On the right road to the Promised Land (eBook)

Chapter 1:
One Nation Under God

“The contemporary church is so often a weak,

ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.

It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.,

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963

Steal Away to Jesus

The kidnapping and enslavement of Africans by European colonists led to unique cultural and religious iterations throughout the Western Hemisphere. Colonizers from disparate parts of Europe brought to the Americas and the Caribbean both Roman Catholic and Protestant belief systems and practices. Africans brought with them certain religious and cultural beliefs which incorporated piety toward ancestors, Islam, and harmony with nature.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, one can readily see the conflation of England, France, Portugal, and Spain along with the influence of the Kongo Kingdom, the Senegambia Region, and other parts of West and Central Africa.3 Even in the twenty-first century, the amalgam of European and African religions and cultures persist where Catholicism co-exists alongside Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé, at times without regard to social status.

Upscale Coral Gables, a Miami suburb of millionaires and billionaires, was the scene of a residential Santería ritual in 2008 with ceremonies that included live animal sacrifice. The ceremony was shut down by local police. However, the worshippers and the ceremony were defended vigorously by Oba Ernesto Pichardo, founder of the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye. Pichardo and his family, part of Cuba’s upper class before the Revolution, were introduced to Santería by the family’s enslaved African cook. Moreover, Pichardo and his church won a Supreme Court case where a local municipality sought to criminalize the sacrifice of animals “for any type of ritual.”4

However, the socio-economic construct of slavery in the United States was more monolithic, and it was crueler. According to Judith Weisenfeld in her piece Religion in African History, Europeans justified slavery based on religious principles.5 Slave owners received assurances from the church that the conversion of slaves to Christianity did not mandate their freedom; slaves were taught the Bible required submission to their enslavement; and, in some cases, the Africans were taught enslavement was their destiny as a consequence of the Curse of Ham. The curse, which was placed on Ham’s son Canaan by Ham’s father Noah, has been used throughout history to justify the enslavement of black people.6

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed this in a sermon. King noted there were Christians who supported the idea black people were inferior “by nature” because of the curse of Ham. Pointing out white Christians used this belief to justify segregation, King called the dogma “blasphemous.” Yet, segregation was not the only position white Christians used religion to support. The Christian church undergirded the platform fueling America’s slave-based economy—an economy that positioned the South as the world’s primary cotton and tobacco exporter, with most of those exports earmarked to the dominant world power of the eighteenth century, i.e., Great Britain. In fact, cotton exports totaled more than half the value of all American exports in 1860.7

Slaves were relegated to the status of sub-human chattel, and with the blessing of the church, converting slaves to Christianity was considered missionary work beneficial to the “heathens.” Yet, the form of Christianity imparted to the black American slave differed from that of the slave master. Christianity in the slave economy collaborated to keep the slave “in his place”: as free labor, subjected to brutality so severe even some Europeans were taken aback.8 Slaves were to believe in the master’s God, only without the same benefits from the master’s God.

Thus, the Christian church facilitated a caste system as it related to the African slave brought to the United States and unlike anywhere else in the world. Slave owners could enjoy God’s blessings here on earth and in heaven, whereas the slave was to be obedient and accepting of his or her fate here on earth with the promise of a respite in the great “by and by.”

In many ways, the religion the Christian church imparted to the black American was tantamount to what the slave received as sustenance on the plantation. That is, the best parts of food on the plantation were reserved for the master and his family, whereas the leftovers that were discarded went to the slaves. Their charge was to make palatable that which the master himself would not eat. And so, too, with the master’s religion.

Some white Christians not only wanted a place of preference in the church, but they also wanted assurance of their place of preference in heaven. Weisenfeld noted concern from a slave owner as to whether or not slave owners would be forced to see their slaves in heaven.9 Moreover, the church’s distinction between the privileges it afforded its white and black believers was not limited to the slave economy of the South.

Even in northern locales, the Christian church differentiated between blacks and whites. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were renowned black clergymen of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Part of an integrated Methodist congregation in Philadelphia, they, and other black congregants, were restricted to segregated worship in the gallery and balcony of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Upon completion of prayer, the black congregants left immediately and planted the seeds for what became America’s first independent black church denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

However, in the South, the slave community is where the Christian church emerged as more than just church. As stated by professor Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, it was in the slave quarters where “African Americans organized their own ‘invisible institution.’”10 Through signals, passwords, and messages not familiar to whites, they called believers to “hush harbors” where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity.11 Thus was laid the cornerstones of what became the black American church widely known today.

Over four hundred years since the slave trade’s inception, one can visit a Baptist or Pentecostal church and still hear and see vestiges of the “invisible institutions” that formed the early slave Christian church. From the gospel rhythms that called to mind the African continent, to the whooping style of preaching that continues in the twenty-first century, songs like “Steal Away to Jesus” meant much more to the slave. What is often the basis of modern-day worship services at times served as critical communication for the Underground Railroad.

From its inception, whether in free states or slave quarters, the black American church embodied much more than canons or liturgy. In his book The History of the Negro Church, Carter G. Woodson wrote, “The Negro ministry is … the largest factor in the life of this race.”12 Woodson, the second black American after W. E. B. DuBois to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard University, was called the Father of Black History.

Professor Woodson authored a definitive chronology of the black American church from the time of Christopher Columbus until the twentieth century. The professor expanded on the notion that the European Christian church had to reconcile the dilemma of converting slaves to Christians “because of the unwritten law that a Christian could not be held as a slave.”13 As a consequence, Europe decreed the Africans were to be “indoctrinated to Christian principles.” However, the decrees were left to the slave states to implement, and with commerce a greater priority, such decrees were implemented only nominally.

Nevertheless, the framework was laid for the dichotomy between the Christian church’s role in the lives of the European immigrant and the lives of the African brought to the shores of the United States. With Europeans, the Christian church sponsored the expansion of its territories and its commercial endeavors, and its missionary work supported each of these. With the Africans, the church offered reluctant inculcation to Christian principles without disturbing the established hierarchy and order. These motivations largely formed the DNA of each, i.e., the European-American Christian Church and the black American Christian church.

As an interesting note, on Sunday, June 14, 2020, long-term U.S. Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart appeared on the midday ABC broadcast This Week in South Florida. Addressing the George Floyd murder by a policeman in Minneapolis, the interviewer asked Diaz-Balart whether or not “systemic racism” existed in America. Voicing his emphatic rejection to the premise of the question, Diaz-Balart asserted that “America was founded on the principle of religious freedom.” Yet, as was noted above, the principle of religious freedom did not apply to everyone, especially African slaves. In fact, particular care was given by the church on how to “indoctrinate” blacks to Christianity without giving them the freedoms European immigrants enjoyed. Thus, the conundrum remains in the twenty-first century whether Diaz-Balart’s response was part of his actual belief...