Religion

By: Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Religion

The importance of religion in the African American experience cannot be overstated. Religion can be seen as both worldview and human organization, and from both perspectives, women have been at the center. The African American religious experience, especially as it has been actualized by women, combines African sensibilities, New World experiences, Western Christianity, and an activist orientation toward injustice and racial oppression. As a worldview, it encompasses mythic, experiential, doctrinal, ethical, ritual, and social dimensions and transcends specific organizational or denominational forms. Women, historically, have taken great responsibility for all of these dimensions, framing and shaping the contexts of religious life and practice. They are the primary teachers of religious doctrine and tradition within the churches. Religious life and practice, in turn, have been central to the psychic and spiritual strengths women have used to cope with the oppressive realities of life in the United States. In their everyday language of struggle with economic, political, and cultural oppression, women within and outside of churches draw on the traditions of spirituals and biblical images. Within Christian churches, women are the most significant force, although their leadership roles vary widely.

Agents of History and Organization

The vital religious role of women begins before New World slavery. Certain African religions had female priests, cult leaders, and healers. West and Central African religions contained both male and female divines. Sometimes the religious practices associated with these deities were gendered with male deities requiring female practitioners and female deities requiring males. Healing was integrated in religious practice, and women were particularly adept at these practices, utilizing extensive knowledge of the local medicinal plant life—knowledge women retooled and revitalized in the New World. Such practices were not forgotten during the confrontation with Western Christianity. Although black women were initially excluded from church memberships, once colonists introduced Christianity to Africans, black women quickly played a prominent role. Isabella, an African woman who arrived the year before the Mayflower's landing in 1620, may already have been baptized. Some early bondwomen may have become Christian to help their families.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, along with Mary Church Terrell and Kelley Miller, observed that women, particularly African American women, grasped the gospel more thoroughly and widely than did men. Their observations reflected historical realities. Women were prominent leaders in the slave quarters community. They were prayer leaders and exhorters. As exhorters and professors, they often admonished the community to maintain its hope for freedom. In recovering the preaching traditions of African American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bettye Collier-Thomas (1998) points out that these preaching women advanced the development of the black church. Collier-Thomas calls them “singular heroes and powerful actors in the struggle for black empowerment, especially the empowerment of black women.”

The importance of African sensibilities can be seen in the role of women in translating African traditions of cult leadership, prophecy, healing, and divining into the slave community's emphasis on conversion and encounters with the Holy Spirit. The role of Tituba in precipitating the witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, is an important although confusing example. Women prophets often wielded considerable power and influence in slave communities, occasionally, as with a woman named Sinda, bringing plantation routine to a halt. Sinda, after offering an apocalyptic analysis of various events, predicted that the end of the world was coming on a particular day. As a result, her fellow slaves ceased working until the appointed day was past and gone. Because of her prominence as an anti-slavery lecturer, the importance of Sojourner Truth as a well-respected Adventist preacher is often overlooked.

Juliann Jane Tillman, preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in a portrait by A. Hoffy dated Philadelphia, 1844. The AME Church was founded in the 1790s.

Library of Congress

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Christian missions to slaves led to the prominence of the Methodist and Baptist traditions among African Americans. John Wesley's first two black baptisms were enslaved women. The presence of Africans and their descendants at Baptist and Methodist revivals also helped to fuel the growth of these traditions. During slavery, black women and men in Philadelphia and New York organized the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church. In the South, Africans and African Americans became overwhelmingly Baptist, so much so that an Afro-Baptist faith has been seen as dominant, regardless of denomination. Within these churches, women exercised ritual and social leadership. In Baptist churches during slavery, church discipline was enforced by boards of deacons and deaconesses who oversaw the lives of men and women.

The most prominent aspect of women's organizational church history took place in the women's departments and missionary societies of their congregations and denominations. After slavery, Western Christianity asserted itself in an assault on women preachers and worship leaders. In spite of this assault, the freed women and men seemed to come together into a religious leadership class of educators. The AME Church was explicit in charging its elders in the South to organize and to teach for the purposes of citizenship and economic development. Black and white women missionaries were prominent among the educators in the rural and urban South. Baptist educational activities usually supported women teachers who also functioned as community organizers and leaders. Most women who rose to prominence as national leaders were at once church women and teachers, women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, and Fannie Jackson Coppin. These women advocated racial justice for African Americans and challenged black men to be more egalitarian in their attitudes toward women leaders.

