The Souls of Black Folk
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to
the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts.
Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology and
religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro
thought and methods. The mass of “gospel” hymns which has swept through
American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists
largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears that
caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the
Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not
only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no
uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African
character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the
“First Baptist”—a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small
organ, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room
with benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of
a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet here,—the church
proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s
societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds.
Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five or six
regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are
collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle,
strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed.
At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a
religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven,
Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are
laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to
withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church
often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family
life, and the final authority on what is Good and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm,
all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice
and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is
noticeable and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the
Bethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice
seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government
consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an
executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors;
general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided groups led by
class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary
societies. The activity of a church like this is immense and
far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizations
throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the
world.
Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure,
are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The census
of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half
millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons,
and in some Southern States one in every two persons. Besides these
there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend
and take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation,
and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps
of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we
must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear
itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we
can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not
start in America. He was brought from a definite social
environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was
nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and
the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the
clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far
greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil became
the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a
terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard,
physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the
slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church
was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized;
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the
members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.
Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of
expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after
the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the
monogamic Negro home. From the very circumstances of its beginning, the
church was confined to the plantation, and consisted primarily of a
series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of
movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was always
important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the
visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament.
To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes,
and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the
churches organized in connection with the white neighboring churches,
chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others. The
Methodists still form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a
million members. The faith of these two leading denominations was more
suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious
feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations has
always been small and relatively unimportant, although the
Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain
sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro
churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with the
white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches
became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite
for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great
African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world,
to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be implored,
of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph
of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,—exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird
midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman
and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that
vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered Negro
even to-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with
hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system,
and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited
his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission
embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early
realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain
bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro
tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a
valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated
into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful
became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the
joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the
next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world,
under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead
His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream. His preacher
repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—
“Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!”
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle Tom,”
came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side
by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation,
where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a
religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the