What Has the Black Church to do with Public Life?

A. Pinn

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137380500
• eBook ISBN: 9781137376954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christianity
• Index: Social Sciences

The role in public life of religious organizations such as black churches has been a contested and heated topic, with their advocates calling for them to have a major place in public discourse and their critiques demanding their silence in public if not their total destruction. This book offers a creative and compelling way to think about this dilemma. Unlike some, it does not deny the effort on the part of such organizations to be involved in public discourse and public policy; instead, it argues this interest is insufficient. Drawing attention to the basic elements of organizations such as black churches theology, organizational hierarchy, and so on Pinn argues these churches (and other religious organizations by extension) are not structured in such a way as to allow participation in the public arena in ways that appreciate and nurture the diversity of that arena. Instead, Pinn calls for recognition of their value in the private life of some, but their failure to have usefulness within the public arena.

1

Early Efforts to Be Black and Christian in Public

Abstract: This chapter explores the effort of black churches to shape the public presentation of African Americans in ways that would present African Americans as “acceptable” and consistent with existing socio-political standards for citizenship. In this way, it points out the activities that gave rise to the assumption that black churches are the best means by which to address the public needs and desires of African Americans. The period covered in this chapter extends to Reconstruction.

Pinn, Anthony B. What Has the Black Church to Do with Public Life? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137376954.

In 1842, a former slave from Raleigh, North Carolina, received assistance in writing a letter to a small paper in Brooklyn, New York. In the letter, he outlined the details of his financial effort to purchase his freedom and that of his family—wife and children. What is rather intriguing about the letter is the importance he places on membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and this is accompanied by a rather nebulous recognition of assistance received. “They,” the letter remarks, “earnestly thank God for thus answering their prayers, compassionating them in their distress, and crowning their efforts with the desired prosperity . . .”¹ This framing of church participation and the outcomes of such involvement in religious life and religious community is a common sentiment within early African American communities.

For example, some years prior to the above statement being written, Richard Allen, the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, outlined the significance of church membership with respect to more than spiritual renewal. He noted the capacity of these churches to inform and influence both the private—health of the soul—and public dimensions of individual and collective life. By that he meant black churches held the capacity to improve the spiritual well-being of people of African descent as well as to foster within them the traits and characteristics, the moral and ethical postures, necessary for their efforts to secure physical freedom and full participation in the life of the Nation.

In this way, church buildings were to serve a variety of purposes: locations for preaching the gospel, spaces of spiritual fellowship, places for the nurturing of morality and discipline, and sites for the advancement of social sensibilities. These three taken together—proper knowledge, spiritual well-being, and proper conduct—would ultimately, Allen and others believed, push the larger society to embrace African Americans as equals with full rights and responsibilities. This is not to say Allen and others associated with early black churches believed that people of African descent were depraved and inferior in any inherent way. To the contrary, they understood the manner in which the system of slavery and racial discrimination limited opportunities for moral and ethical conduct and forced the refining of the worst traits in both white colonists and people of African descent. One key target in correcting this predicament involved the manner in which anti-black racism challenged private relationships, with wide implications.

Morality and public life

As part of this religiously fueled reconstitution of individuals and communities, many African American church leaders gave attention to the proper structuring and management of families. The “cult of true womanhood” and theory of domesticity were praised as a posture toward the world and philosophy of family whereby women were relegated to home as the proper arena for their influence and men to the public spheres of life. The formation of familial relationships was of deep importance to enslaved Africans in North America, and they worked to foster such relationships to the best of their ability and within the strictures of the slave system. However, churches provided a space in which this effort was affirmed and where theological and ritual structures were in place to enhance the value of this effort.

