Why are so many black Americans Christians?

[Nuggets]

It seems odd to me that they would embrace the religious system that white people used to justify enslaving them.

[Iliyah]

1. Slavery.

[DBoon]

2. I'll make 2 guesses

1. Religion makes for tight social cohesion, which is required for the descendants of slaves to survive
2. Many themes of Christianity in the old and new testament resonate - deliverance of a chosen people from slavery, redemption, justice.

[Nuggets]

6. I get the social cohesion.

I was wondering if the ability to more freely communicate influenced many decisions.

Morals can be taught through many different religions or with none. I would think Christianity would have been widely rejected.

[rampartc]

33. "let my people go"

[treestar]

3. This was alerted

I get it, but I get your question too.

There are Christians in Africa and Asia too.

Whatever religion offers people, Christianity may do a good job of providing.

[Nuggets]

9. True.

I was specifically wanting to focus on the US.

There are many ways to be spiritual without embracing this specific religion. Why?
Is it a form of Stockholm syndrome?

[onenote]

20. So you think Obama was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome? Martin Luther King Jr. too?

Wow.

[Nuggets]

28. No

I think religions are handed don’t from generation to generation, for the most part.

Their ancestors didn’t start there though. Martin Luther King used at the pulpit to talk to people to be close to be in a place where white people weren’t going to be.

[treestar]

30. You might believe it, because you'd be, as a slave, cut off from African traditions

over the generations, unable to continue them.

It is complicated. For instance, those defending FGM in Africa will say to those trying to stop it, that "you are going to do things the white man's way." So I get that. But FGM is too much for most of us. Stil,l there are those that fervently believe it must be done, and that it is the white man's way to do away with it. So one can empathize with that too, but at the same time, one does not want to waive on FGM being horrible.

If a slave in the US in those times, you'd really need to believe in the next world, and Christianity would be the vehicle with the most information. A sort of assimilation like the immigrants into the culture, though forced.

And people in Africa were colonized, so it theoretically would be easier to keep your traditions when you are there on the same land and the white man is more clearly trying to change you. Yet there were those people for whom it was still compelling.

[Nuggets]

42. All good points

Thanks

I remember a lot of people becoming Muslim in the 60s

[Hekate]

10. Back when I was in grad school studying Hindu Mythology, someone asked how anyone with such...

...a beautiful myth-system could ever convert to Christianity. Without elaboration I answered, "The caste system. Bride-burnings."

Mythological Studies was a marvelous program, but I may have been the only one in my group that got a degree in History first, and Asian history at that.

Be that as it may, you are right. Christianity began as a religion of the oppressed, and it arose out of Judaism, which also is a religion of the oppressed. The Jews have never gone in for converts, but the Christians always have, and there's a lot of material in both books of the Bible to console and give hope to those in need.

[safeinOhio]

19. Loved my class in college...

Anthropology of Religion.

Does this Religion adapt to the culture?

[Hekate]

37. Religions and cultures always do evolve with one another, in my observation. Japanese Zen Buddhism

...and Tibetan Buddhism are expressed very differently, for instance. What arrived in America was the texts, mostly stripped of the lived cultures they had become embedded in. American Buddhism has its own flavor, and fascinatingly enough many if not most of the major scholar/practitioners are Jewish.

That's what tripped up my friend who asked about Hinduism, I think. What we were studying from afar were the artworks, rituals, and written mythologies -- not the day to day lives of the people. You may be a believer, and devout, but the caste system presses very hard the lower you go on the social scale. I can see the attraction of sidestepping all that.

Sadly I've never been to India myself -- that kind of travel is not in the cards -- and of the many Asian Indians I have met here in the US, all have been associated with the University or high-tech. Thanks to my husband's colleague Suniti we have been invited to several Durga-Puja celebrations in the community, as well as Suniti's debut as a classical singer and instrumentalist in her tradition.

[safeinOhio]

43. Back in the early 80s I use to get up late at night to hear

Allan Watts on the radio and ended up reading all of his books. I think he did a great job of bringing Eastern Thought to the West.

[Hekate]

45. I think so too. The Dalai Lama in exile has done so as well...

What has happend to Tibet under China is an ongoing cultural tragedy -- but the one silver lining to this cloud is that Tibetan Buddhism has been seeded in the West.

