C. Eric Lincoln lecture, "Religion as the Critical Instrument in the Socialization and Acculturation of Blacks In America," at the University of Iowa, June 7, 1976

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 7th, 1976, as part of the Eighth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, held at the University of Iowa. Speaking on Religion, the Critical Instrument in the Socialization and Acculturation of Blacks in America is C. Eric Lincoln, professor of religion at Duke University. He is introduced by Darwin Turner, professor of English and chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: Our lecturer for this evening signed Willie Mays to his first baseball contract when our lecturer was road secretary for the Birmingham Black Barons. Our lecturer for this evening Professor C. Eric Lincoln, who this fall will be accepting a position as professor of religion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Our lecturer for this evening supported himself through college by writing true love stories. He's a distinguished scholar, lecturer, author, he's the founding president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, a native of Alabama. He received the BA from Le Moyne, the Masters from Fisk, keep count with me, a Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Chicago, he also earned a Master of Education and a PhD from Boston University. Along the way, he spent a year of study in the University of Chicago Law School, and not content, spent a year of post-doctoral study at Brown University. He also holds honorary degrees from Carleton College and St. Michael's College. Darwin Turner: Professor Lincoln has taught at numerous colleges, where he has held administrative positions in student services and in other capacities, and where he's also been a professor, such colleges as Le Moyne, Fisk, Clark, Boston University, Union Theological Seminary, the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Ghana, Queens College. For the past three years, he's been chairman of the Department of Religious and Philosophical Studies at Fisk, and simultaneously adjunct professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University. Darwin Turner: Internationally known as a lecturer, scholar, consultant, he's received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Whitney Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Research Grant, and a Lilly Endowment Grant for a commemoration and projection of the Black experience in religion. He's been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has been elected to the International Social Sciences Honor Society. Professor Lincoln is the associate editor of Sociological Analysis, he has served as one of the three judges for the 26 National Book Awards, he served in the area of philosophy and religion, and he is presently serving, in addition to his other capacities, as an external assessor to the universities of Ghana. Darwin Turner: In addition to more than 100 essays in books, journals, magazines, and reference works, in addition to numerous appearances on national television programs, he is the coauthor of A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, and he is the author of such books as The Black Muslims in America, My Face Is Black, Sounds of the Struggle, The Negro Pilgrimage in America, Is Anybody Listening, A Profile of Martin Luther King Jr., The Black Americans, The Black Church Since Frazier, and The Black Experience in Religion. This evening, he will be talking on the topic, Religion as the Critical Instrument in the Socialization and Acculturation of Blacks in America. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce a distinguished scholar, Professor C. Eric Lincoln. Professor C. Er...: Thank you very much, indeed. It's a pleasure for me to be here this evening to see many of my old friends, and to make some new ones. The real subject for my thesis tonight is, Black Religion as a Catalyst for an Inclusive Society. It may sound a little like theology as we begin, but bear with me, it's not theology, it's so something else. The distinctive task of the theological enterprise is the interpretation of those human experiences in which God is the principal actor, or in which God is a principle reference. A theology in the absence of God, or in the absence of a belief in God, would of course be absurd, a mere speculation. Professor C. Er...: Theology, and incidentally, it is necessary to talk about theology if we're going to talk about Black religion, because Black theology has suddenly come to the forefront of interest in this area, and it would have to be dealt with as a background for what I ultimately want to say. But theology takes its legitimacy from the fact that God is a factor in human experience, or is believed to be, and from nothing else. In consequence, theology presupposes a subtled religion, that is a sustained body of human experiences, which taken together offers some patterns of divine human relationships, which may be the subject of spiritual insight and intellectual interpretation. In short, theology claims to have a peculiar vision of what God is about and why, and how it relates to the human condition. Professor C. Er...: A relevant theology then must relate God to the people, and to the critical circumstances of their existence. In consequence, every theology knows God only in part. While human experience is varied and fragmentary, and it is never the same for all people, for all times, or for any given time. Hence, it was seen that a universally relevant theology is quite impossible, so long as human experience is conditioned by its own limitations of time, place and circumstance. A legitimate theology, an effective theology speaks to the peculiar condition of the people, whose contact with the divine is through the prism of their