This familial arrangement in line with dominate perceptions of gender and social roles required a moral and ethical base, in the case of African Americans, an exorcising of the worst life habits encouraged by enslavement and anti-black racism. Therefore, reasonable and productive life in relationship to others—both publicly and in the privacy of one’s family and friends—demanded possession of a moral compass and ethical posture toward the world consistent with the best teachings of the Christian faith and expressed in the doctrine and practices of the Christian churches. In short, many of these earlier churches took upon themselves a public ministry revolving around moral reform and socio-political activism (to the extent circumstances allowed). It was understood churches needed to be both physical space and intellectual space offering mechanisms for advancing educational skills, social talents and capacities, as well as shaping opinions on public issues such as abolition and democratic vision.

White preachers and Christian slaveholders often advanced the need for modesty and conservative conduct, but that was meant to safeguard the structures of enslavement. In opposition to this conformist thinking, for Richard Allen and others like him, moral reform was intended to serve as a force against enslavement and socio-political marginality. And, through religious services, gatherings, and sermons, proper moral conduct was described and practiced as a model for approaches to life outside the sanctity of worship. With no access to the written word because of laws against teaching enslaved Africans to read and write, performance and modeling of conduct as a lived expression of religious doctrine and creeds had to take precedence over written codes of morality and ethics.

The sermon became a prime opportunity to expound the virtues of the Christian faith and the manner in which it targets and corrects immoral and unethical behavior. What is more, the Christian faith was assumed able to challenge groups to live out the best elements of their character. George Liele, who would become an important Baptist minister, recounted the way in which a sermon convicted him and pointed to his moral defects: “The Rev. Mr. Matthew Moore, one Sabbath afternoon, as I stood with curiosity to hear him,” Liele reflects, “unfolded all my dark views, opened my best behaviour and good works to me, which I thought I was to be saved by, and I was convinced that I was not in the way to heaven, but in the way to hell.”²

Religion, in general, and churches in particular were believed to have the vision, capacity, and commitment to point out these deficiencies in white colonists and people of African descent. Hence, early black church leaders understood the necessity of critiquing and correcting the practices and attitudes within communities of both whites and blacks. For instance, the hypocrisy of Christian claims by those very persons supporting the system of slavery was not lost on African American Christians—who critiqued this moral and ethical failure and proposed an alternate approach to individual and collective life. Whites, these churches and church leaders argued, must dismantle socio-economic and political structures that require and feed on the dehumanization of people of African descent; and, the latter must refine the traits and capacities necessary for full and productive participation in the life of the United States. Added to this was recognition that these black churches—despite some opposition and push back from whites and white denominations—in most cases, were the only spaces in which African Americans felt a significant degree of ownership over their time and intent, spaces where their own desires and needs guided their agendas. Many have argued that it was within these religious spaces where people of African descent knew their humanity; their worth was assumed to be in place and of deep significance. This recognition of human agency might have inspired blacks, but it raised concerns for whites interested in maintaining the status quo.

A morality tale at work

Resistance by whites due to fear that religious freedom might promote a desire for physical freedom and equality, combined with verification of this fear through religiously inspired and fueled slave revolts meant limited access to enslaved African Americans on plantations in the South and great difficulty for enslaved and free African Americans in the North. Yet, the number of African American Baptists and Methodists grew in both independent African American churches and white-led churches as a consequence of the first Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) and the second Great Awakening (roughly 1790s–1860s).

Targeting different regions of the nation, these spiritual revivals brought large numbers of people into churches that expressed their spiritual commitments with energy. For example, according to historian Albert Raboteau, prior to the development of the African Methodist Episcopal Church denomination, the Methodist Episcopal denomination claimed roughly 11,600 African American members in 1790. Less than a decade later, the number was over 12,215—representing roughly one-fourth the total Methodist membership. Some estimates put the number of African American Baptists at 18,000 by 1793. And the number would increase to 40,000 by 1813.³

In addition to influential local churches, the nineteenth century also ushered in the development of more advanced African American religious organizational structures. More to the point, the effectiveness of black churches in spreading the story of their purpose and importance is marked most graphically by the growth experienced by independent African American denominations—with hierarchies and structures pushing beyond localized demographics—before the end of the nineteenth century. For example, African American Methodists developed denominations that covered numerous states. Furthermore, African American Baptists began developing regional associations—e.g., Providence Association in Ohio (1834) and the Wood River Association in Illinois (1839)⁴—meant to better utilize limited resources in ways that maximized potential for executing public agendas related to moral and political advancement. These regional associations would eventually give rise to national Baptist conventions, starting in 1895 with the National Baptist Convention, USA.

