The most sustained rejoinder to this assertion came in Gayraud Wilmore's Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1992), in which Wilmore outlined a longstanding relationship between African-American religious leaders (mostly evangelical) and a commitment to political protest against slavery and inequality. In the early 1970s, scholars bolstered by Marxist philosophy (such as Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and black nationalism (as in Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987) argued that Christianity had prevented blacks from doing more to further their own political causes by encouraging submission to authority and passivity in the face of violence. 1995Įqually prominent has been the question of whether Christianity was, in retrospect, a helpful or harmful ideology for slaves and free blacks. Since the 1970s, abundant evidence has emerged to document the ways in which remnants of African religious systems indeed survived the horrors of slavery.Īrchaeologist collecting soil in an 18th-century slave cabin root cellar on a plantation near Jamestown, ca. The first surrounds arguments about the extent of African survivals in black Christian traditions: to what extent did over 400 years of forced exile and enslavement eradicate African customs altogether? Raboteau takes up these questions and describes their background, and scholars since the 1970s have pursued it with increased vigor (the most active advocate of African 'survivals' has been the historian Mechal Sobel her works should be consulted for more specific examples). Two debates have occupied much of the literature on African-American religions over the last several decades. Įvidence of African rituals involving animal sacrifice, Cherry Hill plantation, Georgia, late 1990s more Frey and Betty Wood in Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998). His work has recently been supplemented and furthered by Sylvia R.

His more recent essays in A Fire in the Bones (1996) also contain useful discussion of free black churches, black Catholicism in America, and a variety of other profitable topics.

His Slave Religion (1978) is still an indispensable survey of the major themes surrounding the mixing of African religions and evangelical religion in the United States. Slave religion has fared best of all so far, and the logical place to begin is with the extremely accessible and helpful work of Albert Raboteau. Only in recent years have scholars begun to investigate the varieties of African-American religious experience in nineteenth-century America. Gave them three hogs.'Įntries in account book of George Clark, overseer,

Albert raboteau slave religion