African American Spiritualities

By Peter J. Paris

We often hear people say, Though I am not religious I am spiritual. Usually, they mean that though they do not ascribe to any particular form of organized religion, they do believe in a supreme power as the primary source and sustainer of all life. Such a claim is very African. Africans often say that there are no atheists on the continent because God is everywhere. Moreover, Africans have always believed all mortal beings come from God, to whom they are destined to return. Those who make significant contributions to the well-being of their communities are thought to live on as ancestors imbued with enhanced powers to continue blessing all who remember them with praise and adoration.

Spirituality pertains to the integrating and animating center of power and meaning for persons and their communities of identity. Most important, spirituality is always embodied, which means that any discussion of it necessarily includes a community’s history, sociology, literature, and philosophy. The spirituality of African Americans is deeply rooted in their ancestral experience of nearly three centuries of chattel slavery, followed by widespread societal injustices that in many ways continue to the present day. Metaphorically, the spirituality of a people is synonymous with their soul or essence which, for African Americans, is their tenacious spirit to survive.

African peoples understand spirituality to be integral to every dimension of their personal and communal lives and to be deeply rooted in particular cultural and geographic contexts. Though they brought their traditional religious beliefs and practices with them through the Middle Passage, Africans were not able to keep them intact because those beliefs and practices were integrally connected to lost

linguistic identities and African contexts. During the long process of adapting to an alien environment of hostility and estrangement, however, they were able to retain a common African ethos that expresses itself in a spirit of communal belonging. Their many original tribal specificities gradually morphed into a generalized racial identity that continues to exude a common spiritual ethos that is manifest today in many theistic and humanist forms.

Clearly, with a firm belief in a supreme power ruling over a vast pantheon of sub-divinities, Africans did not arrive on this continent as a tabula rasa. Although countless numbers of them perished en route, those who survived did so by sharing their meager resources through mutual acts of consolation and comfort. The prohibitive rules against their assembling made it almost impossible to organize collective resistance. Nonetheless, sharing an unambiguous moral and spiritual rejection of their bondage, they expressed their humanity whenever possible in two natural forms of resistance: escape and rebellion. Space does not allow more than mere mention of the various alliances with the British following the American War of Independence that enabled thousands to escape as emigres to eastern Canada or the Caribbean. Nor does space allow for discussion of the Underground Railroad that enabled large numbers to find limited freedom in the northern states and central Canada. Suffice it to say, however, that nobody of African descent ever felt completely safe anywhere on this continent.

The spirituality of enslaved Africans and their descendants was shaped by and helped them to resist and to endure the traumatic experience of slavery and its aftermath. For instance, the capacity of Africans to sing and make music along with their genius for double entendre inspired them to compose songs they called “spirituals” that kept their hopes for freedom alive and saved them from despair. By the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans had become familiar with the religion of their masters and overseers, which they had at first disdained. They were first introduced to Christianity by such names as Jesus, Mary, and Sarah emblazoned on slave ships. Later, on the plantations, they saw their masters’ families at prayer and sometimes their pastors were allowed to tell them biblical stories and explicate their moral lessons. Gradually they perceived ways to safely express their own concerns through selected Christian forms of thought and practice.

For example, hearing the story of the baby Moses, who was protected by the cunning action of his sister and mother and grew up to become the deliverer of his people from bondage, they quickly discerned its implications for their own condition. With their master’s religion as an instrumental resource, they gradually morphed a biblical ethos into their own worldview by assuming that what God had done for the oppressed Israelites, God would also do for them. Eventually, their genius for music and song enabled them to compose and sing many beloved spirituals of which the following became their most beloved:

“Go down Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land, Tell Ol’ Pharaoh, Let my people go.”

Hidden from their slave masters’ eyes, enslaved Africans practiced multiple forms of Christianity with mixed influences from their African past and numerous charismatic leaders. Much of this spiritual resource became visible throughout the Black community during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, usually without notice of white people, who assumed Blacks were incapable of creating anything of real value. In due course, marks of their spiritual genius were embodied in the thought and practice of such creative people as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Drew, George Washington Carver, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Mohammed Ali, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Ella Baker, Constance Baker Motley, Marion Anderson, James Cone, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, countless Black clergy, writers, performers, artists, musicians, and many more.

