Across the 60° Meridian Toward a Reorientation of Black Spirituality

By Stephen G. Ray Jr.

Nearthe middle of the Atlantic Ocean a marker can be set. This demarcation line at 60°W is what I think of as the birth site of African American spirituality. It marks the place where African people of many tribes and places passed into a New World in which geographies and imaginative landscapes reigned, where Black flesh was made profane, and the humanity housed in that flesh, denied. In the hearts and spirits of those trapped below the decks of cursed vessels, deities and ancestors who had once been the protectors of the social order and a source of meaning for their lives, now served only as companions on this journey through Hell. For these people the gods of this new universe (New World?) were neither friend nor source of life. Still, they were the holders of the power of life and death. In the face of such power, the voices heard in their hearts were muted but still witnesses that the God of Life was not defeated.

I begin just here because I want to reorient the narration of African American spiritualities in several ways. Often when the stories—there is never just one—of religious practices of those who landed on these shores from the holds of slave ships are told, the idea of syncretism is hovering in the background. Specifically, the question raised by preeminent historian of African American Christianity, the late Albert Raboteau and others: namely, how did African religious heritage blend with the Christianity of the Americas to make something recognizable as Black religion?1 While this is an apt question to ask given the circumstance in which Africans found themselves here in America, namely, as forced migrants from an alien cultural milieu, it invites a static response which I find problematic. By underestimating the dynamism inherent in the constituents of the term “African American,” we make the error of fixing in place definitions which are inherently malleable. This tendency toward fixation is born of the unending need for racial discourses and the oppressive systems built around them to be simple and definitive. While this remains the reigning paradigm for study of African American Christianity, I want to suggest a better way to understand African American religion and spirituality.

The substance of this essay will be framing the study and explication of African American spiritualities in a way that relies on the idea of narration as opposed to story and that complexifies the ideas of “African” and “American.” I will conclude with a particular account of the dynamism at the heart of African American religion that illumines the unique character of spiritualities which flow from the traditions constituent of it.

In the first instance, I use the word “narration” to infuse the conversation about African American spiritualities with a sense of dynamism. Relying on the definition of narration that describes it as the “action or process of narrating a story,”2 I want to suggest that if narration is reshaped to be understood as the work of many and not just one, there are possibilities for telling a story that is richly textured and resists reductionist tendencies. Given the many and varied ways that complexity has been denied in the discourses shaped around the humanity and practices of African Americans, such recognition is vital.

Before turning to the task of describing African American spiritualities using the paradigm of narration, allow me to problematize two specific reductionisms: “African” and “American.”

As Paul Gilroy notes in his groundbreaking work The Black Atlantic, 3 the entire idea of Africa as a single principle for understanding the many and different peoples and civilizations who have inhabited the continent is sheer folly. Particularly in a post-colonial world in which national demarcations are anything but disclosive of heritage or intentions of the peoples themselves, the impulse to suspect that one can meaningfully reduce this diverse complexity is a function of the racialized imagination, an imagination which relies on reductionist absolutes in its construction of racialized bodies and geographies. Recognition of the preceding is what leads to my observation that no one story, no matter how it may be clothed in Africanicity, is adequate to capture the “African” in African American, thus the need for multiple narrations.

In his book African American Religions, 1500 to 20004, Sylvester Johnson adds further complexity by noticing that the Africans who ended up on these shores were quite literally losers on their own shores. Whether at the hands of rival African empires or the burgeoning European colonial empires, those who found themselves aboard the slave ships had lost the war for their freedom as they boarded those ships and lost recognition of their humanity when they crossed the 60°W meridian. A consequence of this reality is that previous understandings of and connections to their ancestors and to the Divine no longer held the power of shaping a society and their place in it. On these shores, ancestors and the Divine became powerful in new ways, as guarantors of the intersubjective humanity of the wretched of this bitter earth, America. Precisely because the spiritual experience of intersubjective humanity is made visible through individual witness, accounts of the power and working of the ancestors and the Divine are best pitched in the key of individual lives. Such an interpretive turn further challenges the notion that any one definition or story is adequate.

The turn to the narrations of the many is thus not simply a methodological move to find consensus in the midst of plurality. It is a recognition of religious agency within communities whose need was to construct some meaningful sacred canopy5 affirming their humanity in a society whose sacred cosmos made no place for such a recognition. Put another way, beginning the exploration of African American spiritualities with the actual accounts of how the Spirit is moving in their midst is essential to escape the reductionistic descriptions and stories that are necessary to the maintenance of systems of racial oppression.

Turning now to the “American” part of African American, I bring to memory that discrete forms of the American practice of Christianity were born, in part, as a moralizing discourse to occlude the wickedness of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the presence of the system of chattel slavery ubiquitous throughout the nation for the first 200 years of its existence.6 The material condition of Africans as a moral dilemma for the Christian faith was permanently embedded in the practice of Christianity, no matter the confession. Thus, no practice of the faith on these shores was predisposed to recognize the full humanity of African Americans or any claims such recognition might have on society as a whole.

Here it is good to be reminded that the religious practices of all people are shaped by the cultural context within which they take shape and the resources available to them in it. This is particularly the case when a “people” is coalescing into a recognizable community. Much of the early books of the Hebrew Bible are a witness to just this situation.

Finding themselves in the context of American Christianity, the Africans and later African Americans crafted a religious practice using the cultural sensibilities and artifacts available to them. The most immediate being a complex of practice and belief that disparaged and abused the materiality of their humanity. In this instance, resort to the intersubjective space in which their forebears had found refuge on the voyage through Gehenna would create the center of gravity of their faith. Spirituality was not then simply a feature. Various commentators have noted the “spirit-filled” character of African American churches, usually as a means of contrast with “white” performances of the faith. Racial reductionism aside, it is possible to note this thread as having a meaning that is disclosive of something genuine of African American faith and spiritualities.

This “Spiritual” thread emerged from coherent worldviews and sacred canopies which formed the systems through which peoples of Africa structured their lives and found meaning. It weaved through barbaric dislocations and existentially shattering transitions from human beings to chattel. In African contexts, this thread wove the material and social relations between the living, the ancestors, and the Divine, but west of the 60° meridian, stories about it wrought only bitter nostalgia. Even then what remained was the love and wisdom of the ancestors and the living presence of the Divine. The tapestries of life in which they weaved their power created and sustained an intersubjective, spiritual refuge far away from homeland and tribe. This is the font of African American spiritualities, spiritualities made visible through African Americans creatively and diversely narrating their and others’ full humanity. Narrations too big for one story to contain. v

Notes

1. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press 2004.

2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narration.

3. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Re-issue edition, 1993

4. Silvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2015.

5. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 1967.

6. The 1619 Project and the part not told.

Stephen Ray is The Crump Visiting Professor and Black Religious Scholars Group Scholar-In-Residence at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. Previously he was the president of Chicago Theological Seminary and taught at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. The co-writer of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (2007), he was educated at Yale University and Yale Divinity School, where he was named a distinguished alumnus in 2018.