Search Results

This book offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism, all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. The book traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal Movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews during slavery supports the contention that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to Northern cities. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian rabbi, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. This book provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them as part of the creative ferment of spirituality, art, and commerce that characterized African American life in the era of the Harlem Renaissance.

This book offers a trenchant examination of the career of Islam among the blacks of America. No one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans (a coinage he explains and defends) but not among white Americans or Hispanics. The assumption has been that there is an African connection. In fact, the book shows, none of the distinctive features of African Islam appear in the proto-Islamic, black nationalist movements of the early 20th century. Rather, Islam owes its momentum to the distinctively American phenomenon of “Black Religion,” a God-centered holy protest against anti-black racism. This book begins as part of a communal search for tools with which to combat racism and redefine American blackness. The 1965 repeal of the National Origins Quota System led to a massive influx of foreign Muslims, who soon greatly outnumbered the blacks whom they found here practicing an indigenous form of Islam. Immigrant Muslims would come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America. For these Muslims, the nemesis was not white supremacy, but “the West”. In their eyes, the West was not a racial, but a religious and civilizational threat. American blacks soon learned that opposition to the West and opposition to white supremacy were not synonymous. Indeed, states the book, one cannot be anti-Western without also being on some level anti-Blackamerican. Like the Black Christians of an earlier era struggling to find their voice in the context of Western Christianity, Black Muslims now began to strive to find their black, American voice in the context of the super-tradition of historical Islam. The book argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam.

In 2006, the contemporary American Pentecostal movement celebrated its 100th birthday. Over that time, its African American sector has been markedly influential, not only vis-à-vis other branches of Pentecostalism but also throughout the Christian church. Black Christians have been integrally involved in every aspect of the Pentecostal movement since its inception and have made significant contributions to its founding as well as the evolution of Pentecostal/charismatic styles of worship, preaching, music, engagement of social issues, and theology. Yet despite its being one of the fastest growing segments of the Black Church, Afro-Pentecostalism has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves. This book examines different facets of the movement, including its early history, issues of gender, relations with other black denominations, intersections with popular culture, and missionary activities, as well as the movement's distinctive theology. The chapters reflect on the state of the movement, chart its trajectories, discuss pertinent issues, and anticipate future developments.

Embracing Protestantism argues that people of African descent in America who embraced Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans, but rather came to think of themselves in the context of more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was the land of slavery and white supremacy where they had little chance of obtaining civil rights or economic mobility. Contrastingly, the Atlantic world offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain and Europe, membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations, the chance for contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa, and inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean with whom they had formed links through correspondence and the movement of black missionaries. Rather than deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants in this era were Atlantic Africans who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. Reaching out to third parties outside the plantation complex in the new abolitionist and humanitarian societies then springing up in late eighteenth-century Britain and America was an important way black Anglophone Christians had to resist slavery.

The question of teaching evolution in public schools is a continuing and frequently heated political issue in America. From Tennessee's Scopes Trial in 1925 to recent battles that have erupted in Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and countless other localities, the critics and supporters of evolution have fought nonstop over the role of science and religion in American public life. This book explores the ways in which the evolution debate has reverberated beyond the confines of state legislatures and courthouses. Using extensive research in newspapers, periodicals, and archives, the book shows that social forces such as gender, regionalism, and race have intersected with the debate over evolution in ways that shed light on modern American culture. It investigates, for instance, how antievolutionism deepened the cultural divisions between North and South—northerners embraced evolution as a sign of sectional enlightenment, while southerners defined themselves as the standard bearers of true Christianity. Evolution debates also exposed a deep gulf between conservative Black Christians and secular intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois. The book also explores the ways in which the struggle has played out in the universities, on the internet, and even within the evangelical community. Throughout, the book shows that evolution has served as a weapon, as an enforcer of identity, and as a polarizing force both within and without the churches.