Why did African Americans convert to Christianity?

[Lorizael]

I'll admit I don't have a good grasp on how conversion happens at all, but this bit of American history has always seemed very strange to me. Why would people who were abducted from their continent and/or kept as chattel slaves ever see anything even remotely appealing in the alien religious beliefs of their oppressors? What thought process is operating here that makes this likely, such that hundreds of years later African Americans are one of the more Christian segments of our population?

[Elok]

For any number of reasons.

1. Their previous religious beliefs were frequently repressed.
2. Their masters encouraged conversion very strongly, at times enforcing the teaching of their children.
3. They may well have stood to benefit personally from conversion; a Christian slave would seem more trustworthy than one who stubbornly clings to heathenism.
4. After several generations in this country, it would come to seem natural, and alternatives absurd if not unthinkable. What else would they be exposed to?
5. It's not at all uncommon for oppressed classes to want to be "on the winning side," whatever the history. If the followers of the Christian God are much wealthier and more powerful than the followers of some West African nature god who couldn't keep you and/or your ancestors out of chains, it would make a certain amount of sense to switch the horse you bet on.
6. Christianity in America was relatively diverse, and Blacks could and did carve out their own versions of Christianity. The famous slave spirituals, etc.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Massa made them go to church. One gathers the vast majority of slaves towards the end were born that way, and the Africans teaching their kids to know better would probably have found it a promising avenue to getting beaten to death if they were caught...

EDIT: ninja'd by the always-articulate and thoughtfully-nerdy Elok...

[Lorizael]

Two things. One, I've read that some slave owners discouraged their slaves from becoming Christians, because it was thought that Christian slaves might get uppity.

Two, a lot of these seem like reasons to pretend to be Christian. How does that ever transform into sincere faith?

[kentonio]

As late as 1800 most slaves in the U.S. had not been converted to Christianity. In the years that followed, however, widespread Protestant Evangelicalism, emphasizing individual freedom and direct communication with God, brought about the first large-scale conversion of enslaved men and women.

At first, itinerant ministers, captivating large audiences at revivals and camp meetings across the North and South during the middle part of the century, reached only a small percentage of the slave population with their calls to Christianity. Larger numbers of black men and women were converted during the resurgence and intensification of revivalism during the Second Great Awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At that time, Baptist and Methodist ministers appealed to the slave and free black populations, preaching a plain-styled message of hope and redemption while also catering to manners of worship that African men and women carried with them to America, including spirit possession, call-and-response singing, shouting, and dancing.

Whereas an earlier generation of evangelical preachers had opposed slavery in the South during the early nineteenth century, Protestant clergymen began to defend the institution, invoking a Christian hierarchy in which slaves were bound to obey their masters. For many slaveholders, this outlook not only made evangelical Christianity more palatable, but also provided a strong argument for converting slaves and establishing biracial churches.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/expe.../history2.html

[kentonio]

Oh, also..

http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/04/...-christianity/

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

There was a lot of Moses and the Children of Israel stuff in there appealing to slaves at the same time there was plenty pro-slavery stuff in the OT appealing to owners...

[Elok]

Sincere faith is rarer than you might think, as a non-churchgoer. My experience is that about ten percent of the population is sincerely driven to believe in something larger than themselves, and will pursue that something, whatever it is, to an extent that would strike nonbelievers as eccentric at best. Another thirty or forty are disposed to be conventional believers, much less zealous but still inclined to very much orient themselves by the rules, if sometimes only for tribal-alignment purposes. The remainder are divided between the truly apathetic (who might go along with it anyway as not to make waves) and the outright cynical who see it as a mode of self-advancement. You will find all four groups, in some mixture, in any given church. The third mostly taking the form of spouses and children of people from the other three.

[Lorizael]

I guess the only way this makes sense to me is as a generational process, such that converting directly from African tribal beliefs or no belief at all to sincere Christianity was rare or non-existent. Their original beliefs were stripped from them. Some played at being Christian for their own benefit. Some encountered non-slave-owners who preached an inclusive-ish brand of Christianity and wanted to fit in. Children of these people wouldn't really get the difference between sincere and non-sincere belief and would just follow along. Eventually it becomes the norm and is not thought of solely as being the religion of your masters/oppressors. Hm.