Based, to some degree, on these and other structural developments, many African Americans found church a place to address a variety of life circumstances and concerns. Ministers often encouraged this expansive approach to church responsibility and obligation through sermons as well as programs meant to address the enhancement of character and transformation of the socio-political workings of the Nation.

Church activities and thought generally reflected optimism regarding the potential of the United States to live out its most profound principles as well as hammered home the value of hard work and moral correctness as means by which to secure full participation in the inner workings of public life. In essence, this strategy was three pronged: (1) critique and corrective to the patterns of discrimination impacting African Americans; (2) promotion in African Americans of the characteristics, sensibilities, and moral outlook believed necessary for full citizenship; (3) advancement of organizational structures meant to shape and promote churches’ public agenda.

Some African American Christians found this approach too slow-moving and without the desired effect. As an alternate approach, slave revolts—while maintaining a Christian ethos—spoke forcefully to a critique and corrective of discriminatory patterns. According to historian Gayraud Wilmore, revolts of varying size took place in noteworthy quantities after 1800 in the South. Methodist Denmark Vesey and Baptist Nat Turner led two of the most (in)famous of these revolts. Vesey’s took place in 1822, and it was rumored that the African Methodist Episcopal Church played some role in the plot, with one of the denomination’s ministers—Morris Brown—providing advice and aid. Turner understood his 1831 revolt as a mission consistent with religious ministry and demanded by his faith’s call to righteousness. Although the damage done by such revolts was minimal, they loomed large in the popular imagination of citizens and pointed to the synergy between religious commitment and public protest.

While figures such as Maria Stewart (the first African American woman to lecture publicly on political issues—Boston, 1831) utilized this style of rhetoric, the slave revolts presented—in word and deed—the most graphic Jeremiad in that they gave physical form to the demand for justice as the only means by which to avoid destruction and judgment. Morality and ethics were linked by the Jeremiad (based on the proclamations made by the Hebrew Bible prophet Jeremiah) through a justice/advancement and injustice/destruction motif. Tied to this Jeremiad was often a sense of chosen-ness, a special place and status for African Americans in that they are God’s people who will be freed from bondage. However, it spoke also more generally to loyalty “both to the principles of egalitarian liberalism and to the Anglo-Christian code of values.” In light of the demands of God concerning human conduct, anti-black racism violated both natural and divine law.⁵

In addition to actions on the part of African Americans and their supporters, church members and leaders provided more coded critiques and correctives in sermons and through the ritual structures of their churches. For example, sermons—even when whites were present—often spoke to a need for moral correctness consistent with the ministry of Jesus the Christ. That is, these sermons often called out hypocrisy: the practices of the larger society did not jibe with the demands of the faith its supporters claimed. Furthermore, it was understood this critique could not be one directional in nature.

Black churches also had an obligation to equip African American Christians with the tools necessary for spiritual health and physical well-being in the existential spheres of public life. For instance, fueled with spiritual warning, Richard Allen’s attention to moral reform meant a warning to young men to avoid bad examples. “Drunkenness hurls reason from the throne, and when she has fallen,” he announces, “Vice st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Early Efforts to Be Black and Christian in Public
• 2  Growing a Religious Agenda for Public Life
• 3  The Golden Age of Black Churches in Public
• 4  The Black Churchs Public ProfileAn Assessment
• 5  Testing My Claim: A Response to Religious Progressives
• 6  Restating the Claim
• Selected Bibliography
• Index