Rapid church growth, black political participation, and migration to southern cities and towns characterized the period immediately after slavery. Black women made up at least half of the urban working class whose money built churches and stabilized fraternal organizations. Conflict over women's leadership and ordination became so intense among black Georgia Baptists that their state convention split over the issue. The opportunities for women to preach and pastor often made Holiness churches attractive to black women during this period.

Women shared the pulpit with men during the 1880s, in the early days of what came to be the National Baptist Convention. The AME church saw the emergence of two women's missionary societies in 1874 and 1904, the older Women's Parent Mite Missionary Society and the predominantly southern Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society. In 1900 the Women's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention was formed. One of its most prominent leaders was Nannie Helen Burroughs, who in 1907 introduced a resolution establishing Women's Day. Although criticized as tokenism, Women's Day continued to be celebrated as a day during which women speak the sermons and lead the worship. Indeed, it became one of the most important public expressions of black Christian women and a cherished tradition, spreading to every black denomination and to predominantly black congregations in white denominations. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Women's Days in some churches became the focus of a wide variety of women's activities that included the religious education of the laity, the empowerment of women in civic affairs, the development of women's leadership, and a focus on social problems affecting women, especially those in prison. In some churches, Women's Day became Women's Season, which included revivals, prayer breakfasts, retreats, and conferences. Among AME and other churches affected by thereligious activism of Cecilia Williams Bryant, these women's conferences drew women from a wide variety of religious networks who then began to develop retreats and conferences at their own churches. One such pioneering congregation, the Ebenezer AME Church in Fort Washington, Maryland, began its retreat tradition with sixty-four women in 1984; in 2004 that church's retreat hosted over three thousand women.

In her day, Burroughs complained that Women's Day had become the chief occasion for raising money rather than raising women. It was women's ability to raise funds, however, that defines their historical role in African American church history. In many congregations, the financial activities associated with women's day included a special tax or assessment on the women. The women in the congregation organized into teams or companies with leaders or captains. Individual women utilized a variety of entrepreneurial activities to raise their assessments. In addition to the individual's assessment, churchwomen engaged in a variety of fundraising activities, including bake sales, rummage or flea market sales, banquets, dinners, and music festivals. An increased emphasis on tithing toward the end of the twentieth century reduced some of the financial pressure on Women's Day, allowing pioneers like Bryant to develop more spiritually centered activities that maintained the high level of women's organization and infrastructure upon which previous financial successes had depended.

The Holiness movement of the late nineteenth century and the Pentecostal movement of the early twentieth century had a profound influence on church life and women's roles within it. Emphasizing the person and work of the Holy Spirit, a tradition carried forward from its African antecedents largely by women, these movements created new denominations in which women played diverse but prominent roles. In some Holiness denominations, fully ordained women were the pastors of their churches. It was to Holiness women pastors such as Neely Terry that William Seymour, the apostle of American Pentecostalism, came when seeking a pulpit to air his views about speaking in tongues. The earliest Pentecostal denomination in the United States was the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Its founder, Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, organized a women's department that became characteristic of the denominations of the Sanctified Church. It was first headed by Mother Lizzie Woods Roberson, who was succeeded by Mother Lillian Brooks Coffey, who, like Nannie Helen Burroughs, was active in national women's organizations. The roles that emerged in the Sanctified Church were highly diverse.

In denominations such as COGIC that did not officially ordain women, women's departments encouraged the development of strong traditions of service and evangelism. In other denominations, women were ordained, and in some cases, they formed denominations such as the Mount Sinai Holy Church, founded by Bishop Ida Robinson, in which women could serve as bishops and preside. The diversity of women's roles in the Sanctified Church made possible the existence of strong role models for women in other denominations; in some cases, the growth of women's preaching and pastoral ministries among Baptists, African Methodists, and other mainline protestant denominations was fueled by the movement of Pentecostal and Holiness women into these denominations.

