A Diasporic People

The descendants of the half million Africans brought to British north America in the slave trade belonged to an international community of people of African descendant. Separation from their African homelands made black Americans a diasporic people: a people scattered far from home and settled among strangers. New Africans and their children lived in cultural contexts very different from those new immigrants unwillingly left behind in Africa. Usually outnumbered by people of European and native American descent in north America, they encountered new religions and languages. They lived through fears of being victimized as an impoverished, racialized minority. They came to an understanding of the conditions of their new worlds and over time forged a new identity as African Americans. At the end of the eighteenth century, religion became a crucial facet of African American identity. Africans in the Americas came from many different religious traditions. Some recognized several gods: other religions, like Islam, recognized one supreme god. All those religions failed their followers who were captured and forced across the ocean into slavery. Those enslaved in British north America were always in a numerical minority. A large number of black people didn’t didn’t follow a particular religion and did not attend churches. Though Christianity offered an alternative to dreadfulness. the religions of African Americans from seventeenth to early nineteenth century were expressed in three dimensions. the first black religion was “syncretic”, a mixture of different traditions, drawing upon the wisdom of Africa and calling upon the overlapping traditions of the native Americans and Europeans as well. The second dimension was multiracial and evangelical Early Methodism and the many independent churches and sects it inspired reflect dimension. The third dimension of black American religion was organized churches. Breaking away from white congregations in the late eighteenth century, black northerners founded their own church organizations, beginning in Philadelphia. the independent black denominations offered wide opportunities to black men, but they were not hospitable to women preachers. like white churches, black congregations obeyed St. Paul’s stricture against women’s speaking out in church, even though most of the rank-and-file membership consisted of women, as was also the case in non-black churches.

I learned about Methodism, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity, which derive their inspiration from the life and teachings of John Wesley. The interesting fact is that methodist congregation often met informally, not in buildings specifically dedicated to worship, but in homes, where people of all races, genders and stations of life movingly told their own stories of personal salvation. The other thing I learned was about “Hagar”. The figure of Hagar, the servant of Abraham and bearer of his child Ishmael, appealed to black people who saw parallels in her situation and that of enslaved women(and later, single parents). Memorable quotations: “Language captured the cultural dimension of creole, or American, identity” (pg 57) “The racialized appearance of the Christian trinity in the Americas embodied one aspect of that very discrimination: although the bible does not specify the race or color of Jesus, God, or the Holy Spirit, every church in the land rendered Christ and the Virgin Mary as white” (pg 49).