Black church

Significance: The term “black church” refers collectively to the many autonomous denominations of African American Christian churches. The black church evolved as a highly visible social institution in response to white racism in American society and racism in white-defined Christianity.

Although African American religious experience is diverse and social forms of religious life vary greatly, the black church has historically been the most visible religious institution in African American culture. As a visible institution controlled from within the black community, the black church has played a central role in African American social and political history. This history has evolved within the broader historical context of American racism and racial politics. The church, also evolving within that broader context, has been an important center for the development of African American Christian theology and for community identity. In fact, the black church originated as a formal institution when African American religious leaders in Philadelphia were forcibly removed from worshiping on the main “whites only” floor of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. When Richard Allen and Absalom Jones were evicted from the church in 1787, they and their fellow black Christians concluded that the racism of white-defined Christianity precluded full Christian expression for blacks in white-controlled congregations. Their formation of the Free African Society that year paved the way for the later creation of the fully autonomous African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, one of the earliest black churches in the United States. An institutionalized form of distinct African American Christian theology began to emerge.

Lincoln/Mamiya Model

In their expansive sociological study entitled The Black Church in the African-American Experience (1990), C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya propose a dynamic model for interpreting the sociology of black churches in their diversity and complexity. Lincoln and Mamiya identify the major black denominations as the AME Church, the AME Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) church, the National Baptist Convention, USA., Incorporated (NBCA), the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). These denominations, as well as many other smaller ones and local churches, provide institutional structure for the religious (and often political) life of millions of African American Christians.

Although sociologists and political historians debate the nature of the black church and its political role, Lincoln and Mamiya offer a “dialectical model of the black church” that encourages an open and ongoing analysis. The Lincoln/Mamiya model offers a way of analyzing the ongoing tensions, both theological and political, within African American Christianity as those tensions are embodied in the structure of the black church. The model proposes the following six “dialectically related” pairs, or opposites. With these pairs the focus is on the ways that human experience shifts back and forth between the two opposites, sometimes tending more toward one idea, sometimes tending more toward the other.

For example, the first dialectic is that between “priestly” and “prophetic” functions of the church. In other words, it concerns how the church balances its role as the center for worship (priestly) in relation to its role as an agent for social change in the community (prophetic). Second, there is a dialectic tension in the black church between the “other-worldly” and the “this-worldly.” Does the church focus on individual spiritual salvation for the “life to come” or does it focus on social justice in the here-and-now? The third dialectic proposed by Lincoln and Mamiya is between “universalism” and “particularism”: how the black church negotiates its role in Christianity, broadly speaking, and its very particular role in African American history. The black church is part of a universal religious institution but is also a very particular response to white racism in American Christianity. A fourth dialectic is between the “communal” and the “privatistic”: How does the church address individual spiritual life in the context of the social realities of African American experience? The fifth dialectic is especially important politically; it is between the “charismatic” and the “bureaucratic.” This involves how the church uses the power of personalized and local leadership in relation to developing larger-scale institutional structure and national leadership as well as how it handles the tensions inherent in doing both. Finally, Lincoln and Mamiya join many African American historians and cultural critics when they identify the dialectical tension between “accommodation” and “resistance.” Given the realities of white racism and African American history’s origins in the experience of slavery, how has a primary social institution such as the black church moved between accommodating and resisting white mainstream culture in the United States?

Politics and the Church

It is in this final dialectic that much of the debate over the role of the black church in the twentieth century civil rights movement evolved. It is debated, for example, whether the church served as an accommodationist spiritual escape that diluted the intensity of its members, whether the church served as a fundamental source of activism and militancy, or whether the black church did both.

During the 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement accelerated and moved to the center of the national political stage. Beginning with efforts to integrate schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and continuing through the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–6), the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), the Freedom Rides summer (1961), and the March on Washington (1963), hundreds of thousands of African Americans confronted American racism and fought for fulfillment of the United States’ stated commitment to freedom for all its people. The black church played a central role during these years, providing people and resources for grassroots organizing while cultivating leadership for the national movement.

During this period, tensions arose in the black community that illustrate the sociological complexity of the church as a social institution. From the perspective of the emerging Black Power movement, the church was suspect in its adherence to Christian principles of nonviolence in the face of white racial violence and was deluded in its emphasis on integration into mainstream American society. For black nationalists, this mainstream society remained white-dominated and white-controlled. Some nationalists argued that African American Christianity itself was flawed because of its origins as a religion of enslavement.

From another perspective, political and religious leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. proposed that African American Christianity provided both the spiritual and material bases for a militant liberation theology, one that posed a radical challenge to the white-supremacist status quo of the mid-twentieth century United States. King was a nationally recognized Christian leader, but with him were thousands of African American Christian women and men who argued that the black church provided the path of most, rather than least, resistance to white racism. As Lincoln and Mamiya point out, the fact that white racists bombed several hundred black churches during the civil rights period indicates that the threat posed to white supremacy by the black church was substantial.

A second debate that highlights some of the issues from the Lincoln/Mamiya model concerns the role of women in the black church. During the Civil Rights movement, women provided the “rank and file” of many organizing efforts, working together with men to form the core of the movement. In the church, however, men still maintained a monopoly in terms of formal congregational leadership. On the national level, this trend was even more pronounced; the nationally recognized black leadership of the Civil Rights movement was almost exclusively male. Women such as Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mamie Bradley (Emmett Till’s mother) were recognized on a national level, but the political leadership of black women in many key political battles, especially on the local level, went unacknowledged both in the national media and in the formal leadership structure of the church.

Gender politics are significant because they highlight tensions within the church when issues that are often expressed in secular political terms (such as women’s oppression) are also engaged in theological and spiritual terms. This can result in significant structural change within a social institution such as the black church. In the case of women and the church, the political becomes religious and the religious becomes political, bringing into play the dynamic tensions between the “this-worldly” and the “other-worldly,” between the “priestly” and the “prophetic.”

Bibliography

Frazier, E. Franklin, and C. Eric Lincoln. The Negro Church in America: The Black Church since Frazier. New York: Schocken, 1974. Print.

Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. Print.

Paris, Peter J. The Social Teaching of the Black Churches. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Print.

Pinn, Anthony B. The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002. Digital file.

Price, Emmett George. The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture: Toward Bridging the Generational Divide. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2012. Print.

Warnock, Raphael G. The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness. New York: NYU P, 2014. Print.

Wilmore, Gayraud S., ed. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. Print.