In addition to their organizational roles within church history, church women established an important political history. In 1896 church women became prominent organizers in the club movement that culminated with the formation of the National Association of Colored Women. Possibly because they could not lead from the pulpit, these women moved into the larger community, forming clubs and organizations that addressed the diverse social and cultural needs of the black community of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These activities were often in addition to their church work. Eschewing separatism, these women invited men to join them in a movement led by women for the benefit of women and men. In their move to uplift women, the basic Christian orientation of these women was evident in their biblical language and in the dual roles they played as both community and church leaders.

Their organizing was so successful that, in 1935, Mary McLeod Bethune was able to form the National Council of Negro Women from the many national black women's organizations that had been formed since 1896. Mary McLeod Bethune was not merely one of the most important black political leaders of the twentieth century, at one point possibly wielding as much power at the national level as had Booker T. Washington in his day. She was also a committed Christian whose life story exemplified the fusion of faith and activism that defined women's public service in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Joyce A. Hanson (2003), Bethune's life was “representative” of the race women of her time in that “she was deeply grounded in religion and family and intensely committed to racial advancement.” Intending to become a missionary, Bethune attended Moody Bible Institute after finishing at Scotia Seminary, a Presbyterian teacher training institution. While at Moody, Bethune participated in the schools missions to the poor, the prisoners, and to the organization of “Sunday schools in the rural districts of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.” In addition, she was given the most dangerous missionary assignments, proselytizing among wandering derelicts and distributing tracts in Chicago slums. Bethune described this work as the best preparation for her political and educational work.

The explicitly Christian ideologies and practices of many of these women's groups continued to demonstrate the activist orientation of church women and the infusion of their religious worldview into their cultural and community activities. Women such as Nannie Helen Burroughs and Mary McLeod Bethune, both of who organized schools, left dramatic legacies within their Baptist and Methodist denominations. The ethical orientation of these Christian women was epitomized in the famous “Last Will and Testament” of Mary McLeod Bethune, in which she encouraged a legacy of faith, hope, and love alongside such practical strategies as education, dignity, harmonious living, and devotion to youth. Blocked from her desire to preach Christianity in Africa after graduating from Moody Bible Institute, she worked to develop and sustain Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, her attempt to find her “Africa” in Florida.

Agents of Religious Tradition

In addition to their organizational and historical roles, African American women were the principal agents of a distinctive Afro-Christian tradition. There were four pillars of this tradition—preaching, prayer, music, and testimony. Women traditionally led devotional worship and were responsible for prayer, music, and testimony. Regardless of the obstacles they faced in attaining roles as ordained ministers, pastors, bishops, or elders, women managed to make their voices heard in preaching of the gospel. In most African American traditions, “teaching” and “speaking” were discriminatory euphemisms for women's preaching.

The basic language of Afro-Christian worship was rooted in the English Bible. Women played a significant role in appropriating and maintaining the Bible as a foundation, integrating it imaginatively into their prayers, their testimonies, and their songs. Hymnists such as Lucie E. Campbell were known for vibrant biblical images. A focus of feminist criticism because of its male-centeredness, the Bible was nevertheless central to the mythic dimension of the African American Christian worldview. Black women emphasized the role of Jesus as fellow sufferer and model of service. For many women in the churches, their devotional life enabled them to focus on Jesus as a friend in the depths of all kinds of physical and emotional suffering.

Women appropriated the Bible's stories and images to create sacred and secular literature. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham points to the utilization of Bible study among Baptist women as they struggled around the issues of women's religious leadership. Nannie Helen Burroughs, a prominent Baptist leader and educator, wrote a “Roll Call of Biblical Women” that reworked and extended biblical stories about women in order to give them the prominence in church life she felt they deserved. Women's fraternal organizations such as the Order of Eastern Star utilized biblical women characters in their public and private rituals. The growth of women's retreats and conferences during the late twentieth century allowed black women to extend their analysis of biblical women and apply these analyses to their lives. Such applications were facilitated through the participation of prominent preaching women and religious scholars at these conferences and retreats.

