African-American Religion

Interpretive Essays in History and Culture

Timothy E. Fulop, Albert J. Raboteau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415914598
• eBook ISBN: 9781136046780
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

African American Religion brings together in one forum the most important essays on the development of these traditions to provide an overview of the field.

MODELS FOR STUDYING AFRICAN-AMERICAN RELIGION

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THE CENTRAL THEMES OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY David W. Wills

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::A common question posed of American religion concerns its distinctiveness, and a common response found in discussions of American religious history is that pluralism and toleration have been in dialectical tension with Puritanism, communitarianism, and collective purpose throughout that history. David Wills makes a thoughtful and suggestive argument that the painful and often ignored encounter of black and white is a third theme that distinguishes the story of American religion from those of other countries.::

::I	THE CENTRAL THEMES OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY Pluralism, Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White

David W. Wills

::What is the religious history of the United States about? One answer, of course, is that it is about the same things as the history of religion everywhere—the human quest for the sacred, perhaps, and its expression in doctrine, practice, and community. The question as it is asked here, however, aims at what is distinctive or at least characteristic about the story of religion in America. It is a question about the central themes that do or should provide the plot lines for American religious history. The answer to this question, if one is to judge from most of the existing literature, is that there are two such themes—(1) pluralism and toleration and (2) Puritanism and collective purpose. The contention of this essay is that there is a third: the encounter of black and white.

PLURALISM AND TOLERATION VS. PURITANISM AND COLLECTIVE PURPOSE

The most common way of telling the tale of the United States’ religious past is to center it on the theme of pluralism and toleration—the existence of religious variety in America and the degree to which it has (or has not) been tolerated and even affirmed. Typically, this version of our religious past tends toward some kind of American triumphalism: the United States has successfully solved the problem of religious diversity, a problem that elsewhere in the world has occasioned persistent repression and/or enduring intercommunal violence. This emphasis on success in the area of religion is often linked, moreover, with a generally triumphalist view of American institutions. The liberalism that has guided our practice of religious liberty is seen to have expressed itself in our political and social life as well.

Not all pluralism and toleration versions of our religious past are identical, however, nor equally upbeat in their assessment of the American experiment. They in fact vary considerably, mostly depending on the point at which genuine pluralism and toleration are seen to have been institutionalized in American life. According to the popular culture’s cult of Thanksgiving and some of the older more filiopietistic histories of the colonial period, religious liberty was established at the center of our religious life as soon as the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Those who know anything of the history of religious establishments in the thirteen colonies, most especially in New England, know that this is a fantasy. More commonly, therefore, it is the adoption of the Constitution, above all the passage of the First Amendment, which is seen as the crucial landmark in the emergence of a normative religious pluralism in America. In this account, the colonial period was a time of struggle against repressive old-world establishmentarianism, but in our moment of birth as a nation we broke free of that past into an era when diversity was embraced and liberty made the religious law of the land.

Still other versions of the pluralism and toleration tale, however, suggest that the constitutional separation of church and state was merely a stage on the way to a genuine pluralism that had not yet arrived in the early national period. After all, religious establishments were still possible at the state level and they endured, in however attenuated form, in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Elsewhere, moreover, legal barriers sometimes remained to Catholic and to Jewish participation in political office-holding and everywhere a kind of normative WASPness prevailed. On this account, it was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as wave after wave of immigration eroded the Protestant predominance, that true religious diversity emerged as both fact and norm in American life. Writing of the post-World War I era, surveyors of American religious history who follow this line typically speak of “a post-Protestant America” or a new “age of religious pluralism.”