[treestar]

31. Good point about the oppressed

Maybe why Marx called it the opium of the people. The harder this life is for you, the more persuasive might be promises about the next. That scripture about a rich man having a hard time getting into heaven - very comforting. Now I know it may be a cynical way to keep the poor happy, as an "opium," and continue taking all the wealth. But a lot of people will not see a way out of that and will take comfort in the doctrine. No wonder the Church did not like communism. That movement recognized that the poor could do something about it in this life.

[Celerity]

4. during the slavery era, they used a syncretic form to still worship native African deities and

concepts via transference.

[former9thward]

5. What an insulting question.

[Cirque du So-What]

7. I'm not certain...

but it seems designed to insult African-Americans AND Christians.

[GulfCoast66]

8. Jesus, that's insulting.

Keep in mind, Christian belief was the driving force of the Abolition movement. And the civil rights movement. The Reverend Martin Luther King. The movement organized in the black church.

Google and watch President Obama speaking (and singing) at Mother Immanuel AME Church. It will answer your question. The most powerful presidential moment of my life.

It not like Christianity has a monopoly on slavery.

And I’m a freethinker.

[Hekate]

15. Thank you for saying this much better than I was about to. The OP is pursuing an arrogant...

...and insulting line of reasoning.

And I'm a Pagan.

[Nuggets]

18. How is directly asking a question so insulting?

No one has said anything about people not having morals or anything else. It’s asking an honest question in a day when everyone is looking to be insulted.



Sorry I try to understand people


How horrible I am. 🙄

[First Speaker]

39. If you have to ask, you'll never know...

...to quote a famous African-American...

[ismnotwasm]

47. You know. You could try google. I mean for real

There’s a lot of interesting information on this very topic.
Your question implies that Black people do not have the agency to choose religion. They do.

Generational religion is a thing, the topics of freedom, redemption and salvation through Jesus Christ* gave hope and continues to give hope to many Black people.
Also, Christianity was not unknown in many places in Africa from the first century onward.

*I am by no means religious

[onenote]

21. +1

[demmiblue]

26. +1 (totally obvious, to boot)

[NightWatcher]

11. Why would a conquered people accept the religion of their foes?

I would never, but then again I'm an evangelical atheist (anti-theist)

[Doodley]

53. Missionaries.

[underthematrix]

12. You should be asking why so many white people are Christians.

Because there are NO white people in the Bible. It represents the stories of brown and black people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

In Revelations, Jesus was described as having hair like wool and feet the color of bronze. In the Bible, he is referred to as the son of God. In Gen 1:26 God said Genesis 1:26 (KJV) Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. In other words, at the time, God made man and filled it with other living things, people were black and brown in the image of God (which he called "us."

Around the time the Romans took over Christendom in old Europe, (Roman Catholicism) They developed ways to monetize and weaponize religion to control, manipulate, and terrorize the white masses.

My husband and I do a daily Bible study BUT we're NOT Christians.

[Nuggets]

24. Well that's also a good question except that

they used it to their benefit. It helped them.

Fact is white southerners used and still use Christianity to enslave people and those very people embrace that particular religion.


Not knocking Christianity or African Americans

[LuvNewcastle]

60. We still enslave people in the South?

Let me know where they are so I can turn them loose. I'm a southern abolitionist.

[treestar]

32. Europe is where it really took hold, though

In fact, my take on modern right-wing "Christians" is that they are identifying with its European roots rather than really believing in the doctrines.

[GulfCoast66]

48. That is incorrect. The Middle East and North Africa was all Christian.

Until the Muslims invaded in the 8th Century. And had been Christian for hundreds of years prior.

Constantine started it and the Eastern Roman Empire was still strong after the Western Empire fell to the Germanic people. And Christian.

France did not become Christians until 500AD when Remi converted Clovis and declared him king of the Franks.

I readily admit Christianity as practiced by Northern Europeans and especially American Evangelicals became totally entwined with racism.

But the origins of Christianity was not European.

Hell, the oldest existing Christian Sect are the Assyrians and they are sure not European.

I get your point and it is valid. But Christianity did not start nor gain its strength as a white European religion.

Well, I guess since Middle Eastern and North African people were Caucasian you could make the point. But culturally they were not what we think of as Europeans today.