The most visible religious role of women both in churches and in popular culture has been in the area of music. Historical accounts point to women in slave communities as song leaders. In addition to composing hymns, women gained prominence as musical directors in denominations, exercising power by shaping hymnbooks. Lucie Campbell and Willa Townsend played such roles in the National Baptist Convention and Mattie Moss Clark oversaw such work in the Church of God in Christ. Dr. Clark served as minister of music to the denomination and developed techniques for training choirs in distant locations so that well-rehearsed mass choirs were able to sing at regional and national meetings. In addition, the hymnbook of the Church of God in Christ exhibited both its historical kinship with Baptists and African Methodists and incorporated the COGIC's distinctive oral musical traditions that contributed to shaping twentieth century gospel music.

Gospel music was one of the most significant twentieth century expressions of the African American sacred music tradition. Gospel music was built on the role of women as song leaders in slave communities, as devotional leaders in churches, and as soloists and directors in church and college choirs. Early gospel singers such as Arizona Dranes and Jessie Mae Renfro toured among COGIC and other Pentecostal and Holiness congregations. While the formal beginnings of gospel music were attributed to Thomas A. Dorsey and his copyrighted compositions such as “If You See My Saviour/I Was Standing By the Bedside of a Neighbor,” pioneering women singers and composers were central to the tradition. The most famous gospel singer was Mahalia Jackson, one of the singers Dorsey preferred to showcase his compositions. Sallie Martin was a singer and a partner with Dorsey in a publishing enterprise. Another gospel singer, Roberta Martin, was also a prominent publisher. Because of these pioneering women publishers, black men and women who composed gospel music were able to reap the benefits of their creativity.

Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith played a pioneering role in carrying the gospel music tradition into mainstream, particularly Baptist, churches. Mother Smith trained generations of soloists through the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses and traveled widely throughout black churches conducting revivals. Leading evangelists and church mothers in Pentecostal and Holiness churches were also known for their singing. In a manner similar to the growth of the blues tradition, men were often prominent as itinerant singers and members of quartets traveling through the South, while women such as Sallie Martin, Roberta Martin, Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, the Caravans, the Davis Sisters, and evangelist Shirley Caesar were responsible for the urban prominence of gospel music.

Willie Mae Ford Smith, Dorothy Norwood, Marian Williams, and Shirley Caesar represented an important practice of women gospel singers. In response to the discrimination against women's preaching, some gospel singers utilized their musical gifts as an alternative venue. In lieu of preaching, these singers would offer extended, biblical introductions to their songs. These introductions were stories that sufficed as sermonettes. Shirley Caesar's career was grounded in a denomination that actually ordained women, so by the end of the twentieth century, she was, in addition to her long career and award-winning recordings, pastor of a church in North Carolina.

Beyond the church service and gospel music, churchwomen's voices also served the civil rights movement. Analysis of the civil rights movement has pointed to the movement as a mobilization of the black church. However, the church component of civil rights has too often been equated solely with the role of the male preacher. Not only were church women prominent organizers, leaders, and supporters but women's voices also helped to make the civil rights movement a singing movement. Bernice Johnson Reagon, an activist and college student from Albany, Georgia, transformed spirituals and other sacred music into freedom songs. Her voice along with the voices of the Freedom Singers of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the voice of Fannie Lou Hamer were quite prominent in the recordings of civil rights meetings as well as in the accounts and memoirs of those who were there.

Prayer is another area of prominence for women. It was often women who provided the prayer prior to the sermon. Not only did women gain prominence as prayer warriors and prayer bandleaders within denominations and congregations but some women also maintained independent prayer ministries in their homes and communities. The Spiritual Churches incorporated this tradition of prayer ministry for both individuals and groups, and the pastors in this tradition served both congregations and individual clients. Although the subject of some controversy, these independent women were occasionally the contacts for unchurched African Americans.