Others, however, are persuaded that not even the twenties saw the real triumph of pluralism and toleration in the United States. The unhappy fate of Catholic Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is, according to this view, a vivid symbol of the persistence of exclusionary religious prejudice—and power. Only in the 1960s, it is sometimes proposed, was the full promise of our constitutional religious liberty realized. A Catholic at last occupied the White House, and in a decade of profound cultural upheaval, the hard crust of a repressive Protestantism was broken through and a thousand flowers of religion, both Eastern and Western, were allowed to bloom. Even this version, however, is prematurely celebratory for some. They suggest that while America in the 1960s may for a moment have repented of its past sins of intolerance, there has been a good deal of backsliding since. We are therefore still pilgrims on the path to the pluralist promised land. But perhaps it is just around the next cultural corner.

If those who stress the pluralism and toleration theme may be said to vary primarily in their optimism about when the American experiment in religious liberty was—or will be—fully realized, interpreters of our past who emphasize Puritanism may be classified according to their degree of pessimism about when the Puritan legacy either was—or will be—fully dissipated. Generally they agree that in its origins the American experiment was not so much an experiment in religious liberty as an attempt at a holy commonwealth. Whatever their sins of oppression against religious dissenters, this account suggests, the Puritans had an admirable sense of common purpose that stands in favorable contrast to the prevailing privatism and individualism of much of our subsequent history—including our religious history. Before they had even set foot in Massachusetts, the Puritans were advised by Governor John Winthrop that if they wished to succeed in building their “city upon a hill,” they “must be knit together in this work as one man … as members of the same body.” Puritanism, however, together with its strong sense of collective purpose, was destined to go downhill in America from this promising beginning. According to the gloomiest accounts, Puritanism scarcely outlived the generation that brought it to the New World. The settlers’ children and their children’s children went from Puritan to Yankee, as crass commercialism dissolved religious bonds and individual material goals supplanted common spiritual purpose.

Not all such accounts, however, are this pessimistic. Some contend that the Puritan legacy endured through the eighteenth century, decisively shaping the public-spirited patriotic zeal of the revolutionary years, the constitutional era’s quest for “a more perfect union,” and the new nation’s sense of its historic mission. Only in the early nineteenth century, these interpreters suggest, was the Puritan legacy at last dissipated, as an orgy of revivalist religion, political democracy, and economic and geographical expansion set the country on its incurably individualist way. Still others, moreover, claim that even these accounts underestimate Puritanism’s durability in American religion, especially in shaping our most deeply shared views of national destiny. Did not the Civil War, they ask, especially on the northern side, involve a great renewal of a broadly Puritan sense of collective purpose, enunciated with unsurpassed eloquence by Lincoln? Only later, they suggest, with the collapse of Calvinist orthodoxy as an intellectually respectable tradition and the more or less complete immersion of the country in the “great barbecue” of postwar economic development and the nascent culture of consumption, did the Puritan era in American culture finally come to a close.

It is a curious feature of the history of American Puritanism, however, that its demise seems to be announced afresh in every generation. For some, it was only the antibourgeois cultural revolt of the 1920s that at last broke the iron grip of Puritanism on the American spirit. Others, however, found in the extraordinary revival of scholarly interest in and appreciation for Puritanism in the 1930s the neo-Puritan spirit of much Protestant neo-orthodoxy and in the corporatist ethos of the New Deal signs that the Puritan impulse was not yet played out. Some thought the end came only in the 1960s. Sydney Ahlstrom, for example, at the conclusion of his massive Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), suggested that the Puritan Age in Anglo-American religious history lasted from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the decade that began with the election of John F. Kennedy. Others think the end is still not yet upon us, though presumably, sometime in the aftermath of the Reagan era, we can expect to hear again that the Puritan era in American cultural and religious history is, at long last, over.

For all their differences of tone and emphasis, the pluralism and toleration version of our religious past and the Puritanism and collective purpose way of telling the story have much in common. Indeed, it is relatively easy to combine them by seeing them as two sides of the same story: Puritanism’s loss is pluralism and toleration’s gain. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to resolve the question of which of these two interpretations is more adequate or how they might be combined. It is rather to suggest that whether together or alone these two ways of understanding our religious past are inadequate to one of the central realities of our history—the encounter of black and white.

