the early Christians--including conversion, congregation, persecution, and alienation--and their pietistic theology was formed by these conditions. When this is seen it becomes obvious that black Christianity is not simply about a human struggle but is about true religious piety.

CONVERSION

Like the Gentiles in the first century, when Africans in the New World first heard the Christian message, they had no historical or theological background by which to make sense of the gospel. Some may have encountered Islam while in Africa, and certainly all of them brought to America their native African religious ideas, but the specific claims of Christianity were distinct from Islam and native African religions. Not long after their arrival in America, some whites sought to Christianize these "heathens;" in 1660 Charles II urged that slaves "may best be invited to the Christian Faith, and be made capable of being baptized thereunto . . . that all persons in any of our Dominions shall be taught the knowledge of God, and be made acquainted with the misteries [sic] of Salvation." However, most slave owners were reluctant to introduce such doctrines to their slaves since it was believed that if slaves became Christian, it would be unlawful for another Christian to keep them enslaved. The bishop of London resolved this problem in 1727 by declaring that converted slaves should remain as slaves. Still the attitude of slavemasters toward the evangelizing of their slaves varied greatly, and though some did encourage Christian faith, just as many did not. The perceived benefits of having Christian slaves, which included less theft and more diligent work, were no greater than the possible danger that the enslaved might take too literally the promises of freedom so essential to the faith.

Since many slavemasters were apathetic toward evangelizing their slaves, the primary way that slaves heard the gospel was from missionaries and traveling preachers. The preaching style of the Great Awakening, as exemplified by George Whitefield, whose bulky appearance, rich voice and preaching--riddled with emotion, drama, vivid description, and spontaneity--was preferred by African Americans, made a significant impact on those blacks who heard it. Descriptions of the Great Awakening tell of hundreds of blacks who heard the sermons and responded to the Christian message, some even taking it upon themselves "to do the Business of Preachers" thereby multiplying the evangelistic effect by passing on the gospel to slaves. These African Americans who became missionaries endured much hardship as they traveled about preaching to fellow blacks; African Methodist Episcopal minister Henry Johnson walked ninety miles across Brunswick County, North Carolina to Horry County, South Carolina, organizing churches from Wilmington to Conway. The revivalist message, which emphasized the conversion experience, was well suited to illiterate slaves since conversion did not require religious instruction but only the personal response of conviction, repentance and regeneration. Along with this, the revivalists' de-valuing of one's external status caused "black and white alike to feel personally that Christ had died for them as individuals."

CONGREGATION

In modern times, when almost all churches are segregated, it seems odd to consider that once blacks and whites worshipped together; it seems almost as odd as the fact that Christians once worshipped in synagogues with Jews. However, the first slaves to attend church went with their white slavemasters. In fact the state of North Carolina prohibited all-black churches by passing a law which fined any slavemaster who permitted "Negroes to build . . . any house under the pretense of a meeting-house upon account of worship." Nevertheless, in time both blacks and whites wanted to have separate services and so bi-racial churches became less common and blacks began to hold their own services. There were many reasons that the groups separated, the first of which was the preferred worship styles. In Brunswick County, where forty-five percent of the population in 1860 were slaves, the story is told of a boisterous slave who was allowed to attend the white church with his master. After the slave repeatedly interrupted the service, his master promised to give him some shoes if he would remain quiet throughout the service; as the service progressed, the slave began to squirm until he finally jumped up and shouted, "Shoes or no shoes, I got to praise the Lord!" Such expressive worship styles among black Christians made them unwelcome in many white churches and led them to congregate on their own, often in Methodist and Baptist churches, where more emphatic worship was allowed.

