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Urbanization and the End of Black Churches in the Modern World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Curtis J. Evans
Curtis J. Evans*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago Divinity School
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Extract

Historian Wallace Best argues in his Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (2005) that historically “we have been more accustomed to think of religion as spontaneous and supernatural.” Best maintains that we have seen religion as “something that happens—outside of human control and irrespective of social context.” He wants to challenge this conception of religion by emphasizing the active production of a new religious culture by black Americans in Chicago in the early twentieth century. The agency of lower- and working-class blacks is what Best emphasizes in his rich analysis of religion and culture in black Chicago. Although it is not clear who the “we” is in Best's analysis because he does not cite any sources on this point, I do not quite see things the way that he does. As I will demonstrate in this essay, the historiography on African American religion has not posited a static or “supernatural” conception of religion. What strikes me about the history of interpretations of African American religion is the way in which interpreters have asserted that peoples of African descent were “naturally religious,” which meant that their religion was a product of biology and nature rather than of the “supernatural.” Generally, white interpreters in the early twentieth century set the terms of the debate by arguing that blacks were naturally religious and thus unable to compete in a modern industrial world. The political and social force of such arguments has been keenly observed by black interpreters, who were eager to offer in response a more socially progressive notion of black religion in order to enlist black churches in social reform, to counter images of blacks as inhibited by nature or biology from contributing to the cultural vitality of the nation, and to insist that black religion changed in response to social circumstances (and hence the common claim in the 1940s that it was very much a product, if not an epiphenomenon, of their economic and political condition).

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 799 - 822
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2007

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References

1. D. Best, Wallace, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3Google Scholar.

2. One of the principal promoters of this conception of blacks as naturally religious primitives was Marc Connelly's play Green Pastures. The play was released in 1929 and won a Pulitzer prize for the 1929-30 drama season. It became one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history and drew huge crowds who raved about the simple and natural faith of rural Southern blacks depicted in the play: see Cripps, Thomas, ed., Green Pastures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

3. For a recent succinct statement of current scholarly views on this issue, see Weisenfeld, Judith, “On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Margins, Centers, and Bridges in African American Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. S. Stout, Harry and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 420–423Google Scholar, 439.

4. Raboteau, Albert, Slave Religion: The “Invisible” Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 56Google Scholar.

5. For an account of the social and political context in which his work was originally written, see Raboteau, , Slave Religion: The “Invisible” Institution in the Antebellum South, Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 323–334Google Scholar.

6. An important and popular text that illustrates this point is S. Wilmore's, GayraudBlack Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday), originally published in 1973Google Scholar.

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9. My use of the term “everyday work” should not be confused with related terms used by James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985). I want to avoid the uses to which Scott's work has been put. I am not interested in reasserting claims of everyday forms of opposition to oppression in the lives of blacks. Perhaps it is time to rethink entirely religion among African Americans without resorting to the dichotomy of protest versusaccommodation, whether we view protest as prosaic and small-scale or as overtly political. For recent uses of Scott's work on the religious practices of African American women, see Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 221Google Scholar; and F. Frederick, Maria, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5–6Google Scholar, 223.

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12. Brenman, “Minority Group,” 1.

13. Ibid., 6.

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17. Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past, 207.

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19. Mays, Benjamin and Nicholson, Joseph, The Negro's Church (Salem: Ayer, 1988 [1933]), 245–255Google Scholar. Mays's and Nicholson's overwhelming emphasis on compensation as an adequate explanation of African American religion is often overlooked, partly because of their more positive estimate of what they called the “genius of the Negro church,” which was appended rather oddly at the end of a book that did not signal “genius” in any of its content analysis of African American religion.

20. Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past, 207.

21. Ibid.

22. Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002 [1944]), 2:928Google Scholar.