THE SOUTHERN THEME: THE ENCOUNTER OF BLACK AND WHITE

One of the easiest and most vivid ways to see what is left out by the two prevailing accounts of our religious past is to ask—literally—where in the colonial era they begin their stories. New England is clearly the primary locus of early American Puritanism, and Puritan-centered stories of American religious history characteristically spend a great deal of time on the founding and initial development of the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies. The religious and political ideas of such Puritan leaders as John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Thomas Shepard are traced out in meticulous detail and the workings of the Puritan family, church, and polity analyzed with great care. In this sometimes stony New England soil, it is suggested, lie our deepest religious and cultural roots.

The pluralism and toleration story, however, more characteristically begins in the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Granted, there is an important chapter of this story which also occurs in New England—the chapter centering on Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. But the pluralistic and tolerant Rhode Island colony clearly lies at the margin of the New England story, whereas the normative diversity of Pennsylvania (and West Jersey) and the moral de facto pluralism of New York (and East Jersey) constitute the very center of the religious history of the middle colonies. The contrast is further reinforced if one compares the remarkable ethnic homogeneity of colonial New England to the English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and German mixture of the Middle Atlantic area. For those to whom the story of American religion centers on the positive embracing of diversity, that story is best seen to begin in the middle colonies.

What, then, about the Southern colonies? Where do they fit in either of the prevailing stories? Attempts have been made to win the interpretive game, as it were, two-to-one, by assimilating the southern story into that of one of the other two sections. It has sometimes been suggested, for example, that the dominant ethos of both early southern Anglicanism and southern dissent was, in the broadest sense, Puritan, and that the religious history of these colonies may therefore be subsumed rather easily under the New England story. Since colonial southern Protestantism is generally regarded as a less potent cultural force than the northern version, it can be argued that it makes sense to study Puritanism primarily in its intense New England form rather than in its somewhat diffuse southern version. Knowing, for example, that the son of Boston’s John Cotton went to Charles Town, South Carolina, to serve as a Congregationalist pastor, helps us to be aware of the Puritan presence in the South, but it is still the father and not the son who is of primary interest to us.

Attempts have also been made, however, to interpret the early religious history of the South as essentially another phase in the history of pluralism and toleration. Indeed, on occasion it has been proposed that the South itself is the real heartland for this theme. In such accounts, the middle colonies tend to disappear altogether, and a cosmopolitan, tolerant, Jeffersonian South is contrasted to a parochial, intolerant, Puritan North. That Virginia and Virginians should have played such an important role in the institutionalization of religious liberty in the constitutional era (e.g., through the state’s adoption of the separationist Statute on Religious Liberty in 1785 and James Madison’s shaping of the First Amendment a few years later) is here presented as the predictable flowering of a southern sensibility that has made its peace with religious diversity in a way that the northern conscience had not. America, it is suggested, began in Virginia.

If this is true, however, it seems odd to leave entirely out of account in defining the central themes of America’s religious history the extraordinary black presence in Virginia and elsewhere in the South. Once the slave labor system had become established in the late seventeenth century, there was a rapid increase in the southern colonies’ black population, so much so that in the eighteenth century parts of the Chesapeake area and all of the Carolina low country were characterized by a black majority. Under these circumstances, it seems highly questionable to characterize colonial southern religion solely on the basis of the religion of white Southerners—or to see as its central theme either the presence of diluted Puritanism or the triumph of a benign pluralism.

Is it not more plausible to see as the central theme of religion in the colonial South the encounter of black and white? This is, in a sense, a negative theme. It is the story of a distance, a gap. The Puritan colonies contained many dissenters and even more of what might be called the lukewarm. In the middle colonies, English and German Protestants sometimes had trouble understanding one another—literally—and there were in this regi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Models for Studying African-American Religion
• Part II Slave Religion
• Part III The Black Church North of Slavery
• Part IV Emancipation, Mission, and Black Destiny
• Part V Urbanization, New Religious Movements, and Social Activism
• Part VI African-American Religious Culture
• Permissions
• Notes on Contributors