During slavery, the initial socialization of boys and girls took place through their observations of mothers and aunts at prayer in the cabins and hush harbor congregations. After slavery, women retained their prominence inthe prayer tradition. Narratives and missionaries' accounts describe the vivid prayers of women such as Aunt Jane, whose powerful prayer on behalf of “poor Ethiopian women” provides stunning images of divine invocation in a context of suffering and struggle. The role of women in public prayer leadership was easily observable in most African American churches both in Sunday services and during the various meetings and services that occur during the week. Many black churches had their origins in “prayer meetings” hosted in someone's home, and the historical records of these originating events describe the importance of women.

The testimony tradition is easily observable since most congregations held weekly prayer meetings, monthly love feasts, and periodic revivals with extended devotional periods. The testimony periods provided a central fulfillment for the church's role as a therapeutic community. It is here that church members were able to talk about the troubles, struggles, and victories they experienced. Women were highly represented in Baptist and Methodist congregations, while ninety percent of the members of Sanctified Church congregations were women. Aware of their predominance, women often made extensive efforts to provide opportunities for male prominence and leadership, efforts sometimes criticized in the face of the discrimination they experienced in spite of their numbers. Women showed no such restraint when it came to the expressive dimensions of religious life. Their testimony sometimes functioned as a form of protest at their sufferings.

Preaching was central to the ritual experience, and it was one of the most contested areas with regard to women's roles. As far as we know, the first African American woman to seek ordination was Jarena Lee in the AME Church. Anticipating the continuing debate over the legitimacy of women's preaching, she reminded her listeners that Mary first preached the resurrection, the event upon which depends all of Christian faith and doctrine. Amanda Berry Smith, also of the AME Church, was the most famous of the preaching women in the nineteenth century. Her ministry carried her to Africa and to India. A staunch advocate of African women's education, her work reflected the combination of religious fervor and social activism that characterized black Christian women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Daughters of Thunder, Bettye Collier-Thomas argues that preaching women in African American Christianity “have not been as scarce as the historical literature on women, religion, and African Americans has suggested.” Ironically, although not a preacher, the first woman to speak publicly before an audience of both men and women and leave a manuscript record was a black woman, Maria Stewart. In her appeal on behalf of black women's leadership, she highlighted the same biblical women that black women preachers and church women cited as the sources of legitimacy for their leadership roles. Collier-Thomas presented the manuscripts of fourteen women who preached during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Preaching women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries advanced two crucial African American religious emphases, one on social justice and another on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

The roles and activities of male pastors' wives formed a tradition of leadership that was much ignored. The feminist emphasis on examining the activities of women independent of their husbands increased such invisibility. However, tremendous expectations were placed on black pastors' wives. Early in black church history, such women were expected to be educators and to organize Sunday Schools. They also served as mission supervisors and evangelists. Within the Church of God in Christ, pastors' wives, who were also evangelists, were powerful speakers who sometimes had charge of their husbands' churches in their absence or became the pastors after their husbands' deaths.

Throughout the black church, pastor's wives were expected to be powerful public speakers, talented singers and musicians, and to serve as choir directors. In some denominations, particularly the AME Church, women whose husbands become bishops were expected to lead the missionary work in their husbands' districts. As educated women, they served as important role models for churchwomen, and at the end of the twentieth century, some black pastors' wives played a particularly important new role as co-pastors.

Preaching women and pastors' wives represented a vanguard for the explosion of women's preaching observed during the last quarter of the twentieth century, an explosion that led to an unprecedented national visibility of ordained black women and to the election in the year 2000 of the first woman bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Right Reverend Vashti Murphy McKenzie. The first African American woman to be consecrated a bishop was Bishop Ida Robinson in 1924, the founder of the Mt. Sinai Holy Church, an African American Holiness-Pentecostal denomination. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, African American women had served as mainline denominational leaders: Dr. Thelma Adair as moderator of the United Presbyterian Church's General Assembly in 1976 and Rev. Dr. Trinette McCray, president of the American Baptist Church USA in 2000–2001. Predominantly white denominations had also consecrated black women bishops: the Right Reverend Leontine T. C. Kelly in the United Methodist Church was elected in 1984, and the Right Reverend Barbara Harris, the first woman bishop in the Episcopal Church, was elected in 1988.