23. Ibid., 753.

24. Ibid., 930. Myrdal was critical of both Herskovits and the black historian Carter G. Woodson because he believed that they selectively attributed negative traits such as crime and “amorality” among blacks to the pressures of living in a white, oppressive society, while they tended to attribute more positive features of black life to an African heritage. Walter Jackson also notes that Myrdal was deeply skeptical of the emphasis of Woodson, Herskovits, and others on the Africanness of American blacks because he felt it would play into the hands of racists such as Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, who wanted to forcibly remove American blacks to Africa. Bilbo and his ilk had a deep fear of racial miscegenation and were adamantly opposed to the idea that blacks wanted to or could be assimilated into American culture. See Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, 120.

25. Huff Fauset, Arthur, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 [1944]), 96Google Scholar.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 97.

28. Ibid. I am not interested in the precise statistics used by Fauset nor have I sought to determine how reliable Mays's and Nicholson's figures were. The important point is how Fauset used these statistics and what he hoped to demonstrate by employing them, namely, that blacks could not be “naturally religious” if a smaller number of them attended church than whites.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 98.

31. Ibid., 100.

32. Ibid., 108.

33. Herskovits denied that he asserted innate black religiosity. He argued that blacks had a cultural rather than a “natural” bent toward religion. Herskovits was angry that Fauset attacked a “straw man” argument and that his efforts to fight racism were not sufficient for Fauset to understand his intentions and meaning. Herskovits appeared puzzled that black social scientists in particular would have such strenuous objections to his attempts to affirm the tenacity of African culture. See Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits Papers, box 38, folder 372; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. That Herskovits had to appeal to his record against racism was an indication of the politicized nature of this debate.

34. Ackiss, Thelma, “Changing Patterns of Religious Thought Among Negroes,” Social Forces 23:2 (December 1944): 212CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 214.

37. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 929.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 928.

40. Franklin Frazier, E., “Race: An American Dilemma,” The Crisis (April 1944): 106Google Scholar.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 861-863.

43. Ibid., 873-874.

44. Ibid., 866.

45. Ibid., 877.

46. Frazier, , “Problems and Needs of Negro Children and Youth Resulting from Family Disorganization,” Journal of Negro Education 19:3 (Summer 1950): 269–270Google Scholar.

47. On Frazier's influence, see R. Feagin, Joe, “Book Review Essay: The Black Church: Inspiration or Opiate,” Journal of Negro History 60:4 (October 1975): 537Google Scholar.

48. Franklin Frazier, E., The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken, 1963), 8Google Scholar.

49. For a fuller analysis of this point, see Young, James Robert, “E. Franklin Frazier and His Critics: The Role of Religion in the Sociological Analysis of Race Relations in the United States” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1984)Google Scholar.

50. Frazier, , Negro Church in America, 9–23Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., 36-90.

52. Ibid., 54-57.

53. Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 7.

54. See Shapiro, Herbert, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 301Google Scholar; Hope Franklin, John and A. Moss, Alfred, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), 496–497Google Scholar.

55. Sperry, Willard, Religion in America (New York: MacMillan, 1946), 183Google Scholar.

56. Ibid., 195. This callous allusion to one of the chief justifications of lynching, the alleged widespread raping of white women by black men, indicates how ominously Sperry viewed the new black migration to the North.

57. Ibid.

58. Sperry was among those postwar figures who adopted a neo-orthodox critique of Protestant liberalism. An interesting project would be to examine to what extent Sperry and colleagues like Perry Miller expressed their disappointment with theological liberalism by their imaginative and professional embrace of simpler societies (such as the Puritans in Miller's case).

59. Ibid., 193.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 194-95. Sperry quoted Mays's work, The Negro's God, to point to the kind of “traditional, compensatory” religion that existed among the masses of blacks. This was the type of religion that he contrasted favorably to the radicalism of urban blacks, particularly those influenced by the Communist Party.

62. Sperry, , Religion in America, 196–197Google Scholar. Sperry added, “The Negro has to a marked degree a native dignity, which no affront or cruelty has ever destroyed. He is in this respect not unlike the American Indian, and here, if anywhere, the myth of the noble savage would seem to have a warrant in fact” (196).

63. E. Franklin Frazier Papers, box 131-78, folder 14, Manuscript Division, Howard University.

64. Ibid.

65. Laurence Moore, R., Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 209Google Scholar.