Unlike European immigrants, who by the third and fourth generation invariably lose their respective languages and customs by assimilating into a common North-American culture that some called a “melting pot,” the marks of one’s African descent do not disappear so quickly due to racist laws and customs. For many generations white Americans assumed the diminution of the humanity of African Americans as a basis for their unequal treatment. Thus in 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared in the Dred Scott Decision, which denied freedom to a Black man and his family, that “the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” The classification of Africans as pariahs helped to maintain the system of racial exclusion and oppression long after the Emancipation Act of 1863 and the Reconstruction Amendments of 1865-70.

Had the enslaved Africans been granted full citizenship rights along with a reasonable measure of reparations by 1870, their long bitter memory of oppression might have gradually faded away. Instead, the brief Reconstruction era (186577) was superseded by the “separate but equal” doctrine of Court’s 1896 Plesy v Ferguson decision, which legitimated racial segregation in public accommodation throughout the nation, a practice sanctioned for more than half a century, before it was finally overturned in Brown v Board of Education (1954). In the United States, only citizens protected by the law can enjoy a good life. Alas, such was decidedly not the case for African Americans prior to 1954, and as Michelle Alexander makes clear in The New Jim Crow, it is in profound ways still not the case today. African Americans were finally granted full constitutional rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voters Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing Act of 1968. Alas, in large part, public schools and residential housing remain segregated throughout the nation—conditions that guarantee unequal outcomes in all areas of our common life.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, both federal and state laws were used to enhance quality of life for whites while disadvantaging Blacks. For example, after the Second World War, the GI bill provided tens of millions of dollars in education and training for white veterans while denying the vast majority of Black

veterans access to the same benefits. As a result of this legacy of enslavement and legal discrimination, people of African descent continue to score lower than their white counterparts on virtually every socio-economic index.

Though there is much more intermingling of the two races today than a half generation ago, the racial divide remains largely in place due to economic inequality, the vast increase in private schools with minimum racial diversity, the gerrymandering of voting districts, and social policies that inflict environmental damage on predominantly Black residential urban areas. Finally, the so-called “war on drugs” that emerged in the 1980s led to the mass incarceration of millions of young Black men and increasing numbers of Black women in the nation’s inner cities with long-term devastating effects on Black families. Space only permits mention of the events leading up the recent Black Lives Matter movement following the public murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by the white police officer Derek Chauvin.

Throughout their history in North America, African peoples have had to struggle in a hostile world to survive with little hope for a better life. Such conditions often lead humans to despair. While that has often occurred, generally African Americans have overcome the odds due to their tenacious spirit of refusing to cease their struggle for justice or to deny their faith in God, which together constitute the predominant marks of their spirituality. This spirituality is deeply rooted in their common experience of racial oppression, on the one hand, and their struggle to survive by engaging in various forms of resistance on the other. Each form of resistance manifests its own corresponding form of spirituality both for individuals and their respective groups. The following examples are illustrative but not exhaustive: (a) those who strive to integrate fully into the societal mainstream embody the spirituality exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr. and the non-violent movement he led; (b) those who strive to love their racial identity and work toward racial solidarity and progress in all aspects of their lives reflect the spirituality of such leaders as Malcolm X, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, James H. Cone’s Black Liberation theology, and womanist theologians such as Jackie Grant, Delores Williams, and Katie Cannon; (c) those who strive to gain widespread acclaim as successful business entrepreneurs reflect the spirituality and leadership styles of such notables as Oprah Winfrey, professional athletes like Venus and Serena Williams, and numerous musical pop stars like Beyoncé and Jay-Z; (d) those who strive to be non-theistic humanists and are wholly dedicated to racial justice reflect the spiritual ethos of people like W.E.B. DuBois as well as such contemporaries as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and the religious scholar Anthony B. Pinn; (e) those who strive for separate racial self-development reflect the spirituality of the iconic Booker T. Washington and countless charismatic leaders like T.D. Jakes and Cynthia L. Hale. Suffice it to say that the spiritualities of Black folk can be discerned by observing their habitual practices as they strive to endure, resist, and flourish in this still-too-hostile land.

Peter Paris is The Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary.He also taught at Harvard University, Harvard University Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and Trinity Theological College (Ghana). A preeminent black social ethicist, he is the author of Virtues and Values: The African and African American Experience (2004) and other books on the spiritual landscape of Africans and African Americans.