Term Paper on "African-American Christian Heritage"

Term Paper 12 pages (3361 words) Sources: 4 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

AME Church

Though not really strictly a black church, the African Methodist Episcopalian Church (or AME church) has had a major leadership position in the black community and has served to empower the people, promote political and social causes, attract the patronage of political leaders, and at the same time develop a large and loyal congregation. The church has had a long history and is an important part of the history of the black church in America even if it is open to people of all races. The church is similar to others in terms of its organization and governance, and in theology it is a Methodist denomination. In other ways, it is a unique religious institution in the American system and continues to be an important part of its community.

History

The African Methodist Episcopal Church is a United States Methodist Church and is not affiliated with the United Methodist Church. The AME was formally organized in 1816, developing from a congregation formed by a group of Philadelphia-area slaves and former slaves. They had been members but withdrew from St. Georges's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787, and they did so because of discrimination. They built their own church, the Bethel African Methodist Church in Philadelphia, today known as Mother Bethel, and in 1799, Richard Allen was ordained minister of the church by Bishop Francis Asbury of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Before the Civil War, the church was found only in the Northern states, but it spread rapidly in the South after the war. In terms of doctrine and church government, the AME is Methodist, and it holds a general conference every four years ("History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church" paras. 1-4).

The church formed during the era when slavery was still in force in parts of the country, which affected many in the North because of fugitive slave laws even if there was no slavery in the North. One source of opposition to slavery was found in the church, and the black Christian churches did what they could to promote emancipation and the abolitionist cause. Religion developed so it formed the center of the world the slaves made for themselves. Parish cites Eugene Genovese to the effect that Christianity was a double-edged sword which could sanction either accommodation or justify resistance to slavery:

In the everyday routine of plantation life, it brought spiritual comfort and relief to the individual slave and sustaining power to the slave community. An emotional brand of Christianity, spiced with elements of the African religious legacy, developed into a distinctive African-American religion (Parish 81-82).

Researchers believe that slave religion inspired a powerful sense of community and offered leaders and spokespersons for that community, and it also helped to provide alterative standards and alternative possibilities in terms of relations between slaves. The influence of religion was likely different on large plantations as opposed to smaller farms. Masters and white preachers alike worked to convert the slaves, but African influences remained diverse and potent. Voodoo was still widely practiced, and conjurers had great influence within the slave community. These two strains merged to produce a distinct, syncretic African-Christianity (Parish 81-83).

The most important black denomination started when black members of St. George's Methodist Church found themselves segregated for the first time within the church, so they left and formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, or the AME, as noted. This was to be an important center for social organization, economic cooperation, education, leadership training, political action, and religious life. It would be the primary example of the black church, the one institution African-Americans controlled (Raboteau 79-80).

Some of the fears of slave owners seemed to come true in the early part of the nineteenth century with the attempt on the part of Denmark Vesey to plot a revolt, and the suppression of that revolt in 1822 also led to attempts to suppress the black church as a source of dissension. Vesey was a member of the AME church, and a number of black churches in the South were forced to go underground. The Nat Turner revolt in 1830 led to further restrictions on the freedom of blacks to move about and organize, but in any case, between 1822 and 1861 there was a substantial increase in the number of black Christian congregations and church organizations in the country. By 1936 there were 86 AME churches with nearly 8,000 members. In that same year, the first organization of black Baptist churches, the Providence Baptist Association, was formed in Ohio, and by 1850 there were 150,000 black members of the Baptist Church (Ploski and Williams 1258).

Methodist preachers who had attended the Baltimore Conference in 1780 agreed to work for abolition. This conference established the Methodist Episcopal Church and saw slavery as contrary to the laws of God. The church ordered its members to divest themselves of their slavs, but by 1800 this order was withdrawn because the church was too busy increasing membership to concentrate on social reform (Richardson 53-55). This was the background against which the black members split off to form their own church in 1816.

By the end of the Civil War, many blacks had left the white Methodist Episcopal Church for AME, and by 1896 AME had more than 450,000 members.

The related African Methodist Church of Zion had 380,000 members, and even more blacks ere abandoning white churches for other black churches, such as the Colored Primitive Baptists and the African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church in 1866; the Reformed Zion Union Apostolic church and the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1869; the Colored (later Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church (CME), which separated from the Methodist Episcopal church, South in 1870; the Colored Presbyterian Church, which separated from the mainline Presbyterian Church in 1874; and so on. One group left the Northern-dominated AME church and formed the Independent African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1885. In 1895, various black Baptist associations merged to form the National Baptist Convention in Atlanta. Many of the ministers in these churches promoted racial consciousness, and many participated in Reconstruction politics. Henry Turner, a bishop of AME, advocated migration to Africa. Many black churches sent missionaries to Africa and the West Indies, and by 1990, four of nineteen AME districts were found in Africa (Carroll 86-87).

Success of the Church

As the church became more successful and attracted larger numbers of congregants, it also encountered new issues. Growth on this scale saw congregations in every northern sates and many southern states, bringing changes:

Inevitably, the church became more structured and hierarchical, as leaders struggled to accommodate tens of thousands of new members. These changes, in turn, posed fundamental questions about the church's character and mission -- questions that pitted leaders against laity, the learned against the "ignorant," the free-born against the freed. If we are to understand how the AME Church came to be in South Africa, and what happened to it after it arrived, we need first to understand these transformations and struggles. (Campbell 32)

African Methodism was from the first an expansive creed fueled by prophecy and dedicated to sending emissaries to encourage others to join the movement. However, there were hazards to the program of evangelization, especially in the South, "where a series of uprisings led by Christian slaves had left southern whites deeply suspicious of black independent churches" (Campbell 34). The church did manage to establish a foothold in many southern and border cities where there was relative social fluidity and an overlap between salve and free populations. Some of the problems could be seen in the rise and fall of the church in Charleston, South Carolina, where the roots of the church reached back to 1817. Membership reached about 3,000 and was established as the AME Church's second largest conference. However, the Vesey conspiracy created new suspicions:

Whether the uprising conceived by Vesey was as massive as panicky whites believed, and whether the AME Church played as pivotal a role in the plot as critics charged, are matters of considerable debate. What is clear is that the church bore the brunt of white reaction. Whites alleged that Vesey, who undoubtedly was a member of the church, had preached sedition from the pulpit and used weekly class meetings to plan his bloody insurrection. (Campbell 35)

The official investigation suggested that the AME Church had played a major role, and the church was banned and dozens of alleged conspirators hanged. African Methodism would not return to Charleston for another four decades.

Campbell also suggests that the rise of this church illustrates the view of H. Richard Niebuhr on the movement from "sect" to "church," seen as one of the major themes of Protestantism:

Virtually all the great Protestant churches began with small knots of saints, rebelling against religious establishments they regarded as worldly, ritualistic, and corrupt. Taking root in society's lower orders, most tended toward antiauthoritarianism, eschewing theological training and other conventional trappings of religious authority in favor of insight, enthusiasm, and an… READ MORE

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