Another reason for the separation of the churches came after the Civil War, when slaveowners lost possession of their slaves. As an Alabama minister wrote, "The ex-master and ex-slave did not quite fit each other in the 'old meeting house,' as they had in days of yore," and with the new social order many freed blacks sought independence in all areas of their lives. However, the greatest reason that African Americans wished to separate from the white churches was the same reason that the early Christians separated from the Jewish synagogues: the realization that what was preached there was not the true word of God. Blacks recognized the hypocrisy of the preaching that was directed toward them; by far the most common biblical passages they heard were the commands that slaves obey their masters. The Reverend Charles Colcock Jones even published a catechism for slaves which contained such statements as: "Q. Is it right for a Servant when commanded to do anything to be sullen and slow, and answering his master again? A. No. Q. But suppose the Master is hard to please, and threatens and punishes more than he ought, what is the Servant to do? A. Do his best to please him." From what they had gathered from missionaries and evangelists, along with their own intuition, African Americans knew that this was not the complete gospel message, and they despised the hypocrisy of those slaveholders "who prayed with them on Sunday but beat them on Monday." Still the African Americans did not respond to the impiety they saw by rejecting Christianity as a whole; they understood that the white churches they saw were tainted Christian institutions. A spiritual said, "Old Satan's church is here below; Up to God's free church I hope to go" and Frederick Douglas condemned slave holding church members while upholding true Christianity which was "pure, peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of good fruits, and without hypocrisy." So African Americans left the white churches, attempting to leave the unholy things and take with them those things which were worthy. It is evident that the Holy Spirit joined them in their new churches; however that is not because he was unable to reside in sinful white churches.

The most important theological reason that blacks left the white churches was their understanding of "how Jesus' blood for redemption flows." Black Christianity had "christological focus," emphasizing the power, person and work of Jesus Christ. Unlike the Jews in the New Testament who could not conceive of a suffering savior, blacks in America certainly had good reason to relate to the figure of Christ. When Jesus did the work of a servant, when he was called unclean, when he was mocked, when he was abused by the ruling authorities, when the whip tore his flesh, when he was alone in his sufferings, and when he was killed--slaves understood what that was like. When they sang "Were you there when the crucified my Lord?" the implied response of the slave was, "Yes." This version of the redemptive story, with all the explicit and earthy details, was not as prevalent in the average white church and so "the slaves made an adaptation to Christianity that rendered it something more than a dispassionate system of theology and a code of behavior."

PERSECUTION

Once African Americans no longer attended white churches, they were in some senses open to more persecution and attacks from angry whites. But persecution was nothing new to African Americans who had often been forced to do their religious deeds in hiding for fear of slavemasters who did not allow them to practice Christianity. In Brunswick County, when slaves began to sing a certain song while working in the fields, it served as a signal to all that that night they would meet down by the river for a secret worship service. This was one of many common practices used by slaves to hide their religious activities from their masters. Often slaves would turn a kettle upside down believing it would prevent their voices from being heard. A former slave recalled "when my ma used to put us chillin outside de cabin in de quarters, and den she would shut de doors, and shut de windows tight, and sit a tub of water in de middle of de floor, and kneel down and pray," while others "hab big holes out in de fiel's dey git down in and pray." The reason that it was necessary to hide from slavemasters is revealed by the content of their prayers: "dat de yoke of bondage be removed from de nigger's neck." Because "dey uster pray for freedom" the slavemasters felt that they needed to prevent them, and it is ironic that those white Christians intent on preventing Christian piety by their slaves were so pious themselves that they feared the power of prayer and the possibility that it might be effective in gaining freedom for those who prayed.

The punishment for secret prayer could be severe; one slave remembered a time when his slavemaster was told that his slaves had been praying and "he come out in the yard with a cat-o'-nine-tails and rounds everybody up." On another occasion, when a slavemaster learned that a group of slaves "wus down on deir knees prayin' fur de good Lord to sot dem free," the master "sont de oberseer down dar an' brung ebery one uf dem to de stake, an' tied dem, an' whupped dem so hard dat blood come from some uf dem's backs." Certainly more than one slave preacher "was flogged, and his back pickled" for preaching at a secret service. Henry Bibb's master, who was a deacon at the local Baptist church, threatened him with five hundred lashes for attending a prayer meeting at a nearby plantation, and the brother of Charlotte Martin was whipped to death for taking part in a religious ceremony. Genuine piety compelled these slaves to risk punishment "at the hands of their earthly masters in order to worship their 'Divine Master' as they saw fit."

ALIENATION

Once the prayers of the pious were answered, and the mountain of slavery was moved off the backs of African Americans, the black church went through a time of disorganization and discontinuity. Separated from white churches, black churches continued and many thrived, but the conditions of the churches varied considerably from place to place. As late as 1945, the majority of African American churches in locations like Mississippi County, Arkansas had neither electric lights nor a water supply; at the same time in another rural county, Northumberland County, Virginia, all black churches had such facilities. One thing that was common to almost all African American churches was a lack of formal Christian education for the preacher. Almost no slaves had been literate since "Our masters always tried to hide / Book learning from our eyes; / Knowledge don't agree with slavery-- / 'Twould make us all too wise." In fact so serious had been the fear of literate slaves that teaching a slave to read was a crime for which Margaret Douglass was imprisoned in 1853. Slaves had tried to make up for this by instructing their children with a simple catechism or prayer that they had picked up somewhere, but the primary means by which the black church compensated for a lack of literacy was through their rich oral culture.