own experience. Professor C. Er...: It is not that God is limited, but man is. Man sees through the glass, but darkly, conditioned by the very limitations which define his place in the order of things, and leaves him excited with hope, and burdened with contingency. Theology then is the insight which turns hope to faith, and makes of contingency a partnership in the fulfillment of the grand strategy of the Almighty. Now, the critical task of the theologian, is to assist the religious practitioner in making sense of experience, his experience, in order that transition of hope to faith and contingency to partnership may take place or may be confirmed. Professor C. Er...: And here I do not mean individual experience only, but the experiences which come to the individual in the normal course of his group affiliation. While the essence of religion is hardly to be found in solitary contemplation, religion is a shared experience, and the solitary, mystical encounters men do have on occasion, are no more than the personal reaffirmations for what is common to the culture in its corporate experience. The vicarious experiences of all those common to the cult, become after a time increasingly difficult if not impossible, to distinguish from the personal experiences of individuals, and the religion is expressed as a cultural ethos, rather than as a personal predisposition. Professor C. Er...: It is in this context, that Black religion is to be understood. Black religion is the spiritual affirmation of the saving Grace of God, which rescue the African diaspora from the terrors of chattel slavery in White Christian America, and set the Black Americans on the long road to freedom and dignity and self-respect, a process of liberation, which even to this day is incomplete. It is the religion so deeply associated with the life experiences of Black people in America as to be peculiar to the Black experience, inseparable from it, and meaningless in any context which has no understanding or appreciation of that experience. It is, first of all, a religion of liberation, a celebration of God's moving activity, and of deliberation in history to smash the forces of human selfishness and depravity, what snatched millions of Africans from their homes and families, sailed them over some 3000 miles of open sea, and held them in slavery for 350 years. Professor C. Er...: It is a religion of jubilee, of a celebration of being free. The recognition that one's body and one's mind, one's being, belong to himself alone, even as one's soul belongs to God. It is the recognition that evil, the most degrading form of evil has been overcome, and that virtue has triumphed in this world. At another level, Black religion is also the recognition that there was and is a White religion, calling upon the same God, and giving assent to the same creeds and the same ethic, and that it was in the name of this same White religion, that generations of Black men and women were forced to labor, suffer and die to enrich Christianity, the same Christianity whose faith they now share. This is a dilemma for Black religion, and a critical task for Black theology is to reconcile that dilemma, or to at least clarify the issues which compose it. Professor C. Er...: The task of this paper then is to deal with one small facet of this larger dilemma. The effect that sharing the White man's religion may have had upon the eventual acculturation of the Black slave and the subsequent easing of his transition from slavery to freedom, and an increasing participation in the common ventures of a society... excuse me, and the common ventures of a society, of which he is now a part. The issue then is sociological rather than theological, and the approach is essentially that of a social historian, rather than a theologian. But the presuppositions, which give relevance to the task, rest squarely on the recognition that the Black experience in America is the wellspring of Black religion, and that the legitimate interpretation of Black theology must rest in part upon an understanding of social, as well as cosmic forces. Professor C. Er...: My presuppositions are two, one, that there does exist a viable, identifiable Black subculture in America, and two, that while this subculture shares with other ethnic groups, and with other culture in general, a broad spectrum of experiences, values and institutionalized behavior patterns, there is a unique element in its history, commonly defined as the Black experience. And I might add a third presupposition, and that is that, what is understood by the [end group] as the Black experience is a principal motivational force in a development of a cultural Black nationalism, which I see as the prevailing mood, characterizing the contemporary Black community and the Black church, which is a part of that community. Professor C. Er...: Now, the nationalistic impulse is directed toward the appreciation, and the elevation of whatever values and behavior that may be thought of as unique to the Black community, or as originating with Black people, or as peculiarly appropriate to Black ambience, style or projection. Implicit in this attitude is of course, a sense of cultural solidarity with the Black world, as well as an implicit devaluation on traditional White value constructs, which are the byproducts of the socialization process. It is at this point that the matter of the Christian religion becomes an issue of the most critical importance, while the prevailing values in the overculture derive or are believed to derive from a basic commitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition. If this commonly held belief is true, then cultural Black nationalism, must not only imply a repudiation of prevailing social conventions, but other religious values which undergird those conventions or at least some of them. Professor C. Er...: Some contemporary Black scholars, in the positivistic tradition, see religion as a false issue. The worst aspects of it being the preemption of too many good minds, which might otherwise be turned to more pragmatic pursuits. Religion, they argue, whatever it's source, and whatever it's uses in the past, is irrelevant today because people have outgrown it, particularly Black people. "We do not need religion to define our problems, or to prescribe a means of coping with them." It is said. "We do need the total intellectual energies of the Black community, directed towards the alleviation of empirical conditions we can see and account for." Professor C. Er...: The Black positivists are not alone in their desire to dismiss religion, and to get on with the revolution. Their impatience with religion is shared by Black youth. But Black youth aren't inclined to be more peremptory, although their reasons for dismissing religion are quite similar at bedrock to those of the positivists. For the positivist, it is a matter of having outgrown God. For a Black youth, it is a matter of having outgrown history. For this [latter], Christianity is something that is right out of the White man's bag of tricks, and Blacks have simply outgrown trickery. Hence, Christianity is left to those too young to understand, and those too old to change. Professor C. Er...: The basic difference between the Black positivists and the Black youth is that Black youth do not rule out summarily the legitimacy of some other religion for Black people. But it must be a religion untainted by White association or White manipulation. It must be a genuinely Black religion, not simply a Black patina on a White happening. This is one reason why Black youth have not identified in significant numbers with the new wave of Black religion and its new Black theology, which is current in the United States. "Black religion," they say, "is still Christianity," and Christianity is tainted, perhaps irretrievably so, by the manipulative racism with which it has been associated since it was first introduced to Blacks in America, thereafter to shackle them through their faith to centuries of servitude and depersonalization. Professor C. Er...: It is precisely this problem, the problem of the origin of the faith that does trouble the contemporary Black believer. Unlike the Black positivist, who has presumably reason through belief and beyond it, and unlike contemporary Black youth, which tends to dismiss the faith on operatory grounds, which preclude the issue of belief or non-belief, the Black believer does believe, he believes in spite of himself that he wants to believe. But he may be at odds with himself precisely because he does believe. The problem is that whatever its classical expression may have been, and whatever it's claim to ethical triumphs in other parts the world, the prevailing Christian ethos in America has seldom functioned in the fair and equitable interests of Black people, as Blacks themselves perceive and understand those interests. Professor C. Er...: In consequence, the nagging recollection that Black Americans receive the faith through their slave masters, and then only after the Christianization of the slaves was clearly established as uniquely advantageous to the system of slave ownership, is a constant irritant to the desire for a conclusiveness. However certain he may be of the essential validity of the faith as both timeless and universal, and however firm his conviction that the faith transcends all attempts to manipulate it and to turn it to private advantage, the persistent allegations that Christianity or the White man's religion or that Christianity is a slave-making religion, seem solidly buttressed by the ways of facts of experience. Professor C. Er...: Black ambivalence about the Christian religion is probably as old as Black contact with the faith in America. That they readily accepted Christianity, whenever it was available to them, is most [indiscriminately] documented by the fact that at least 98% of all Black Americans confessing any religion, confess some form of Christianity. And by the fact that even today, when religious affiliation is no longer socially or morally compulsive, the majority of all Blacks in America admit to some connection with some faith, no matter how tenuous. But accepting the faith and accepting the conditions of the faith are not quite the same thing. Professor C. Er...: For much of the Black experience with Christianity, the Christian message to the Black faithful could be typically illustrated by this quote from a Virginia clergyman. Said he, "Servants be obedient to them who are your masters, with fear and trembling as you would be obedient unto Christ. Remember that God requires this of you. There is something so becoming and engaging, in a modest, cheerful, good natured behavior, that a little work done in that matter seems better done. It also gains for you the love and the goodwill of those you belong to. Besides your murmuring and grumbling against your masters, is the same as grumbling against God who has placed you in their service." Professor C. Er...: Now undoubtedly, this message had a very telling effect upon some who heard it. There were no competing messages or recognized authority, and what came from the Pope pedaled the White man's church with the relevatory wisdom of the White man's book. And who could gainsay it? Who could understand it? It had the imprimatur of the White man's God, the source of the White man's power, his wealth, and who's commissioned to rule. Who could ignore it? Lunsford Lane was one who did. Said Lane, who was an ex-slave, "There was one kind-hearted clergyman I used often to hear because he was very popular among the Black people, but after he had preached the sermon to us in which he urged from the Bible, that it was the will of heaven that we should be slaves and our masters should be our owners, many of us left him, considering like the doubting disciple of old, this is a heart saying, who can hear it?" Professor C. Er...: As Lane and some of his followers left the White minister who offended them with his consignment of all Black Christians to the perpetual service or their White brothers of the Christ, other Blacks left the White man's church for similar reasons. Some lost themselves in that invisible institution, which met in the swamps and the forest, remote from the intelligence of the big house, safe from the noxious propaganda of the captive clergymen who came there to strengthen the doubtful hand of the slave master with the sure-right hand of God. This invisible institution, represented the Black Christians covert rejection of the White church, which had already rejected them. However, other Blacks organized their own institutional churches, which for the most part, tended to replicate as nearly as possible, the White churches from which they had been excluded, and which were their references. Professor C. Er...: It is interesting to note, for example, that when Richard Allen and his commissaries shut the doors to St. George's Methodist Church off their spiritual feet nearly 200 years ago, they did so because they had been dragged from their knees in that White institution while inadvertently praying in a part of the gallery, which was intended for White Christians. Nevertheless, the church Allen founded soon thereafter was not only Christian, but Methodist, which can only suggest the depth of attachment to the faith, and to the particular format of the faith and its belief and practice embodied in institutional Methodism. Professor C. Er...: It could still be argued with validity, of course, that Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church represented a giant step, in freeing Black Christians with the religious tyranny of White Christianity, while despite the wholesale adoption of the Methodist discipline, Blacks were finally to gain a measure of control of their own spiritual destiny, though not without a protracted struggle. According to a public statement concerning the establishment of Bethel, the mother church, or what was to become the first Black denomination, its members were to, "Continue in union wealth and subject to the government of the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in all ecclesiastical affairs, except in the right to church property." And that they would, "Accept the rules, the government, the disciplines and articles of faith of the Methodist Episcopal Church." Professor C. Er...: The pulpit at Bethel was under the control of an elder of the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church, the same way an institution in which they had so lately detached themselves. Even so, the Blacks who retained their affiliation with St. George's, hidden away in a corner of the gallery, and proscribed in every activity, though they were, felt called upon to denounce Richard Allen, and to accuse him of leading his followers into a segregated church. The impact of Methodism upon Blacks was curiously phenomenal and often inconsistent. In 1822, following the discovery that Denmark Vesey and the principal conspirators involved in the plan to seize Charleston were members of the African Methodist Episcopal church, which had been founded by Richard Allen. The South Carolina authorities, "Suppressed that congregation, and had its house of worship demolished." Professor C. Er...: On the other hand, there is a tradition that when Nat Turner ravaged the countryside of South Hampton, Virginia in his bloody rebellion a decade later, he gave orders that, "None of the people called Methodists ought to be harmed." Certainly Richard Allen's commitment to Methodism was second on into this commitment to Christianity. When the Free African Society, which he founded with Absalom Jones offered him the honor of pastoring the first Black Protestant Episcopal church in history, he declined the offer upon the ground that he was a Methodist. Professor C. Er...: When he left the Free African Society, intent upon founding the church that was to become Bethel, he did so with the conviction that, "There was no religious sect that denomination would suit the capacity of the colored people, as well as the Methodist. While a plain and simple gospel suits best for the people where the unlearned can understand, and the learned are sure to understand," "I could not be anything but a Methodist," said, Allen, "As I was born and awakened under them, they were the first people that brought the glad tidings to the colored people. I feel thankful that I have ever had the chance to hear a Methodist preacher." Professor C. Er...: Allen's sentiments were generally echoed by the Black community. Within five years following the famous Christmas Conference from 1784, that firmly established Methodism in this country, one fourth of the Methodist membership was Black. The Methodist split over the issue of slavery in 1844, but by the time the Civil War commenced in 1860, there were fully 200,000 Blacks in the Southern wing of Methodism alone. Professor C. Er...: Now this is not intended as a treatise on Blacks and the Methodist church. Instead, we are concerned more precisely with the phenomenon of Blacks in America first choosing to be Christians at all, and once that choice was made, why Methodism seems to prove particularly attractive, because Blacks were involved in Methodism from its earliest appearance in America, and because Methodism does not differ substantially from any other White denomination. In its practical approach to the issue of race, Methodism, does lend itself as a convenient model and the illustration of the way in which Blacks in the presence of religious need and under pressure of prevailing social norms, not only adopted the religion of their oppressors, but maintained membership in White religious organizations long after they were at liberty to pursue their separate destiny. Were there viable alternatives? Or were the pragmatics of the situation such that every apparent choice was an illusion? Professor C. Er...: Much has been made of the issue of African survivors and the religion of Black Americans. For years, the classic controversy between the followers of anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, who thought he saw residuals of African religion and Black American beliefs and practices and those followers of sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, who was equally as certain, that nothing of significance in African culture had survived the shattering impact of American slavery. Professor C. Er...: All of this has titillated scholars in the field and kept the graduate students going back to the stacks to pour over the same mega data for the same misconclusion. The data are rendered irrelevant, and the issue of survivals in religion is mooted by the larger factors which play a part in what the African diaspora might have done, but in fact, did do in America. First of all, a viable religion will be one which has a working relationship with the culture with which it interacts. This is not to say that it needs to be a culture religion in the sense that the values of the society and those of the religion are indistinguishable. It is to suggest however, that religion has a practical base, firmly rooted in the society, which it both molds and reflects. Further, the needs and conditions, the fears, the anxieties, the hopes, and the aspirations to which a religion addresses itself must be the real in the experience of the believers, not somebody else. If they are not, faith will never be more than an aberration until, or unless the culture modify to fit the faith. Professor C. Er...: The evidence for this would seem to be impressive. The mission and zeal of Western Christians in Africa and elsewhere produced few Christians until other agents of socialization had first westernized segments of the native populations to the degree that Christianity simply made more sense in the context of a scheme of values imported from the West than did the indigenous religions. For example, in a society where the supply of men is short and there are no satisfactory factors of compensation such as we have developed here in the West, a religion that teaches monogamy and sexual indistinction will have no significant appeal until those cultural benefits and understandings which make monogamy and its attended arrangements viable in the missionizing culture are sufficiently institutionalized in the culture being missionized. In short, there is nothing incidental about the structure of a religion and its relation to the society, which produces it or which makes it its own. Professor C. Er...: Christianity was swept out of North Africa by Islam after six centuries, not necessarily because Islam was of superior faith, but because Islam was more readily accommodated to the patterns of culture, which antedated Christianity and it's essentially novel requirements by 2000 years or more. A viable religion will be a functional expression of the society which births it, or at the very least, it will be a religion in which the expectations of the faith are not incompatible with the existing norms, values, and social experiences by which that society is shaped and structured. Professor C. Er...: If anybody has ever wondered about the problems of desegregation in the churches in the South and elsewhere, then here is your answer. Let me say then that where there survived any elements of African religion in the dispersion of the African diaspora and America is not a salient aspect of the phenomenon of African Christianity in America. For almost 100 years from 1619, when the first African was destined to become a prop of an English community were landed a Jamestown, Virginia, until 1701, when the society for the propagation of the gospel in foreign parks turned its attention to the evangelization of Blacks. Until that time, the Africans in America had practically no contact with Christianity. Professor C. Er...: [inaudible] Professor C. Er...: (silence) Professor C. Er...: The arguments against Christianization of Blacks, bound or free, South or North were many and varied and persistent. They cannot be offered to you in detail. And my task will be limited to an illustration of the fact that developing American Christianity felt no compelling need whatsoever to complicate prevailing social and theological consensus by extending the gospel to Black people. If Blacks were not outside the boundaries of God's grace, and even this was a matter of dispute, they were simply not within the boundaries of American Christian interest and responsibility. There, the matter rested until the advantages of a Christian servant class were made explicit in the pulpit and protected by law. Some American Christians flatly declared that the Negro was not a man, but a beast, and that he had no soul either to save, or to lose. Professor C. Er...: In fact, so many White Christians considered the Blacks as creatures of another species who had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments that in 18th century New England, this was considered the main obstacle to the conversion of these poor people according to one clergyman, many learned divine delivered themselves and debate on the subject of shocked and vast crowds, anxious to hear the issue they claimed. Ultimately, the decisions of the American Christians probably turned on other grounds, however. The European observer traveling in American 1748 was struck by the indifference of the Americans concerning the spiritual conditions of the Africans they had enslaved. He reported as follows, "The Whites are partly led by the conceit of its being shameful to have a spiritual brother or sister among so despicable of people, partly by thinking that they would not be able to keep their Negros so meanly afterwards, and partly through fear of the Negroes growing too proud on seeing themselves about a level of their masters in religious matters." Professor C. Er...: The notion of sharing a brotherhood in Christ with the Africans in this world or any other world was certainly not a popular one. A common response, which was put so vividly into words by a lady in Virginia was said to have been, "What? Such as they? What? Those Black dolls be made Christians, and will they be like us? Is it possible she wanted to know that any of my Negroes could go to heaven and must I see them there?" Despite such prevailing attitudes about the possible social consequences of sharing the faith in this world or in heaven, the fundamental barriers to the instruction or the polarization of Blacks was basically economic. The slave system was geared to the premise that Black labor was a perishable commodity, and that its extraction should be at a steady continuous rate to be interfered with only under the most compelling circumstances. Professor C. Er...: Negroes, "Were bought for the purpose of performing labor, what fact could be more obvious and natural, less demanding of explanation?." And a system which routinely expected a slave mother to be back at her plough the same day she dropped a child. Church time, including the time spent at instruction, prayer or other religious requirements was inevitably thought of as time misspent at the masters expense, even if it was taken when the slave normally would be resting and restoring himself for the next day's labor. Professor C. Er...: Father John Carroll, a distinguished clergyman, and the first Catholic Bishop in America, was sensitive enough to be aware that Blacks were in his words, "Kept so constantly at work that their spiritual nurture was necessarily neglected, with the result that they were very dull and faith, and very depraved in morals." But the good Bishop, like many of his Protestant counterparts was apparently not unduly troubled by this [dominance] and depravity of Blacks for he owned and presumably kept constantly at work several of them himself. Professor C. Er...: The ultimate fear was that the slave himself could be forfeited as a unit of production if he confessed religion and became a Christian. It was not until this specter of economic loss was laid finally to rest by religious authority and by law that a productive concern for the spiritual welfare of Blacks in America could take hold. Once the barriers were removed, there was still a low grade rush among Blacks to become Christians, despite nearly 100 years of work by the society for the propagation of the gospel and other missionary or in organizations and individuals. If there was a hungering and thirsting for the White man's religion, by the close of the American revolution, such a yearning was still not reflected in the pews or the churches of New England. Professor C. Er...: Samuel Hopkins of Newport attributed the absence of the Blacks to their treatment by Christian masters, a treatment, he thought, "Well calculated to inflame the Blacks with the deepest prejudices toward the Christian religion." He said. By all the rules of logic, Reverend Hopkins should have been right, but religion is as you know, often paralogical rather than logical. And the raw and raw prejudice has been known on occasion to produce a more accommodated response than has benevolent disdain. Professor C. Er...: Indeed, this may in part account for the fact that while the churches in New England had relatively little success in attracting Black constituents, in the South, the Methodist and the Baptist had gathered thousands of them into their churches before the end of the 18th century. The truth is, that there has been no stampede of church in the South either until the Great Awakening broadened the horizons of the faith to include a spectrum of values and experiences, to which Blacks were prepared to respond. The Episcopal church, dominant in the States where the Blacks were most popular failed to attract a significant Black constituency. The Presbyterians and the Quakers, both more benign in their attitudes toward Blacks than either the Methodist or the Baptist had no more success than the congregationers of New England who were considered, "The most ardent friends of the Blacks." Professor C. Er...: The Catholic church had less impact upon the determination of the Black religious experience in America than any major faith with the exception of Judaism. But then in the developing years of the American Republic, both Catholics and Jews were themselves under suspicion. The Great Awakening, aroused in thousands of Americans, White and Black, a new spiritual consciousness, which culminated in many cases in church affiliation, mainly with Methodists and Baptists. Many theories have been advanced offering to account for the Black attraction to Christianity at this peculiar moment in American history. Most of them suggest that while New England Calvinism was too cold and too recent for the Africa mind, Catholicism and Episcopalianism were too symbolic and too ritualistic, the Quakers were too meditative and too reflective. Professor C. Er...: The burden of this argument of course, rests upon the common presupposition that Black people are exuberant by nature, impatient with symbolism and abstraction and not giving it all to reflection. The world in which the African is at home has always been conceived by others as a world of the senses and not a world of the mind. The practical effects of the limited nature of the African personality was therefore to postpone insignificant religious involvement until the development of a religious expression more nearly matched with his capacities and his inclinations. Professor C. Er...: The Great Awakening, it is then alleged, provided just that occasion, uncomplicated preaching with simple vivid stories of illustration, opportunities for substantial personal involvement and participation, a chance to give free reign to the spirit and to the emotions, all of which were thought to replicate to some degree, the normative African experience and religion. In consequence of that deviation from established norms or religious behavior, the practices of the Great Awakening came under fire from the traditionalist of that day. A prominent New England minister complained that, "So great has been the enthusiasm created by Wesley and Whitefield and Tennant, that the various servants and slaves pretend to extraordinary inspiration, and under the veil, they have cherished their idle dispositions, and in lieu of minding their respective businesses, running rambling about the other enthusiastic religious nonsense." Professor C. Er...: Whether or not the religious style of the Great Awakening was as decisive for Black involvement as it's commonly held, the social style was undoubtedly critical. The effect of a church organization, which required on the one hand, that one must go through a period of instruction before admission, and which at the same time held firmly to the belief that Blacks were incapable of instruction, or that even if instructed could not feel moral requirements of the faith, wants to keep Blacks out of the churches, and that's precisely the situation that existed in New England. In New England where church membership and citizenship were closely tied to each other, Blacks were effectively denied enfranchisement. In the South, the worrisome problem of the legal status of a Christian slave was obviated. Everywhere, the embarrassment of social equality at the level of religion was precluded. The Great Awakening was the first serious breach in the formidable fortress of religious formalism, which protected the socio-economic infrastructure of the developing American Commonwealth. Professor C. Er...: In the Great Awakening, Blacks rushed to become Christians. At this point, not so much because they could give vamp to any so-called natural exuberance or any native spiritual [fervor], but because the rules which kept them on the plantations and out of the churches were relaxed momentarily, and the opportunity to enter into new kinds of relationships with others in their world contact were presented. The consequences of their religious involvement in the Great Awakening would be both immediate and far-reaching. First of all, the argument about the Black man's spiritual and moral capacity would be mooted by the fact that thousands of Blacks had accepted Christianity and had been received as Christians. Second, while the religious tests of the Awakening were based on religious experience rather than upon theological and moral understanding, some modicum of education, at least at the information level was inevitable in the process of Christian worship and fellowship. Third, any kind of Christian association, even that of master and slave necessarily modified relationships and raised questions in the minds of all parties, which whether spoken or unspoken added to the weight of the maintenance of the slave system. Professor C. Er...: Finally, Christianity provided an organizational and a moral base for self liberation, which the slaves were certain to explore and did. In short, once Blacks became Christians in large numbers, the wheels for the eventual dissolution of the slave system were irretrievably set in motion. Had the Great Awakening occurred a hundred years earlier, slavery as an institution may well not have survived the American revolution. This is not to overlook the probability that some Blacks were undoubtedly more securely accommodated to their condition through the instrumentality of religion. Such was inevitable considering the susceptibility of Christian teachings to distortion and misinterpretation. However, the visible accommodation of some to a system of oppression could only become a factor in the flux of the efforts of liberation. The Great Awakening then, was the first major step in the socialization of Blacks in America, however inadvertent it may have been. Professor C. Er...: It proved to be their first introduction to the significant values, which make America what it is thereto for, the vast majority of slaves were confined to the fields from can to can't. That is to say from can-see to can't-see, from daylight to dark. Their participation in the culture and their understanding of the culture was hardly any different from what it would have been had they remained in Africa. Whatever religion they may have practiced in the remote corners of the plantation could do little for their present or their future in America. The Great Awakening was the beginning of a process of Americanization for better or for worse that transcended religion. The White man's religion became with modifications, the Black man's religion. There was no other way for the Black man to find a meaningful participation in the White man's cultural experience in the West. Professor C. Er...: A distinguished sociologist has said, "Americans are generally religious, Southerners are more religious than the rest of the nation, and Negros are more religious than White Southerners." The caste system forces Negroes to be exaggerated Americans." "If this is true, the Blacks' preference for Christianity in general, and for the Methodist and Baptist churches in particular probably needs no further explanation, for the Black under caste was merely acting out its aspirations by adopting the prevailing religious expressions, with which they were in contact. But the late Arnold Toynbee reminds us that, "The Black man may have found spiritual salvation in the White man's faith, he may have acquired the White man's culture and economic technique, and yet it profits him nothing so long as he has not changed the scope." This seems to say that the White man's religion is not an effective shelter from the White man's more peculiar inclinations. Professor C. Er...: And that consequently, the Black man's hope for relief of his condition through conversion to Christianity was doomed to failure. Toynbee was right, but only if one takes the short view of history, there is no record that conversion brought liberty to a single slave throughout the long history of slavery in America, but there is a certain erosive quality in Christianity, which over the long run reduces its disharmonies to inconsequence and grinds its distortions into confirmation. Once the slaves got religion, it was inevitable that slavery as an institution would be questioned, would be fault and would be doomed. Professor C. Er...: Neither the South, nor the nation could thereafter restrain the spectrum of forces and counter-forces loosed in contention for the definition and the establishment of a proper Christian ethic in America. For Blacks, religion became the primary occasion for social contact with Whites, and in consequence, the most important instrumental socialization. The fact of religious capability, not only granted solace to the Blacks, but in doing so automatically raised them to the level of men and granted them some degree of moral responsibility. Professor C. Er...: Religion did not automatically raise the presumption of racial or social inequality, and it did not presuppose Blacks to have a moral capacity equal to the White masters. Rather, the Black Christian was simply expected to do the best he could with the equipment he had. God and society would perhaps forgive him for the rest. But the aura of strangeness and territorialism surrounding the Black field hands was reduced, and the stage was inevitably set for the challenge and the debate of notion switched thereto for had been above challenge and beyond debate. Professor C. Er...: In the meantime, the Black Christian developed a quality of faith of unusual tenacity and resilience. In the face of the formidable contrary evidence of his own experience, he persisted in the belief that God was just, and that Christianity would be the instrument of his salvation if he died, or of his liberation in due course, if he lived. Undoubtedly, the requirements of the faith made some slaves more tractable and more patient as Cotton Mather and all the other advocates of Black spiritual involvement had predicted it would, but in the long run, the crystallization of the Blacks work toward their liberation. Professor C. Er...: Certainly it is true that Christianity in America never approximated the ideals of the development in women who saw in the English experiment here, an opportunity to perfect the faith in a way they did not see as possible amidst the contentions and distractions of 17th century Europe. The notion of religious perfection, like the spirit of the enlightenment, which stared in the breasts of the founding fathers succumbed ultimately to a virulent racism, which had gone unrecognized when the brave plans were made for the Atlantic excursion into the wilderness. The colonial Americans sacrificed the dream of religious perfection and the possibility of political democracy on the altar of a political economic system based on the presumption of racial superiority and racial manifest destiny. American Christianity became an ideological factor in the instrumentalization of this new and less respectable dream, and the version of the faith bequeathed to the Blacks was inevitably tainted with chauvinism. Professor C. Er...: Yet, it is improbable that the espousal of any other religion by the Blacks would have done anymore for them. With any other religion, perceived differences between Whites and Blacks, which were already vast, would have been exaggerated. The suspicions of barbaric paganistic practices like those assigned to the medieval Jew would have proliferated. Social distance already polar, would have had no basis for modification, and the opportunity for a physical contact and communication would once again, have been limited strictly to the mechanical relations of overseers and field hands. The peculiar institution, which shamed and desecrated America would have been indefinitely prolonged, and the humanization of the social order in America would be no further advanced than it is in contemporary South Africa, where a common participation and the prevailing religion of the ruling Whites is still not a viable option for the Black masses under the prevailing system of apartheid. Professor C. Er...: In America, there is no established religion. However, Christianity as the prevailing faith, which sustains the basic ethos of the culture has functioned as an effective vehicle by means of which Blacks who were once totally excluded from the society, have moved into pseudo peer participation. Black religion is the understanding of the faith and turn for the Black man of distinctive needs and peculiar experiences, and Black theology is the interpretation of God's activity on behalf of the Black oppressed. Together, they work toward the neutralization of the remaining distortions of the faith, which condemn the Black servants to serve White masters in perpetuity. And they aim at restoring the moral and ethical balance to a Christian society. To the end, the racial diversity should not be a permanent barrier to a community of peace and goodwill based on a common integrity and mutual respect. Thank you.