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Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Timothy L. Smith
Affiliation:
Mr. Smith is professor of history in The John Hopkins University.

Extract

Extensive discussion of the origin and nature of Black Christianity in America has in recent years linked together two issues which are logically distinct: the degree of uniqueness attributable to the beliefs of Afro-Americans, and whether or to what extent their faith sustained resistance to the system of slavery. Abundant evidence that slaveowners hoped Christian instruction would persuade Black people to asquiesce in their bondage has been readily taken for proof that acquiescence was in fact the usual result of their conversion. This questionable conclusion has sometimes led to another: that such religious notions as occasionally inspired resistance were brought from Africa and were uniquely the heritage of Black men. According to this view, the biblical rationales for revolt such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner appear to have employed were merely a gloss upon ideas of freedom and justice which they and their people had long held.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1972

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References

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69. See, again, my earlier study of this matter in Revivalism and Social Reform.

70. See, again, Mays' comments on Nathaniel Paul 's speech of 1827 in The Negro's God, 43–44; and compare Washington, , Politics of God, 156157Google Scholar, rebuking as “pseudoeschatology” and “inauthentic” those passages of the spirituals which offer escape from this world.

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74. Powdermaker, , After Freedom, 230232, 245246, 248Google Scholar, errs only in attributing a more narrow Fundamentalism to the earlier epochs. A volume of Baptist sermons intended to assure white missionaries that their educational labors in the South had not been in vain is the only proto-Fundamentalist work I found in nineteenth-century literature: Brawley, D. D., ed., The Negro Baptist Pulpit: A Collection of Sermons and Papers on Baptist Doctrine and Missionary and Educational Work … (Philadelphia, 1890), 9, 5163, 104112.Google Scholar