When you hear the word faith in relation to the history of African Americans in the United States, what do you imagine? Do you see a preacher, or a gospel choir, or imagine a church mother in a resplendent hat?
These images, while valid depictions of the Black church, are not the only measures of how faith informs and shapes the history of African American life.
For African Americans, faith has not been simply about belief in a deity. By necessity, it has also been about having the faith to fight for freedom, faith in showing the shortcomings of democracy, faith in finding hope during struggle, and protecting the community. It was also the only way, for many years, to organize and establish places of worship or set up businesses.
In the American context, many equate African American religion with Protestant Christianity. Yet, faith isn’t limited to a particular religious tradition or organized religion. It is an intentional practice of believing. The history of African Americans’ personal faith and organized faith traditions is what has sustained them in their tumultuous history in America.
It is impossible to speak about the history of faith and African American life without speaking of the brutal realities of the Atlantic slave trade and slaveholding in America. Africans who were captured and sold into slavery from ports in West Africa came to the Americas from rich traditions steeped in different African religious practices, like Vodun.
Some of the enslaved, like Omar Ibn Said, were Muslim, and still others were from places like Congo and had been introduced to Christianity in Africa. Examples of the longevity of these religious traditions can be seen in the practices of the Gullah people in South Carolina, who have shared their traditions like rice growing, ring shouts, and burial practices from enslavement to the 21st century.
Faith also defined the involvement and influence of African Americans in the struggle for equality and freedom. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both important members of the freed Black community in Philadelphia, left St. George’s United Methodist Church over the racism there. Both Allen and Jones would establish churches: Allen starting Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Jones establishing the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.
To wrest Mother Bethel from the attempts of the white Methodist group to gain control over it, Allen would use the legal system, incorporating the church in 1796 and then fighting to keep control of it from the larger white Methodist denomination. Faith, as well as acumen, would give him the determination to see the legal process through to incorporation in Pennsylvania.
Today, the AME denomination is a worldwide church, estimated to have more than two million members.
Faith would also play a role in establishing organizations within the African American community.
Schools in the 19th and early 20th century found their formation in religious organizations post-Civil War. Clergy would pair with white denominations to form schools such as Spellman and Morehouse. Other organizational structures formed by religious communities would include insurance organizations, funeral homes, fraternities, and sororities. The best-known organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would also find pastors and religious figures in the initial call for its formation.
Faith leaders from various religious communities were also instrumental in reminding and challenging white leadership of the promises of democracy and freedom in our founding documents.
In the 20th century, new religious movements such as Garveyism, Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s peace movement would all organize as a counternarrative to the harsh conditions of racism and Jim Crow in American life. All these movements offered an alternative narrative of not only uplift but also promoted different visions of race through religion that drew followers who questioned the merits of white Protestantism for African Americans.
Of course, we cannot forget the role of faith in the civil rights movement. While it is obvious to think of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it is important to remember that King not only found his voice through Christianity, but through the principle of satyāgraha, soul force, coined by Mohandas Gandhi, the famous Hindu leader who promoted nonviolent struggle that formed the foundations of the civil rights movement. Diane Nash, who was Catholic and considered being a nun before becoming an activist while at Fisk College in Nashville, would become an important part of the movement — along with figures like the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who was enrolled in divinity school before joining the movement.
All of these are very brief examples from a very diverse history of faith in the African American community that was not only about individual belief, but many times served as a counter to the racism of religious communities in America that treated African Americans as second-class citizens.
Suppressing this history by altering it or calling it DEI does an injustice to the history of faith-based organizing in America.
African Americans’ faith, and the challenges they brought to bear on the racial issues of America, highlighted the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Now, more than ever, we need that faith to sustain us during the 250th anniversary of America.
Anthea Butler is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania.
