An Reflection Based On The Ideal Of Worship As Empowerment

African slaves were brought to America from many tribes and they brought with them a variety of beliefs and practices. In some ways, the religion that many West Africans practiced bears a striking resemble to the practices of Christianity and Judaism. There are however several differences that make it clear that it is its own separate faith. On the plantations in America slaves were taught a “modify” version of Christianity so that they would obey their masters, and often times slaves would hold their own services. Other slaves believed in and practice what was called “conjuration” along with Christianity.

Many people believe that Christians played a great role in abolishing slavery. However, Douglass’ ideas about religion and its connection to slavery shine a light on the dark side of Christianity. Douglass’ account of his own life is a very eloquent first hand retelling of the suffering and cruelty that many slaves were going through. His account gives a detail of the ills that were committed against the slaves. The atrocities committed by the various different masters varied in intensity depending on the masters’ individual personality (Glancy 42). This first hand narrative gives us a glimpse in to the connection between religion (Christianity) and slavery.

African firmly believes that there is a living communion or bond of life which makes for solidarity among members of the same family. Before Christianity, Africans did have their own system of salvation. In traditional religions, salvation can and does take the form of courage to face the reality of morality. The church was looked art as a place for political activity, a source of economic cooperation, an agency of social control, and a refuge in a hostile white world. Slaves worshiped with great enthusiasm. Religion, after all, provided a ready refuge from their daily miseries and kindled the hope that one day their sorrows might end. Planter's actually encouraged religious observances among their slaves hoping that exposure to Christian precepts might make their laborers more docile, less prone to run away, and more cooperative and efficient workers. But slaves turned biblical scriptures to their own purposes forging a theology that often emphasized the theme of liberation. It was easy for them to see, for example, in the figure of Moses a useful model for their own dreams; like the Israelites, they too were ready to cross a River Jordan into a promised land of freedom. The religious services held in the quarters provided slaves with so many positive experiences that, even as they were being exploited, they managed bravely, but perhaps not too surprisingly, to feel that they were free within themselves. In this way slaves began to achieve a degree of liberation well

For almost eight decades, enslaved African-Americans living in the Antebellum South, achieved their freedom in various ways—one being religion—before the demise of the institution of slavery. It was “freedom, rather than slavery, [that] proved the greatest force for conversion among African Americans in the South” (94). Starting with the Great Awakening and continuing long after the abolition of slavery, after decades of debate, scholars conceptualized the importance of religion for enslaved African-Americans as a means of escaping the brutalities of daily life. Overall, Christianity helped enslaved African American resist the degradation

Christianity was new to most slaves who had been abducted from their native country and taken to the Americas. Some were hesitant to abandon their old traditions for the Christ their white captors taught of, but after several generations of slavery, most black slaves had succumbed to relentless preaching. However, the Christianity that took hold within the slave community was often interpreted differently, conveying different messages to pockets of slave population. The use of Christianity in slavery was a double edged sword, creating not only a tool for control, but a weapon of discontent in slave communities. Examining the works of Richard Allen and the stories of Nat Turner, create a narrative of how Christianity was applied differently to slaves.

One of the first things that attracted the African American slaves to Christianity was a way of obtaining the salvation of theirs souls based on the Christian’s idea of a future reward in heaven or punishment in hell, which did not exist in their primary religion. The religious principles inherited from Africa sought purely physical salvation and excluded the salvation of the soul. However, they did believe in one supreme God, which made it easier for them to assimilate Christianity.

The author starts out by describing the harsh situation slaves were put in and how the black experience in America is a history of servitude and resistance, of survival in the land of death. The spirituals are the historical songs which tell us what the slaves did to hold themselves together and to fight back against their oppressors. In both Africa and America, music was directly related to daily life and was an expression of the community’s view of the world and its existence in it. The central theological concept, which is the prime religious factor, in the black spirituals is the divine liberation of the oppressed from slavery. Further, the theological assumption of black slave religion as expressed in the spirituals was that slavery contradicts God, and therefore, God will liberate black people. This factor came from the fact that many blacks believed in Jesus, and therefore, believed that He could save them from the oppression of slavery because of his death and resurrection. The fact that the theme of divine liberation was present in the slave songs is supported by three main assertions: the biblical literalism of the blacks forced them to accept the white viewpoints that implied God’s approval of slavery, the black songs were derived from white meeting songs and reflected the "white" meaning of divine liberation as freeing one from sin (not slavery), and that the spirituals do not contain "clear references to the desire for freedom". The extent of

Slavery is a contradictory subject in American history because “one hears…of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; [while] on the other hand on hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridles power and wide oppression of men” (Dubois 2). Dubois’s The Negro in the United States is an autoethnographic text which is a representation “that the so-defined others

