Religion, African Americans

History of the Black Church

The Black Church has historically been the most important institution in the religious lives of African Americans, as well as in their social, economic, and civic lives. The Black Church provided a place where African Americans, regardless of their formal skills or education, could achieve upward mobility, as deacons and deaconesses, trustees, church mothers, and pastors. The Church was a haven from a harsh, oppressive society. Scholars have consistently regarded the Black Church as the heart of the African American community.

African Americans' mass conversion to Christianity is primarily attributable to revivalist religion. Some argue that revivalist religion was appealing to African Americans because it embraced hope and freedom. As a subordinate people, African Americans could connect with a personal and accessible God in the man Jesus who also experienced suffering, yet was ultimately victorious in overcoming his oppressors. Others propose that the effusive, fervent religious practices of revivalist religion were amenable to traditional African religious culture, and were therefore appealing to African Americans.

Mass at an African American Catholic Church on the South Side of Chicago (1942). Religion has been the core of the African American community from slavery to contemporary times.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USW38-000138-D.

Despite African Americans' conversion to Christianity, however, African American Christians, those enslaved or free, were not subsumed as equal with their White counterparts. African American church participation was limited to worship service attendance. Occupational or social mobility within religious organizations was rare. White males filled the leadership and pastoral positions in these spaces. Religious meetings and services attended by African Americans and Whites were racially segregated. African Americans were relegated to separate pews, usually in the back rows or [Page 1138]galleries. Slaves were usually not allowed to attend services with Whites. Under these conditions, slave owners permitted slaves to congregate, but only under their supervision and the leadership of White clergy.

In response to exclusion from full participation in White-controlled religious institutions, African Americans began to carve out religious spaces where they were relatively free from White control. Slaves, who were forbidden to organize, developed plantation churches, also known as the “invisible institutions.” Secret worship services, usually led by male slaves with at least some Bible knowledge, were held in slave quarters or other clandestine places. Free African Americans founded their own formal Christian institutions. For example, Richard Allen, a preacher in the Methodist denomination, and other free African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1787 after being physically removed from an unsanctioned section of a church during a crowded worship service. After the Civil War, these formal and informal organizations forged a loosely tied network of African American denominations commonly referred to as the Black Church—the first African American-owned and controlled institution within the African American community.

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