Hopefully someone with more knowledge than I will come along and clean this up?

[Igel]

54. The racial categories you think are somehow permanent--

even if you might at some other time argue that they're social fictions--didn't hold back then.

Hell, to a large extent only inveterate racists held to the most common racial distinctions I'm exposed to when I was a kid in the '60s and '70s. Some people may have hated certain ethnicities, but they didn't put them in a different racial category.

As for the "origins of Xianity," first you have to define Xianity. If you're talking about the kind that became Catholicism, that was European.

[GulfCoast66]

57. That I generally agree with.

[treestar]

67. I didn't mean the origins were European

But that it spread throughout Europe and became the very dominant religion there. And that is what Deplorable Christians identify with. Not the doctrine, just that it is the religion of Europe. (Of course there are Christians elsewhere, but the religion does not dominate other continents the same way).

[GulfCoast66]

68. It did dominate before Islam took over.

But I get you point and don’t disagree.

Christianity was established and thriving in the near east and North African before it came to north Europe.

I agree that the Christianity we are saddled with now is very European dominated.

Just want to point out it gained its first strong foothold outside of Europe.

The Assyrian and Coptic sects way out date Catholicism. And before the Islamic invasion dominated.

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. I encourage you to study further, because you've a lot to learn

Yes, there are "white people" in the Bible. Romans and Greeks. There's a book called "Romans", which I suppose you haven't got to yet. The New Testament was written perhaps entirely in Greek.

A dividing line between "white" and "brown" is a silly thing to try and draw in the eastern Mediterranean. People moved around the area. Some think the Philistine language was Indo-European, so they may have been related to Indo-European-speaking people in Europe, or Anatolia (where the Hittites, also in the Bible, did speak another Indo-European language).

Revelation, which you seem to have skipped ahead to, is not exactly going for pictorial realism of Jesus the man in its description:

The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

So his face was not coloured like any human face, his eyes literally blazed, and his feet were glowing too. And the 'wool' bit refers to colour. This is not a clue this vision looked like a human to the writer, let alone one you can call "brown".

[yortsed snacilbuper]

13. I don't know,

good question though, according to the bible slavery is okay!

[Mariana]

14. Most of the time, Christianity is the result

of intense early childhood indoctrination, by adults the child loves and trusts.

[Everyman Jackal]

16. Because there in nothing wrong with following Jesus.

There may be more Black Christians than White Christians in America.

[Skittles]

17. I don't know but may I say

I've always thought, if you believed, if you truly BELIEVED, had faith, you'd be joyous in church like black folk are, not all somber and serious.

[safeinOhio]

23. +1

Great observation.

[aidbo]

22. The main reason that any individual follows a certain religion..

..is because their parents and family are followers of that religion.

[JI7]

25. many reasons but churches are places for the community to gather

so its not just about belief in itself.

people throughout history have joined religion based more on social, political, and other benefits.

[msongs]

27. religion is cultural. it is learned behavior. if the behavior serves a positive purpose it continues

and maybe spreads. of course the positive purpose may not be so positive as at first thought
and degenerates into spreading misery

[MicaelS]

29. Download a Bible or New Testament..

That has Jesus words in red. Read those and you will understand better.

Jesus speaks to and for the downtrodden and oppressed. And no one had been done so more than AAs.

[gibraltar72]

34. It's what they had.

[struggle4progress]

36. There is always more than one way to understand

[GoCubsGo]

38. For the same reason just about everyone else adheres to their religion.

Because that's what their parents raised them to be. Most of us get indoctrinated as very young children, when we aren't allowed to think for ourselves. We're often taught to fear punishment for straying from the doctrine, and we're made all sorts of wonderful promises for adhering to it. I was drafted a Catholic. I believed all of that stuff because I was told from the beginning that I'd burn in Hell if I even questioned it, let alone stop believing it. Fortunately, I chose science as a career, and eventually learned to think for myself, at which time I realized there was not one damn thing to back up any of the beliefs that were forced on me all my life.

[cwydro]

40. Why are so many white Americans Christians?

[stillcool]

41. it has nothing to do with White Americans...