The African Methodist Episcopal Church also known as the AME Church, represents a long history of people going from struggles to success, from embarrassment to pride, from slaves to free. It is my intention to prove that the name African Methodist Episcopal represents equality and freedom to worship God, no matter what color skin a person was blessed to be born with. The thesis is this: While both Whites and Africans believed in the worship of God, whites believed in the oppression of the Africans’ freedom to serve God in their own way, blacks defended their own right to worship by the development of their own church. According to Andrew White, a well- known author for the AME denomination, “The word African means that our church was

It can be assumed that Christianity shaped slave culture in several ways such as developing a common bond among slaves. At the some time, it could also be argued that slavery altered Christianity in various ways including the formation of Methodist and Baptist denominations. However, these were not the only manners in which both cultures had an effect on each other. Black converts dramatically increased the number of Christians in the New World. The ideas instilled in slaves by Christianity gave some slaves thoughts of rebellion and influenced African-American music and dance. Not to mention the church was a major supporter of the proslavery argument which conveyed slavery as a positive thing during the

While black power focuses on the political, social, and economic condition of black people, Black Theology sees black identity from a theological context. Much of black liberation theology’s foundation comes from God's deliverance of Israel from oppression under the Egyptians. According to James Cone, “the consistent theme in Israelite prophecy is Yahweh's concern for "the lack of social, economic, and political justice for those who are poor and unwanted in the society."# The dominate view of Black Liberation theologists is “God in action, delivering the oppressed because of His righteousness. He is to be seen, not in the transcendent way of Greek philosophy, but immanent, among His people." God is "immanent”” because he is present in many historical moments that focus on liberation of the poor. Its derives it beliefs from the fact that in the bible, God often enters human affairs and takes the side of the oppressed, that god is heavily worshipped where human beings experience humiliation and suffering. Because of these beliefs, blacks adopted a gospel relevant to the uplifting of blacks and ending black struggle under white oppression.# Black theology places both our past and present actions toward black liberation in a theological context, eliminating all false Gods and creating value structures according to the God of black freedom.

Another great part of the African culture that was brought to America and kept in practice through African American slaves was religion. An article titled “Slave Resistance and Rhetorical Self-Definition: Spirituals as a Strategy” states that “African American slaves used their spirituals to provide themselves with a rhetorical self-definition that served to refute limiting definitions pressed on them by whites” ( Sanger 1) Religion allowed Africans and African Americans to not only preserve something that was a part of their culture, but also allowed them to have hope and believe in something outside of the constraints that their white masters gave them. Without their masters knowing, slaves could get together and discuss liberty and the judgement of God against people being allowed to own slaves. According to this same

Through out the entire time period of slavery, religion remained a high priority and a way in which to label different social groups. The lack or complete non-existence of religion among Africans led to them being viewed as somewhat inferior. Later in the second chapter Jordan talks about how during the slave era religion distinguished whites from blacks. Also how classification changed once Africans began to enter the Christian church. He himself viewed this type of labeling somewhat ridiculous, in that many of the Africans were baptized before the came to the New World. Thus they in many circles would be identified as Christians. This important information helps show the reader how the justifications for slavery evolved. Jordan captures the utter and blatant hypocrisy that the colonies exuded with regards to the slave situation. Jordan also sees religious injustice within the treatment of Indians and Africans. The English made attempts to convert the Indians and had little desire or intention to do the same for Africans. This again shows to what lengths early Americans went in creating a subculture for the purpose of slavery.

The issue of slavery in the United States has been hotly debated for centuries. Historians continuously squabble over the causes and effects of America’s capitalistic, industrial form of slavery. But two of the most heavily discussed questions are whether the institution of slavery destroyed African culture in America, and whether it reduced slaves to a child-like state of dependency and incompetence. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, and historian Stanley Elkins both weigh in on this debate: Herskovits with, The Myth of the Negro Past, and Elkins with, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. In, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Elkins asserts that African culture was all but destroyed by a repression of the slaves’ rights, at the hands of their masters. He claims that complete dependence on their masters and a lack of collective cultural identity and family bonds, reduced slaves to a child-like state of helplessness and ignorance, and childish behavior called the ‘Sambo’. Herskovits takes a different stance in this debate. In, The Myth of the Negro Past, he claims that African culture was not completely destroyed by slavery, and that the ‘Sambo’ stereotype was no more than a myth or at least a gross generalization. He uses slave revolts and the persistence of African culture in American in music, dance, and language as evidence to prove this.

The ethnocentric ego’s still plagued the African American people, Although, African slavery played an indispensable part in the settlement and development of the United States. The distinctive features of American slavery were the essence of ethnocentrism, a superiority mentality. In America, the home of opportunity and home of the free was the home of bondage for African Americans. Yet, it is said that is on the backs of slaves that many Americans was free to take control of their destiny and to enjoy the American dream of liberty and equality. (Farmer, Degler, De Santis, p. 290)