So first we talked about a slave rebellion where the majority of the enslaved Africans were African born and drew inspiration from their indigenous African religions. (Haitian Revolution)
Then we talked about a conspiracy to start a slave rebellion that was largely inspired by the success of the Haitian slave revolt as well as the story of Exodus from the Old Testament from largely multigenerational enslaved Africans. (Denmark Vesey Conspiracy)
Now we are going to explore how multigenerational enslaved Africans in America even became familiar enough with Christianity to use Exodus from the Old Testament as inspiration.
American colonists long justified their enslavement of the African on their understanding that Africans were “infidels” and “heathens”. So colonial slave masters were not just hesitant to, they were downright opposed to teaching their slaves Christianity for the obvious reason; if they converted their slaves to Christianity they wouldn’t be infidels and heathens anymore. And since that was the primary justification for having the right to enslave them, wouldn’t that mean that they now had to emancipate them? And it was for this reason that the overwhelming majority of slave masters denied their enslaved Africans religious instruction throughout the eighteenth century.
The Great Awakening is what historians call the evangelical and revitalization movement that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Historians define the Great Awakening as a departure from placing an emphasis on ritual, ceremony and hierarchy and instead arguing that a relationship with God should be a personal one; and giving the individual the freedom to define his own standard of personal morality.
Americans motivated during this “Great Awakening”, now called “revivalists”, did manage to increase the number of enslaved Africans and free blacks who were exposed to and converted to Christianity. But even with that said, “By the time of the American Revolution in 1776 very few enslaved Africans had ANY contact with white ministers and an overwhelming majority of them still believed and practiced the religions of their African Fathers.” – Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, Marcus W. Jeregan
Slave masters in the colonies were given direct instructions by the English Monarchs to Christianize their enslaved African property way back in 1702 but the King was way over there…and well, they were way over here…and well that was that. Plus, colonists in America back in the 17th century were not very religious at all. So even when the Bishop of London wrote a letter urging slave owners to Christianize their enslaved Africans it carried very little weight. It wasn’t until the Great Awakening that colonists in America took on this fervor of finding salvation in Christ and proselytizing heathens, heretics, infidels and the like.
So let’s be clear here, although the first enslaved African in America was in 1619, the overwhelming majority of enslaved Africans in the Southern United States (where the vast majority of us were) were NOT taught anything about Jesus Christ, the Holy Bible, Moses, Noah, Jehovah etc. none of it, until 1800, just six decades before the American Civil War.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first predominantly Black Christian denomination in America, was founded in 1816 just 45 years before the start of the American Civil War. And the AME was primarily made up of free blacks in the North in Philadelphia. Enslaved Africans in the South were by-in-large still an untapped group. A person couldn’t just walk on to a slave owner’s plantation and start filling up his slave’s heads with Jesus.
First of all, slaves were there to work, not to have their souls saved. A missionary or minister had to obtain permission from a slave master before you could even begin evangelizing to his slaves. If the slave master said, “No” then the answer was “No”. If you were of the ilk that you “didn’t take no for an answer” and you waited to Sunday, the one day a week American slave owners gave their slaves to recuperate from their six, 16-hour a day 96 hour work week, then he could have you killed by simply accusing you of trying to organize his slaves against him. Slave Masters were deathly afraid of outside agitators coming in and upsetting their slaves with “wild ideas” like seeing themselves as being an actual human being in anyone’s eyes, including God.
There were risks involved in this line of work of proselytizing enslaved Africans, that is why most ministers didn’t bother.
When White Ministers did get access to enslaved Africans and began teaching them about Christianity, what resonated most with enslaved Africans was the idea of having life after death which was something that white ministers really drove home when they were exposing them to Christianity. First of all, life after death was something that enslaved Africans believed in their own indigenous religions. What an enslaved African wanted more than anything was to believe that they would return to Africa and back to their ancestors when they died.
Some enslaved Africans were followers of Islam from their encounters with the Moors in Northern Africa and could read and write in Arabic and there is documentation that says that even some 40 years after being enslaved in America some of these Muslim slaves were still begging their masters to get them a copy of the Koran. Some white ministers even went so far as to obtain copies of the Koran (printed in English) and read to them from it until the enslaved Africans learned enough English and then they quickly replaced the Koran with a Bible. Particularly with these slaves it wasn’t at all uncommon to hear when they were being given the Christian Gospel call out “Allah” instead of “God” and “Mohammed” instead of “Jesus Christ” during sermons.
You have to remember, it is only human to try to relate new information to what you already know. Again, enslaved Africans were not blank slates. These were not people who were void of religion, moral and/or ethical belief systems. They were people who had their own cultural and religious way of viewing the world, the universe and their own particular place in it. So when enslaved Africans were given crosses, they thought of them as “charms” to ward off evil spirits, and they thought of Jesus not as Christ but as a “healer” not unlike the faith healers they were familiar with back in Africa. These initial introductions to Christianity were filled with instances of enslaved Africans creating a “hybrid faith” of their understanding of their own indigenous religions with the concepts they were being taught about Christianity. So many enslaved Africans, at least initially, were fusing the two together, both their traditional African understandings with Christianity into something entirely unique.
Please consider this account from a Southerner writing of one such enslaved African who had fused her African beliefs with Christianity…to some extent.
“She had forgotten the name of her tribe; even the names of her parents had slipped from her memory; but the river which she had been taught to worship in her infancy had worn deep channels in that treacherous memory. This deep, abiding superstition made it comparatively easy for her to transfer her idolatry to some stream in her new home. By consequence she became a Baptist, or rather an immersionist; for she was Baptist no further than the waters of the Great Pedee conveyed her.”
To be continued…there is a point I am getting to here.
We are not done.