Although the majority of Africans are adherents of Christianity or Islam, African people often combine the practice of their traditional belief with the practice of Abrahamic religions. The two Abrahamic religions are widespread across Africa, though mostly concentrated in different areas.

[doc03]

44. Why are so many people still Christians?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

46. Why are so many people still

enslaved to any religion at all?

[GulfCoast66]

50. Same reason we invented it in the first place.

Death is scary.

Not everyone could be a a Stoic. Even in Greek Times.

[True Dough]

63. We need to change our perception of death as scary

I mean, every one of us knows someone who's dead. Probably numerous people. In total, more than 100 billion are estimated to have died in Earth's history. That's a staggering number.

There are, of course, some much scarier ways to go than others. No one wants to endure a slow, agonizing death. I'm strongly opposed to that. If people seek euthanasia they should be entitled to it (with a few protective caveats in place to ensure it's not a temporary disturbed state of mind).

[GulfCoast66]

64. Good luck with that.

Changing 30,000 years of human history is not something I want to think about.

[True Dough]

65. When you put it that way

I'll settle for changing 2.5 years of history that have been as scary as hell!

[GulfCoast66]

66. Amen brother. Or sister!

[LanternWaste]

70. Not merely religion. nationalism, politics, and economics as well.

We are willingly enslaved to nationalism, political tribalism, and economics as well. All by choice too.

In the future, a day may come when we don't predicate the vast majority of our decisions, both large and small, on the imaginary.

But it sure isn't today.

All rationalizations aside, even you and I.

[hunter]

49. There are many flavors of Christianity.

Mine, of course, is the best.

[LanternWaste]

71. There are also many flavors of politics.

Ours, of course, is the best.

Imaginary is as imaginary does.

[Locutusofborg]

51. The White Abolitionist Movement to end slavery

Was overwhelmingly based in the Christian faith. For example, White abolitionist radical John Brown whose goal was to force an end to slavery through violence based his movement on the Christian Bible.
The best selling book in America other than the Bible in 19th century America was Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a fundamentalist Christian whose book on the horrors of slavery is listed as one of the causes of the Civil War.
Christianity worked both ways. Nearly every black leader of slave rebellions and escape from slavery was a Christian.

[Everyman Jackal]

52. I went to the William LLoyd Garrison Elementary School in Roxbury MA

Not only was he an abolitionist but also believed in women's rights. He was also a pacifist.

[Everyman Jackal]

55. Why are some people talking about so many White Christians.

Just because people call themselves Christians does not mean they are Christians. Christians are the followers of Jesus. Christians live by his words especially in Matthew 25:35-45.

[padah513]

59. You are so right.

Far too many people want to lump everyone who claims to be a Christian or a believer in the teachings of Jesus Christ into one massive mold and that's just not the case. VP Pence claims to be a Christian but no true man of Christ would ever join himself to a man like Trump. The yoke is far too uneven for a true believer to bear. Think about it. What true Christ-man would condone the horrendous things taking place at the border, namely the caging of children, and not speak out about it? And yet Pence will go to church on Sunday morning and sit in the pew with his head held high acting all holy and pious. You know them by their fruit. Period.

[BeyondGeography]

56. Consolation, meaning, beauty

[Takket]

58. because people are smart enough to recognize the bastardization of true Christianity for themselves

Christianity being bastardized to justify slavery is the fault of the morally bankrupt slave owners, not the religion.

This is no different than asking why anyone would be a christian today when it is being used to justify taking away women's rights for instance. I'm an atheist but I have no issue with Christianity. In fact I wish the people who call themselves Christians would ACTUALLY ACT LIKE IT! Stop using the religion to justify greed, hatred and idolatry.

Here's a Frederick Douglas quote that perfectly answers your question:

Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”

https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/

[mountain grammy]

61. "I like your Christ, but not your Christianity." Ghandi

Good post and good article. Gave me a new perspective. I struggle with the idea of the oppressed adopting the religion (or culture) of the oppressors, but separating the religion from the oppression is logical explaination. I never really looked at it that way. still learning at 71.

As an atheist, I see religion itself as oppresive, but my believer friends don't, and I have no problem with that.

[yortsed snacilbuper]

62. It makes life easy,

you don't have to think for yourself.

[ooky]

69. I don't find it odd at all.

Christianity provides hope to the oppressed.