[Elok]

Bear in mind that the reasoning process of modern religious people is to some extent opaque to you. Also that "pure" and ignoble motives can sometimes work together, and it can be very hard for even the person experiencing them to tell them apart sometimes.

[Kidlicious]

Christianity changed from a religion that idealized the knights to one that idealized the slaves. This is why Nietzsche said, "God is dead." But if you listen to secular liberals they will tell you that Christianity is all about idealizing the master. That's because they are ignorant.

[Elok]

Also, the general scenario here--sincere piety among the descendants of the oppressed for an oppressor's religion--is more the rule in history than the exception. Latin America is quite Catholic, Africa itself flooded with Anglicans, Luther's piety came out of a region that had been converted at the point of Charlemagne's sword, and as for Islam . . .

[Elok]

Interesting example: the Ottoman Empire. Most people with any knowledge of history know that they relied on slave soldiers called Janissaries, right? But the whole civil service ran the same way. All government officials, military or civil, were slaves of the Sultan. Every year officials would go out looking for promising kids from dhimmi villages, who would be sort of nominally enslaved, then required to convert. They'd then be trained to function as whatever the Sultan's existing slave bureaucracy thought they'd be good for. Since they were Muslims now, their children were Muslims by default--and Muslims may not be enslaved. The bureaucracy was thus prevented from becoming hereditary, and ran as a pure, perversely involuntary meritocracy for generations until the rules were relaxed. Or so I read in one book. My local library is shamefully short on readable books about the Ottomans.

Anyway, there are indications that many families actively pushed for their kids to be enslaved in that manner, because doing so was a guaranteed road to success. That this would involve forsaking their religion and their heritage was apparently not a major concern. Food for thought.

[C0ckney]

interesting thread.

as elok has correctly pointed out, slaves throughout history have tended to adopt the religion of their masters. this is for a variety of reasons, many of which have been mentioned. one that hasn't, however, is that people took this sort of thing far more seriously; perhaps that might be better expressed as saying that religion/spirituality occupied a greater and more important portion of their lives. i think this may also explain the sincerity issue: if you abandon your old god(s) to pretend to worship another, then you are offending both old and new, albeit in different ways. also, christianity's message about forbearance in this life leading to reward in the next is attractive to people who have little or no practical way of improving their real life circumstances.

[Elok]

I realize that last bit (to JM) was not strictly topical, but after a Tweedling I figure any direction we go with this thread is up.

Two things. One, I've read that some slave owners discouraged their slaves from becoming Christians, because it was thought that Christian slaves might get uppity.

Conversion can be a funny thing. I've read from multiple sources that in early Islam (yeah, I've read a lot about Islam, trying to understand it), conversion was actively discouraged among subject peoples, for two reasons. First, and more well-known, it hurt the treasury to have people escaping the jizya tax. Less well-known, but to my mind equally interesting, there were racial motives. Muhammad gave his revelation to the Arabs; it gave them a central place in the cosmic drama, and they were reluctant to share the glory with a bunch of Persians and Berbers and such. When people did convert, they still got treated as second-class citizens, eventually leading to a Berber revolt, and much of the later politics in the Abbasid era centered around conflict between the Arab and Persian power blocs.

Fast forward a few centuries to Norman Sicily, and you see a Catholic king actively forbidding the conversion of Muslims, because he had to maintain a balance between them, the Greeks, and his own Catholics, and he knew that proselytizing would infuriate a community he depended on for manpower.

I've also heard that at some points in the Renaissance the Pope wound up taking a strong hand in the protection of the rights of Protestants, when it happened to suit his political interests (ie he thought they would undermine an enemy's power base, or make a Catholic prince more dependent on him, or some such). But I don't know the details there. Bottom line: religious conversion can be fraught with goofy politics in any era.