As part of this, the African American church made use of spirituals which spoke of the salvation experience and recounted various stories from the Old and New Testament. So complete were these spirituals that "if these songs [were] arranged in a somewhat chronological order, they [would be] equivalent to an oral version of the Bible" which made it possible for black preachers to preach their sermons "only with a knowledge of these songs." Along with the spirituals, the preaching style found in black churches was unique and had evolved to fit the oral culture of the church. Sermons did not need to be intellectual or didactic expositions, since the audience often knew as much of the Bible as the preacher; instead the task of sermons was "one of arousing the emotions, of helping the tired, subdued Negro to associate his traits, sorrows and joys with those of Biblical characters."

Made up of people who had rather recently become Christians from their pagan background, African Americans sought to make sense of the gospel they had received within the culture they were born into. As many have pointed out, African Americans retained some of their African ideas and even incorporated them into Christianity. There is nothing sinister about this and it does not make the black religion we call "Christianity" any less Christian since Christianity is not bound to a particular culture, but can exist equally in various cultures. The fact that, because of parallels in African culture, blacks enjoyed Christian baptism or ecstatic praise does not taint the purity of their Christianity any more than if a Frenchman happened to enjoy the use of wine in the Eucharist.

CONCLUSION

Like the very first Christian converts, the slaves were converted to Christianity by the preaching of great evangelists and missionaries and, without much use of the written Scriptures, relied on the oral culture of stories of faith to encourage the faithful. They suffered persecution and resorted to secret meetings where, hidden in the woods as the early Christians hid in the catacombs, they devoted themselves to prayer. When they finally were able to set up their own churches, they bore the weight of their extreme poverty and lack of education. Though they did not have access to theological training and thus were not aware of the label "primitivist," they somewhat unintentionally exemplified the primitivist piety that many Christian groups attempted, but failed, to realize in their own communities.

In recent decades the African American Christian church has been approaching the time of Constantine; there has been a growing interest in black issues and in incorporating black theology into the mainstream of religion. Even conservative Christians have expressed such interest. Certainly there still are low levels of theological education in African American churches; the United States Census Bureau reports that while 191,000 whites and 20,000 Hispanics have doctoral degrees in religion or theology, the number of blacks with such a degree "represents zero or rounds to zero," and Cain Hope Felder states that there are "just a little more than thirty black North Americans with a completed Ph.D./Th.D. in biblical studies." Still a small group of experts has come to the front and now has the task of defining what it means to be an African American Christian. Like the Council of Nicaea in 325, through this "council" a canon of essential writings will emerge and doctrine will be discussed as African American theologians define a religion which has for the most part only existed in localized, primitivist groups.

One of the most important decisions will be if this "Constantinian" acceptance of black Christianity is good in the first place, or if acceptance by the culture at large should be avoided. The answer to this question will reveal the extent of primitivism in those that decide, since primitivists consider the Constantinian Donation and the subsequent mainstreaming of Christianity as a negative influence on authentic piety. Throughout this, those scholars called to judge and explain black theology will do well to avoid the insufficient and monolithic view of black theology as only liberation, a position which enfeebles the powerful witness of history. The African American experience is about an Exodus toward freedom and blacks' human longing for liberation, but it is also about the strength of piety based on a supernatural and genuine faith in Jesus Christ as Savior. That is the substance of black theology, and only with attention to this can theologians capture the experience and belief of blacks in American history.

Seventy years after the Emancipation Proclamation, former slave Prince Bee said, "That religion I got in them way-back days is still with me. And it ain't this piecrust religion, such that the folks are getting these days. The old-time religion had some filling in between the crusts. Wasn't so much empty words, like they is today." The "filling" which will prevent modern black theology from becoming empty words is the realization of the thing that made slaves risk their lives to pray and worship the Christian God, and that is their unintentional primitivism and their very intentional piety.

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