Baptism

By: Sylvia Frey

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Baptism

Baptism, or ritual washing with water, has from ancient times signified regeneration or rebirth. Early purifications prescribed by Mosaic law symbolized the external washing away of internal uncleanness. It is unclear when baptism became institutionalized as a sacrament, but biblical scholars cite Jesus Christ's declaration to Nicodemus as the probable origin: “Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he can not enter into the Kingdom of God.” As recorded in John 3:4 and Matthew 28, Christ commissioned his apostles to baptize. By the time of Augustine the idea that salvation was the unmerited grace of God and was achieved through the sacrament of baptism was part of Christian orthodoxy. The moment when God forgave original sin, baptism had immediate effects, including the remission of all sins and the infusion of sanctifying grace. It signaled as well the entry of the recipient into the church in full communion.

The Protestant Reformation did away with most of the sacraments, but both Luther and Calvin accepted the merit of baptism and retained most of the elements from the traditional liturgy. Calvin taught that baptism was necessary for adults but that infants of parents who were baptized were sanctified in the womb and were therefore free from sin without baptism. Although theologians accepted baptism as a Christian initiatory rite, in the eighteenth century many ordinary men and women still regarded it as a quasi-magical rite, and there was persistent anxiety within slave societies over the emancipating effects of Christian baptism on enslaved people.

In slavery's earliest years there was a widely held belief inherited from English social thought that credited Christianity, especially Protestantism, with the decline of the servitude of villenage, a vestige of the manorial system. The Elizabethan author William Harrison explained it this way:

"As for slaves and bondmen we have none, naie such is the privilege of our countrie by the especiall grace of God, and bountie of our princes, that if anie come hither from other realms, so soone as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterlie removed from them."

(p. 27)

The association with Christian baptism was made more explicit by Sir Thomas Smith. It is, he wrote, “the perswasion … of Christians not to make nor keepe his brother in Christ, servile, bond and underling for ever unto him, as a beast rather than as a man.” Although Elizabethan intellectuals maintained that the mitigation of bond slavery was also supported by the common law, in fact, villenage survived in English law books and legal dictionaries well into the seventeenth century, by which time African slavery on an international scale had clearly emerged. By the end of the seventeenth century the English had made a thorough commitment to slavery, justified by English jurists on the grounds that slavery was brought into the world as punishment for sin and as a consequence of captivity in warfare between Christians and non-Christians.

The controversy over the Christianization of Africans was an outgrowth of previous developments in West and West Central Africa, where Catholic missionaries had been proselytizing since the fifteenth century; Protestant missionaries joined the competition for souls early in the eighteenth century. By the time the organized European slave trade began in the seventeenth century, a small minority of Africans professed to be Christians. Some of those who were forced into the brutal Middle Passage were already baptized Christians. The vast majority, however, clung to traditional African religious beliefs and practices. Appalled by the “heathen rites” brought out of Africa to the New World, Anglican churchmen, beginning with Morgan Godwyn, lobbied the Anglican hierarchy in London to begin organized missionary activity among enslaved Africans. Efforts to convert the “heathen” starting in the last two decades of the seventeenth century won few converts, both because Anglican doctrines and ritual had little appeal to enslaved Africans and because of powerful planter opposition.

Like their counterparts in other plantation colonies, planters feared that baptism would “infuse [slaves] with thoughts of freedom” and foster rebellion. The Anglican clergyman Francis LeJau tried to reassure white South Carolinians by requiring black catechumens to swear before their owners that they were not seeking baptism in order to claim freedom. Despite the repeated assurances of clergymen like LeJau, until well into the eighteenth century slaveholders continued to complain that baptism would empower slaves by making them “proud” and assertive. The obvious implication that it would ultimately abolish slavery rested on the old English equation of baptism and personal liberty and its attendant idea that no Christian could lawfully hold another in bondage. In an effort to reassure planters, colonial assemblies enacted laws declaring that the baptism of slaves did not imply their freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and North and South Carolina had all passed laws assuring slave owners that baptism did not necessitate manumission. Even so, planter opposition to Christianization did not end until the 1830s, and only then after southern evangelical Protestant church leaders had articulated a fully developed defense of slavery on biblical grounds.

In the meantime enslaved men and women were taking an increasingly active role in their own spiritual and religious transformation, in part as a means to come to terms with their shattered lives and in part to express defiance of the master and opposition to slavery. The appearance in the 1730s of Methodists and in the 1740s of the New Light Presbyterians and Separate Baptists dramatically changed the religious landscape, bringing into the Christian fold thousands of African converts. The strength of the evangelical appeal was in its acceptance of men and women, black and white, as spiritual equals. The new rites added by evangelicals to the traditional Protestant sacraments of the Lord's Supper and baptism—including love feasts, washing feet, anointing the sick, the right hand of fellowship, the kiss of charity, and “dry-christening” (as the ritual of laying hands on a newborn infant was derisively called)—envisaged a moral community that transcended race, class, and gender. But it was the core idea of salvation or rebirth in Christ that resonated most powerfully with enslaved men and women.

Traditional West and West Central African religions shared to a considerable degree certain overlapping ideas and practices, which made the transition to Protestant Christianity possible. The born-again message shared by Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians was enacted through a ritual cycle of total immersion symbolizing death. The laying on of hands that followed signaled the rebirth and entry into the Christian community. Africans' initiation experiences were also associated with the symbolic death and rebirth of initiates, while naming ceremonies symbolically represented the acceptance of the infant into the family and the community. Visionary experiences, which frequently accompanied the conversion ritual, also had African counterparts in possession experiences during which a divinity speaks through a medium rather than directly to God. In the half century following the American Revolution, the number of African Americans claiming a Christian identity increased steadily. Although they were part of the evangelical community, black Christian churches developed their own distinctive ethos and character.

See also Baptists and African Americans; Black Church; Congregationalism and African Americans; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Methodist Church and African Americans; Missionary Movements; Presbyterians and African Americans; Religion; and Spirituality.

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