$21.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4681-3

Published: Spring 1998

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Copyright (c) 1998 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Come Shouting to Zion is a study of a paradox. The conversion of African Americans to Protestant Christianity was a, perhaps the, defining moment in African American history, yet, as Peter Wood wrote in 1979, it is "a forgotten chapter in eighteenth-century southern intellectual history."[1] True, portions of the religious landscapes inhabited by the peoples of the early South and the British Caribbean had been mapped by historians writing prior to 1979, but usually they had adopted a decidedly and an unashamedly Eurocentric approach to the subject.[2] Moreover, despite the work of folklorists and African American scholars and churchmen dating back to the late nineteenth century,[3] and the pioneering anthropological studies of Melville J. Herskovits during the 1930s and 1940s,[4] the dominant impression that continued to be conveyed through the 1950s and 1960s by all but a handful of historians was that the religious history of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans began only with the arrival of the slave ships in the ports of the New World, that virtually no West and West Central African religious beliefs and practices of any substance or significance survived either the Middle Passage or the subsequent experience of enslavement in the early South and British Caribbean.[5] Indeed, as recently as 1990 Jon Butler confidently asserted that West and West Central African religious systems were shattered beyond repair as a result of the Middle Passage, a process that he described as a "holocaust"[6] In this bleak scholarly scenario, Africans, African Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans have almost always been depicted as reactive rather than as proactive, as shaped by rather than having helped to shape the Protestant Christianity presented to them by white missionaries.

During the past few years, however, a new and immensely vibrant scholarship has emerged that, without necessarily being wholly and uncritically Afrocentric, places Africans, African Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans at center stage, recognizes the existence and the significance of their agency, and emphasizes both the continuance and the adaption of West and West Central African beliefs and rituals in the shaping of various New World religious cultures.[7]

Come Shouting to Zion builds upon this recent work to offer what we believe are new departures and an original contribution to scholarship on Southern and Caribbean religious history. It takes from Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll and Mechal Sobel's The World They Made Together the lesson that black and white Southerners inhabited the same world and shared many of the same experiences, each shaping the other individually and collectively in tangible and intangible ways.[8] Our initial understanding of West and West Central African religious systems has been greatly informed by the work of anthropologists and comparative religionists, whose analyses of contemporary religious systems offer useful insights into traditional practices.[9] From African historical studies by Robin Horton, T. O. Ranger, Ann Hilton, John Thornton, and others we developed an appreciation of the dynamic and reciprocal nature of cultural interaction and the necessity of differentiating the variable regional and cultural responses to missionary Christianity.[10] The vast recent literature on women's history made us acutely aware of the distinctive roles that women have always played as both guardians of traditional cultures and cultural innovators.[11]

Our starting premise is that religious change was everywhere the product of a reciprocal process rather than of conversion by confrontation. Among the distinguishing characteristics of this entire process were the active agency of Africans, African Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans in their own religious transformation; the simultaneous transformation of white religious cultures as part of the same reciprocal processes by which Africans, African Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans became Christians; and the critical role played by black women in the formation of revival culture, in the creation of affective ritual worship, in the establishment of institutional foundations of the early black church, and in the dissemination of religious values within and between generations. Our concluding proposition is that the spiritual and the material lives of enslaved people were inextricably linked. And we close with an analysis of the ways in which Protestant Christianity influenced the family lives and domestic economies of African American and Afro-Caribbean Christians.

Come Shouting to Zion does not claim to be the definitive work on the subject. Because of the scope of the project, important themes had to be ignored or treated incidentally rather than comprehensively. Topics that have been treated more extensively or in different contexts by other scholars, such as religiously inspired resistance, are given a secondary place here. Informal religion, or the "invisible institution," for which little or no evidence exists for the early period, remains all but invisible in our text. However, we investigate in some depth areas that have been hitherto ignored by other works. Two major developments of the post-Revolutionary period, geographic expansion and the institutional foundations of the black church, receive far greater attention here than in any previous work. African Americans are given a prominent role in both the internal and external migration of religious cultures. The contributions of women constitute a central theme of our analysis.

Whereas earlier studies of black Christianity have tended to take a narrow geographical focus, Come Shouting to Zion takes a broad spatial perspective, incorporating both the American South and three of the major islands of the British Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua. The reasons for doing so are several: first, because of the metropolitan-based institutional links that characterized the Anglican and Moravian missionary activity prior to the American Revolution and the conversion techniques employed by the Moravian, Baptist, and Methodist churches both on the American mainland and in the Caribbean after the Revolution; second, because of the movement of Africans and Europeans in both directions between the British sugar islands and the Southern mainland during and after the colonial and Revolutionary periods; and third, because of the critical significance of African American missionaries in establishing the Baptist and Methodist faiths among the enslaved populations of the British Caribbean during the last two decades of the eighteenth century.

The time frame of our study is equally broad and sweeping. The periodization of black religious history developed by most older works begins around 1750, with the first evangelical efforts to convert slaves.[12] Led by the new scholarship on African conversion we take as our points of departure precolonial West and West Central Africa, the initial places of cultural interaction that comprise the central theme of our book. Our study concludes with 1830, which marks the beginning of the plantation missionary movement originally launched by the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This movement, a massive organized effort at converting slaves at the same time that it seized control of the missionary effort, eventually sent hundreds of white missionaries onto plantations throughout the American South and the British Caribbean.[13]

In the British sugar islands, the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831,[14] apprenticeship, and the eventual ending of slavery in 1838 would produce fundamental alterations and permit and demand the persistence of equally important continuities in the context and contours of religious life.[15] In the Southern mainland, the cumulative effects of Gabriel's Revolt in Virginia, the Vesey Revolt in South Carolina, and Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831, produced a vehement white backlash that manifested itself in stringent measures that severely curtailed the independence of the African churches and the rights of assembly of black Christians. The black preachers who had from the outset dominated the evangelical effort among blacks were virtually stripped of the preaching rights they had claimed and won for themselves.

Some of the South's autonomous African churches survived this purging as did certain ritual and worship practices. But the religious community that finally emerged was fundamentally different from what had gone before. It was largely dominated by white missionaries sent out to teach a more orthodox form of Christianity than had been created by the self-proclaimed black preachers. The institutional structure of the evangelical community took on a new configuration. In many if not most churches white ministers displaced the old black leaders without managing to destroy completely their authority in the slave quarters. The result was the "invisible" black church that Albert Raboteau has described and a visible, predominantly biracial religious community that persisted through Reconstruction. Though its messengers continued to proclaim the doctrine of spiritual brotherhood, the new religious community was structured on the basis of white authority and the fundamental inequality of black Christians.