Prior to her election as an AME bishop, Bishop McKenzie was named among the top three in a list of the fifteen greatest black women preachers by Ebony magazine in 1997. All of the fifteen and the additional twenty-one honorably mentioned had records of significant national leadership in both religious and secular settings, including the civil rights movement, academia, communications, media, education, and union organizing. Five of these women served as pastors, co-pastors, assistant pastors, and Episcopal supervisors alongside their pastor or bishop husbands. All of these women moved across denominational boundaries in their preaching and public service, and several were pastors of significant congregations they had organized. Overall, these thirty-six women were representative of the dual history of African American women as agents of organization and of religious tradition.

A Diverse Experience

There was great diversity among the religious experiences of late-twentieth-century black women. That diversity arose largely out of a shared historical experience of oppression and out of the creative responses and challenges to that oppression. This was particularly true during the period of the civil rights and black power movements. As an organizational experience, the religious experience is historically, primarily, and predominantly Christian, with a distinctive emphasis on the person and the work of the Holy Spirit and on the person of Jesus as fellow sufferer and member of the disinherited and the dispossessed.

During the civil rights period, the Nation of Islam rose to prominence primarily through the voice of Malcolm X and aggressive proselytizing in prisons and northern urban ghettoes. Malcolm X's conversion to mainstream Sunni Islam accelerated the growth of Islam among African Americans, making it one of the most significant challenges to the hegemony of Christianity among African Americans and making Islam one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Although the largest source of the growth of American Islam was through immigration, African Americans represented the largest indigenous population of American Muslims. Although both men and women are Muslim, African American women are less likely to remain Muslim and more likely to return to Christianity. Their return to Christianity was a source of challenge to Christian churches, one that inspired these churches to become more Afro-centric in their presentation of Christianity.

Some of the successes of the civil rights movement had profound effects on the structure of black communities. Those changes also generated new organizations and movements within black churches and new religious movements in black communities. The new opportunities generated by the civil rights movement fostered both economic and geographic mobility for many black Americans. Economic mobility prompted the rise of congregations with larger proportions of middle-class members. Geographic mobility led to the suburbanization of churches and the reconfiguration of black communities as college students and professionals resettled in response to educational and job opportunities. Some of these churches became so large that they were called “mega-churches”—churches where three thousand or more people attend on any given Sunday. Although African Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century made up some 12 per cent of the population, they were 25 per cent of the mega-church population.

New members of the black middle class carried traditional practices of Baptist, Pentecostal, and Holiness churches into the congregations of the old black middle class. Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) referred to this phenomenon as “neo-pentecostalism.” At the same time, these economically mobile members brought some of the highest levels of education to their churches. As a result, they professionalized the laity and placed new demands on the clergy. Many of these churches had pastors, both women and men, with doctorates. Women represented the largest populations in seminaries, and women were more likely to enter seminary as second career professionals, therefore guaranteeing that they were educationally advantaged.

Women were especially prominent in these new and newly transformed churches as pastors, preachers, educators, and administrative leaders. These larger churches offered a national visibility to women preachers across denominational boundaries. In some of these churches, the role of the wife of the minister was so dramatically transformed that many of these women effectively served as co-pastors, fully ordained in the denominations of their husbands. Some of these new churches were founded and developed by women who worked outside the Baptist and Methodist mainstream. Overall, the revitalized churches of late-twentieth century black America contained large groups of exceptionally well-educated women at the same time that the concern for the crisis surrounding black men and black families had gripped all of black consciousness. Black women served on the staffs of these churches and were most likely to execute the church mission in the various social service and resource centers that were a part of these churches.

In spite of the dominance of Christianity and the rise of Islam, African American women exhibited a wide range of spiritual and organizational expressions and interacted across diverse religious settings, including Baha'i, Islam, Buddhism, and traditional African and African-Caribbean religions, especially the Yoruba and Fon religions, in the form of Lucumi, Vodun, and Santeria.

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