AT A GLANCE

Black Church

2 articles on Black Church

  • Black Church

    Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

    Word Count: 8306      Includes:  Early Black Presence in American Churches | Rise of Independent Black Churches | Antebellum Period | Post–Civil War Period | Postwar Divisions | Bibliography

    Any discussion of the early black church rightfully begins with an examination of the nature of the church. A debate began in the mid-twentieth century over this question, which centered on the presence or absence in the African American church of Africanisms—that is, indigenous African religious practices. In his seminal work The Myth of the Negro Past, Melville J. Herskovits argues vehemently for the strong presence of African traditions and practices in the early black Christian experience in North America. His argument is an attempt to refute the myth that black Americans' roots in Africa were of no consequence and were inferior to European-based culture. Herskovits's position, however, has had many critics, including E. Franklin Frazier, a noted black sociologist of the late twentieth century. Frazier and others have argued that the enslavement process (capture, sale, the Middle Passage, and “seasoning”) almost completely stripped Africans ...
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  • Black Church, The

    Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

    Word Count: 3586      Includes:  Early Influences | Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution | First Black Churches | Philadelphia's New African Churches | New York's First Black Church | Methodist Churches | Christian Methodist Episcopal Church | Baptist Churches | Pentecostal Movements | Church and Community Development | Economic Development | Education

    Reference to the more than 65,000 Christian churches, which have a predominance of African American members and black clerical leadership; the Black Church has served as a major institutional foundation of African American spiritual and community life. The Black Church emerged from the period of slavery as the most stable and dominant institutional sphere in black communities in the United States. This centrality of religion was achieved through a gradual historical process that involved several factors. First, prior to and during the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the traditional worldviews and societies of the Africans themselves were permeated by religion, with no division between sacred and secular, especially between religion and politics. The Africans who were brought as slaves to the New World came as human beings, already socialized in their ...
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