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This concluding chapter considers the implications of studying African-Jamaican religiosity for theology and for African-derived religions. It suggests new directions for Caribbean theology that are consonant with the historical manifestations of Jamaica's African-derived religions and with the spiritual insights and ethical imperatives of broader African-Caribbean religions. It argues that African-derived religions are critical in shaping liberative perspectives in Caribbean theology. Some methodological insights and limitations of contemporary Caribbean, Black, Pan-African, womanist, and Latin American theologies are explored, particularly liberation theological approaches to indigenous religions, which seek to bring credibility to aspects of indigenous traditions as they have been incorporated into localized expressions of Christianity.

This chapter discusses the ambiguity, contradictions, and controversy surrounding the legacy of African-derived religions in Jamaica, especially with regard to Kumina, a Kongo/Koongo-derived Jamaican tradition. It highlights the dualistic approach to African religions in Black Jamaican culture, especially during the 19th and 20th centuries. On the one hand, African-derived religions and the people who sustain them have been and continue to be stigmatized as dangerous and pathological in Jamaican popular culture. Yet, on the other hand, practitioners of African-derived religions are consulted regularly for healing and crisis resolution. An African-centered womanist “theology of the cross” is developed in this chapter, which shows that Obeah, Myal, Revival Zion, Kumina, Rastafari, and other African diasporic religions share common religious foci that appear to be African-derived and emphasize healing, well-being, and the integration and affirmation of purposeful life experience.

This chapter explores the encounter between Europeans and Africans during four centuries of European expansion (1492-1838), looking at the historical legacy of African-derived religions in Jamaica during the slave period and its theological potential for contemporary Jamaicans. By examining Obeah and Myal within the socio-historical setting of pre-Emancipation Jamaica, it refutes the bad-versus-good classification of the two traditions as a product of absolutist reasoning in Western Christian thought. Instead, it posits that the idea of moral neutrality is most compatible with the metaphysical assumptions and ethical principles embraced by practitioners of both traditions.

This chapter examines two chief African responses to the European missionary enterprise from slavery to the 20th century. One response was to incorporate aspects of the Christian faith into the African religious heritage. Native Baptist (c.1830s-c. 1860s), Revival Zion (1860s- ), and Rastafari (1930s- ) traditions represent this type of religious formation. The Native Baptists were associated with the African-American evangelist George Liele, who began his missionary work in Jamaica during the late 18th century. The Revival Zion tradition represents a resurgence of the Native Baptist religion. With a Pan-African orientation and deep socio-political convictions, Rastafari, more than any other African-oriented tradition on the island, has shaped the postmodern, post-Christian African personality in Jamaica. African loyalty to Christian orthodoxy, another African-Jamaican response to European missionary Christianity, is also considered in this chapter as it was taught and reinforced by generations of missionary groups, especially after the last quarter of the 19th century.

This chapter discusses two strategies that have proven to be helpful in building trust and creating a transformative understanding of African American religions in relation to resistance to racism. The first strategy helps students to see diversity within African American religion (and thus also the African American experience) by providing methods for analysing arguments, persons, and events from the history of African American religions. The second strategy helps students see how their own experiences and perspectives on racism are related to racism in the United States. Used together, these strategies can empower students in their analysis of racism and the variety of ways African American religions have resisted racism. This, in turn, may help students to consider their own relationship to racism and their resistance to it.

In a course like African American religion, the classroom is a “contact zone”, a term used by Mary Louise Pratt. To illustrate the difficulties in dealing with the contact zone, this chapter describes an African American Religion course recently taught by the author of this book. It then looks at the issues involved when a classroom becomes a contact zone. The chapter then discusses the use of David Remnick's biography of Muhammed Ali, King of the World, and America in the Civil Rights era for understanding the significance of the Nation of Islam. Finally, building on the spiritual journey of Muhammed Ali, the central issue in teaching religion, transformation, whether it is African American Religion or not, is considered.

This chapter explores some pedagogical challenges, responses to, and strategies for the inclusion of African and African American cultural perspectives into the required core curriculum courses at a graduate theological seminary. This chapter represents the author's longstanding personal interest in African and African American religions and cultures — an interest that was deepened through participation in the workshop “Mining the Motherlode of African American Religious Life”. This personal commitment is used to develop seminary courses that draw on African American religious life. In the teaching context, part of the challenge of rethinking the core curriculum lies in the particular nature of theological education.

African American Christianity can be used to engage the questions of social practice and theology. From a variety of sources, the Black Church has constructed practices that counter and subdue oppressive forces felt by African Americans while simultaneously establishing a context for a more abundant life. This chapter presents a model for teaching those contexts. It presents the rationale and several of the strategies used in the course, “The Social Contexts of the Black Church”. The course requires students to ground their ministerial vision in a dialectical understanding of the Black Church. Moving between the contemporary interdisciplinary interpretation of the sociocultural contexts of African Americans and the history and established theological teachings of the Black Church, an approach is presented that equips theological students to construct a ministerial direction and praxis.

