Title: The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau
Abstract: Abstract “The Visible Church” is a broad survey of the field of African American religion in the Atlantic world that has emerged in the quarter century since Albert Raboteau's seminal text, Slave Religion, first appeared. It focuses on a relatively small number of works that have fundamentally changed or conceptually displaced the three major categories of analysis—survivals, creolisation and revisionism—that have dominated the historiographical landscape since 1978. Notes 1. The literature falls naturally into five different historical periods: African religions; African American religion under slavery; the nineteenth century/Reconstruction; African American religion in the Civil Rights era; and non-Christian religious traditions. Reconstruction and the twentieth century are not relevant to the period embraced by Raboteau's Slave Religion and are not considered here. 2. Greene, “Beyond Power,” 321, 325–327, 330. 3. Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World; Bastide, African Religions of Brazil. 4. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. 5. Klein, The Middle Passage; Rubin and Tuden, Comparative Perspectives on Slavery; Degler, Neither Black Nor White; Inikori and Engerman, Forced Migration. More recent studies include: Manning, Slavery and African Life; Berlin and Morgan, The Slaves' Economy; Berlin and Morgan, Cultivation and Culture; Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade. The interest in historical demography has also produced two important databases: Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Hall, Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. 6. Raboteau, Slave Religion, xi. 7. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past; Frazier, The Negro in the United States. 8. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 328. 9. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy; Parrinder, African Traditional Religions; Ray, African Religions; Booth, African Religions; Muzorewa, Origins and Development of African Theology. 10. Horton, “African Conversions.” The critique of the ‘timeless’ character and the direct quote are from Ranger and Weller, Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa, 6–8, 10; Ranger et al., Historical Studies of African Religions. For a more recent work by Robin Horton see Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion, and Science. 11. For a survey of the Catholic Church in Kongo, see Thornton, “Development of an African Catholic Church.” For early Capuchin missions, see Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo; Gray, “Como vero Prencipe Catolico'.” For Protestant missionary activity, see Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries; Wills and Newman, Black Apostles at Home and Abroad; Sanneh and Carpenter, The Changing Face of Christianity; Frey & Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 27–34. 12. See, e.g., MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 63–135; Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 251. 13. Thornton, “Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo,” 509, 512, 514. In a later article, Thornton attributed the success of the Portuguese missionaries to the fact that “Kongo and Portugal were of the same world” (see Thornton, “Early Kongo-Portuguese Relations: A New Interpretation,” 188). 14. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo; Thornton, “Development of an African Catholic Church,” 152–154; Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 50–65, 90–103, esp. 94, 102. 15. Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa. 16. Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History: quote is on p. xix; see also pp. 63, 183–184, 198–199. See also Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal; Robinson, Paths of Accommodation. For more comprehensive treatments of African Islam, see Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies; Levtzion and Pouwels, The History of Islam in Africa. 17. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 87–101, quotes are on 112, 113. 18. Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture. 19. Sobel, Trabelin' On, 58–75. 20. Sobel, The World They Made Together, 213–214. 21. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 255. Sweet (Recreating Africa, 106 n.9, 248) rejects the ‘Christian paradigm’ that informs the work of ‘devout’ scholars who seek to demonstrate Christian elements in African thought by ‘finding Christianity where it did not exist’. He takes issue with scholars like Hilton and Sobel who stress overlapping cosmologies, and stresses the differences between European and African cosmologies, and also with Thornton for ‘emphasizing revelations over the broader cosmology’ (Recreating Africa, 109–114). African and European cosmologies were largely incompatible and Catholic priests validated only ‘a very small number of Kongolese revelations’, with the vast majority being rejected as ‘diabolical’. Those Kongolese who embraced Catholicism did so largely on their own terms, ‘persisting in their beliefs in indigenous African forms’ (Recreating Africa, 110). 22. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 163, 204–205, 254; Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony. 23. Ira Berlin's highly praised essay ‘From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America’ located the origin of black life in North America in the meeting between Africans and Europeans on the West coast of Africa and later in Atlantic slave societies. Berlin's primary focus was not on religion, but the workplace as the ‘seat of social change’, but the process he described gave a somewhat different shape to the creolisation paradigm. ‘Atlantic creoles’ were the products of this first meeting of Africans and Europeans in Africa. Labeled the ‘charter generation’ by Berlin, they became Africans in the Americas at different rates in different places, depending on geography, demography, economics and societies, and only later African Americans 24. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 184–192. 25. Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora,” 6. 26. Older studies, such as Palmer, Slaves of the White God, and Palmer, “Religion and Magic in Mexican Slave Society,” touch only briefly on conversion. 27. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 13, 27, 94–96, 101–103 and passim. 28. Sweet, Recreating Africa, quotes on 192, 229. 29. Lovejoy, “African Diaspora,” 15–16. See, e.g., Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage, 134–135. Kuyk relies on Philip Curtin's ‘shot in the dark’ estimate of 54,000 people of ‘purely African culture’ smuggled into the United States illegally following the ending of the international slave trade in 1808 to 1861, to make her case for the renewal of cultural knowledge of people of African descent. 30. Murphy, Working the Spirit, 45. 31. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 197, 198, 200, 202–203, 205–210; see also Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 148–149. 32. Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. For the importance of West Central African influence in South Carolina, see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 114. 33. Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, 7, 8–10. 34. McCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting,” 64–89; Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow. 35. MacGaffey, “Twins, Simbi Spirits and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti.” 36. Vanhee, “Central African Popular Christianity,” 245, 249, 253, 258–264; the quote is on p. 248. 37. Rey, “Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism,” 269, 272, 273, 285; the quote is on p. 266. 38. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival, 239. 39. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 15–22, 46–50, 92–93, 138; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 65–72. 40. Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion. 41. Michael Gomez has complained about ‘how retarded the scholarship on North American slavery really is’ by comparison to Latin America (see Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 113). 42. Creel, “A Peculiar People”; see also Joyner, Down by the Riverside; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. The anthropologist, William S. Pollitzer (The Gullah People and Their African Heritage, 104) refers to Gullah language and culture as the ‘most African in the United States’ – a fact disputed by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, whose Africans in Colonial Louisiana characterised New Orleans as the ‘most African city in America’. 43. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 152–153. 44. Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage, 133–135, 139; quote is on p. xix. 45. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 232. 46. Karasch, “Central Africans in Central Brazil,” 120–122. 47. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival; see also Sensbach, A Separate Canaan, 140–143. 48. Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 104–105, 107, 135, 163. 49. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 90–92. 50. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 83–84, 87, 217, 285 n.14. 51. Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind; Lyerly, “Religion, Gender and Identity”; Heyrman, Southern Cross, 223–252; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 171–172. For similar developments in New England, see Juster, Disorderly Women, 107–108, 112–114, 127–128, 161, 130–134, 145–179. 52. Early studies of African preaching that explore the issues of theology, homiletic theory and diverse cultural expressions virtually ignored female preaching (see, e.g., Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America). Scholars of the history of rhetoric have begun to explore African American preaching with particular attention to the experiences of black women both as congregants and preachers (see, e.g., Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, 96–127; Logan, “Black Women on the Speaker's Platform”; Kim, Women Preaching). 53. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 132–134; see also Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 169–171. Rebecca Larson (Daughters of Light Quaker Women) points out that Quakers were one of the few denominations that consistently allowed women to preach, but she does not discuss black female Quakers. William L. Andrews chronicles the ministries of Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, and Zilpha Elaw, in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Also see: Humez, Gifts of Power; Painter, Sojourner Truth; Moody, Sentimental Confessions. 54. Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage, 88, 99. 55. Gilkes, “If It Wasn't for the Women …”; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. 56. See, e.g., Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’.” 57. Clark, “‘By All the Conduct of Their Lives’”; Clark and Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans”; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 106–135. 58. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon, 113; Hanger, Bounded Lives, 105–106. 59. Le Glaunec, “The Formation of a Peculiar Afro-Catholic Slave Community in Antebellum Louisiana. Database Project Slave Baptisms 1800–1802 St. Louis Cathedral,” unpublished. 60. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 106–135; Clark, “Masterless Mistresses.” 61. Gould and Nolan, No Cross on Earth, No Crown in Heaven; Gould, “Piety, Social Activism and the Dynamics of Race”; Gould, “Sisters of Mercy.” 62. Sylviane Diouf's estimate of the total number of enslaved Muslims of 2.25–3 million sent to the Americas and the Caribbean is based on Allan Austin's figures for 1701–1810 (see Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America, 32–36). There are a number of published autobiographies of Muslims, including Austin's collection of primary records by and on 65 Muslims brought to North America between 1730 and 1860 (see Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America). 63. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 38. 64. For a recent work on the subject, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 87–101 65. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 60–62, 73, 81. Gomez concedes that Islam's most lasting impact in North America might be in the process of social stratification within the larger African American community (see also Gomez, Black Crescent). 66. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 58–59, 64–65, 81–86. For brilliant visual evidence of Muslim persistence, see Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Bresil, 71–102. See also Sweet (Recreating Africa, 181–186), which links the bolsa de mandinga to persistent Muslim influence. 67. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 181–186; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 79–81. 68. Mitchell, Black Belief, 31. See also Palmer, Slaves of the White God, whose chapter, “Religion and Magic in Mexican Slave Society” (pp.144–166), treats magical practices and religion as a dichotomy. See Butler (Awash in a Sea of Faith, 67–97), which recognises the “subtle exchanges” between occultism and evangelical Christianity and occultism, but tends to treat magic and religion as a dichotomy. 69. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 212, 276–277. Some recent works continue to detach supernatural practices from religion, see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 284–290; Hopkins and Cunnimgs, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, 93. 70. Chireau, Black Magic; Chireau, “Uses of the Supernatural,” 10. Chireau suggests that black women were instrumental in preserving traditional forms of supernatural practice, such as conjuring, which one recent scholarly work describes as ‘an underground religious economy’. 71. Fett, Working Cures, 84–108, esp. 103. Ina Johanna Fandrich (The Mysterious Voodoo Queen) treats Louisiana voodoo as a hybrid religion imported from Africa (Benin, Eastern Nigeria and Kongo), but with important Catholic elements. 72. Wilmore's Black Religion and Black Radicalism is one of the most important contributions of the Black Theology movement. 73. Thornton, The Kongolese St Anthony, esp. 210–214; Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” 74. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt,” 528. Slave revolts on Sundays and holidays were common throughout the Americas. As Joao Jose Reis points out, the 1835 slave rebellion in Bahia also began on Sunday, the feast of Our Lady of Guidance (see Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil, 73). 75. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 289–318, quote is from p. 289; see also Egerton, He Shall Go Free, 221; Mullin, Africa in America, 241–267; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 66, 93–94, 112–114. 76. Metcalf, “Millenarian Slaves?”. 77. Older studies done by some of the leading proponents of revisionism themselves subscribed to the creolisation model (see, e.g., Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 146). 78. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 459–476; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 58–62, 146–147. 79. Chireau, Black Magic; Chireau, “Uses of the Supernatural,” 171–188. 80. See, e.g., L. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil”; see also Slenes, “The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike,” 186, 188 n.15. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSylvia R. FreySylvia R. Frey is Professor Emerita at Tulane University
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 34
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot