Black Churches

For African American Christianity, the Christian God ultimately revealed in Jesus of Nazareth dominated the black sacred cosmos. While the structure of beliefs for black Christians were the same orthodox beliefs as that of white Christians, there were also different degrees of emphasis and valences given to certain particular theological views. For example, the Old Testament notion of God as an avenging, conquering, liberating paladin remains a formidable anchor of the faith in most black churches. The older the church or the more elderly its congregation, the more likely the demand for the exciting imagery and the personal involvement of God in history is likely to be.

The black Christians who formed the historic black churches also knew implicitly that their understanding of Christianity, which was premised on the rock of antiracial discrimination, was more authentic than the Christianity practiced in white churches. A major aspect of black Christian belief is found in the symbolic importance given to the word "freedom." Throughout black history the term "freedom" has found a deep religious resonance in the lives and hopes of African Americans.

In describing the key religious elements of the black churches he visited in the South, W. E. B. Du Bois was particularly impressed with "the preacher, the music, and the frenzy." In later chapters we will examine more closely the situation of the black preacher and the development of music in black churches. For this examination of the black sacred cosmos, a deciphering of the frenzy is particularly important. Like most observers and visitors to black worship services, Du Bois was referring to the intense enthusiasm and the open display of emotions and feelings exhibited by the worshipers.

The assumption that black churches constituted the central institutional sector in black communities is common in the American understanding of the black subculture. Reliable investigators have consistently underscored the fact that black churches were one of the few stable and coherent institutions to emerge from slavery. Slaves not only worshiped with their masters or under the conditions of their masters' control, they also held their own secret, independent worship services in the backwoods and bayous of plantations, and sometimes in their own slave quarters: a phenomenon which Frazier called the "invisible institution."

During the antebellum period of Reconstruction the pattern for their central and dominant institutional role was set when churches became the centers of the numerous black communities in the South that were formed as former slaves were separated from the plantation base to which they previously belonged. Du Bois has called the building of these black churches the "first form of economic cooperation" among black people. Even in northern urban black communities the early historic black churches like Mother Bethel in Philadelphia , Mother Zion and Abyssinian Baptist in New York City , and First African in Boston also became the central institutions of those communities.