This chapter analyzes European cultural attitudes toward African people and African religions, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries. It assesses in greater depth the standard European planter and missionary responses to Obeah and Myal. This assessment is prefaced by considering the Afrophobic motif as the most essential ingredient in colonial scripts of European expansion and encounter with the African Other.

This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, characterizing the novel as a complex, sophisticated work influenced by biblical narrative, African‐American religion, and the social sciences. In the light of Hurston's near iconic status in some feminist circles, the importance of her identity as an African‐American woman for her representation of the exodus is considered. Hurston's anthropological training with Franz Boas, and consequent familiarity with the concept of cultural relativism, is also shown to be formative of her presentation of the biblical story as at once both unique and relative, the myth by which Americans live(d).

The introduction argues that a study of black religion in the Delta in the post‐Reconstruction era promises to introduce new theoretical perspectives to three overlapping academic disciplines: American religious history, African American history, and southern history. It offers a working definition of American religion that integrates popular, church, and racial history; a sense of black history in which the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent a time of profound cultural experimentation that belie its label as the nadir of African American cultural accomplishment; and a view of southern history in which the religion of rural poorer blacks emerges as a rich and varied source of protest to segregation.

This chapter discusses approaches to the co-construction of religion and race in Hollywood films focusing on the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1929 film Hallelujah. Directed by King Vidor, the film extended popular culture and literary traditions of naturalizing and sanctioning American racial hierarchies through the presentation of an aesthetic of primitive black religion. The chapter examines the production history and reception of the film with attention to discourses about race, religion, and representation, as well as about the relationship between African-American religious practices and civil rights more broadly.

This chapter begins by introducing the heterodox nature of Du Bois's religious voice. Against David Levering Lewis, it argues that despite Du Bois's hostile comments against religion, Du Bois also speaks with a deeply religious register. Du Bois turns his discontent with religion and its affects on American democracy into a religious faith of his own making. The chapter presents five theses on Du Bois's religious imagination, which work to claim Du Bois as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist.

This chapter investigates how growing numbers of Delta blacks rejected a number of the new dimensions to black religion, including the role of fraternal orders, the sight of ministers hawking market wares in person and in print, the popular stress on worldly goods as a sign of spiritual worth and success, and the marginalization of women from traditional roles of authority. It demonstrates how the disenchanted turned to a new breed of religious leader, men such as William Christian, Charles H. Mason, and Charles P. Jones, one-time Baptist ministers who urged blacks to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity. Each was a founding father of the African American Holiness‐Pentecostal movement and criticized black denominational churches as too materialistic, rational, and hostile to ecstatic dimensions of worship. Yet within twenty years of its founding, the Holiness leaders, ironically, embraced some of the very denominational practices they had previously castigated, revealing not only the limits to their calls for reform but also some of the modern characteristics of Delta black religion as a whole.

Identifying W. E. B. Du Bois as a historian of African religion, this chapter examines his rethinking of fetish, God, and the continuity between African religion and African American religion. Originally agreeing with imperial comparative religion that fetishism marked the beginning of religious evolution, Du Bois eventually critiqued the notion of the fetish as a European invention and an ideological supplement to the slave trade. Initially relying on European reports that the Yoruba believed in God, Du Bois came to emphasize the Yoruba God Shango, who was not like Rudolph Otto's “wholly other” but a deity of political sovereignty. By contrast to an early confidence in the transatlantic continuity of African religion into the Black Church in America, Du Bois eventually stressed the disruptions of slavery and colonialism that separated African religion in Africa from the diaspora.

This chapter tries to make a case for the defense and looks at everything that can be argued against the identification of African religion with the microcosmic and of mission Christianity with the macrocosmic. It then turns to the key question of literacy, arguing that there was no necessary connection between its introduction into much of southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and conversion to Christianity, even though there was an actual connection. The generalizing potentialities of literacy have become available to the spokespersons of African religion. The ways in which mission Christianity was much less macrocosmic than the conventional model supposes are explored. It is noted that much of the continuing history of the religion in southern Africa, whether of Christianity or of African religion, lies in the working out of “this dialectic between the local and the central”.

This chapter traces how Charismatic healing practices long prominent in African Independent Churches/African Instituted Churches and Pentecostal churches have become central in all the traditionally mainline/historic churches in Ghana, focusing on Akan ethnic churches: Roman Catholic Church in Ghana, Presbyterian Church of Ghana, and Methodist Church Ghana. Non-pentecostal Western missionaries established mainline churches in the early nineteenth century. To stem the exodus of members to AICs and Pentecostals, from the 1970s lay-led Charismatic renewal movements within mainline churches departed from missionary heritages influenced by an Enlightenment worldview developed in non-African cultures. For most Akan/African Christians, as for practitioners of African indigenous religions, religion must meet existential needs. The universe seems filled with benevolent and malevolent spirits; the Devil and demons cause sickness or render medicine impotent; and salvation includes healing and deliverance or liberation. When sick, Akans typically try hospitals, traditional healers, Muslim spiritualists, and churches until one finds healing.