CHRISTIANITY (Religion) vs SLAVERY in AMERICA Since every one want to be and seems to be damn scholar on FB, I suggest the following for those who want to get into the subject a little more deeply on their own............The question of whether Christianity was, in retrospect, a helpful or harmful ideology for slaves and free blacks. In the early 1970s, scholars bolstered by Marxist philosophy (such as Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and black nationalism (as in Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987) argued that Christianity had prevented blacks from doing more to further their own political causes by encouraging submission to authority and passivity in the face of violence. The most sustained rejoinder to this assertion came in Gayraud Wilmores Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1992), in which Wilmore outlined a longstanding relationship between African-American religious leaders (mostly evangelical) and a commitment to political protest against slavery and inequality. More recent authors have come to a middle ground on this issue, tending to see the complexities of the role Christianity has played in the experience of American blacks rather than engaging in an either/or debate. Most notable in this newer literature (although not appropriate as texts for high school students, they are nonetheless great reads) are Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998), Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (1998), and James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (1995).
Posted on: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:34:13 +0000
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