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white American religiosity was always present with slaves. Slave narratives reveal that early in
colonial life illiterate slaves, without being able to read the Bible, recognized the lie of their
masters and the deception of the truncated gospel that was preached to them focusing on
"servants, obey your masters." As early as mid 1700s, black Baptists were establishing
separate churches in which to worship without the presence of racism. In 1787, Richard Allen
founded the Free African Society (which would become the African Methodist Episcopal Church
in 1816) after experiencing racism in Philadelphias Methodist Church. The nineteenth century
is filled with revolts by slaves using biblical narratives for their justification and oratorical
attacks against racism in society and especially among those professing to be Christians. The
early and mid-twentieth century was never void of a prophetic black Christian thinker to shout
against the evils of racism.

During the 1780s, a "window of opportunity" quickly shut. The Awakening, with its

accompanying emphasis on conversion and vital religion, "pricked the consciences of the
churches on the subject of slavery."

During the 1780s Baptists were preaching against

slavery, Methodists were passing resolutions against slavery, and Presbyterians were finding
slavery wanting for theological justification. However, secular culture prevailed over the
conviction that briefly surfaced. By the 1960s, nearly two hundred years later, many black
Christians did not want the Christian church to miss another opportunity to be genuine in the
practice of Christianity.

The pre-Black Power Christian thinkers and clergy were committed "to the ideology

of integration [that] led them to think of ethnic and cultural background as incidental to the
doing of theology."

Their belief in the power of Christianity was not eclipsed by bitterness and

they were able to consider Christianitys potential in America. Benjamin Mays said, "The
Christian religion...is potentially, and at times actually, the most powerful weapon a minority
group has to press its claim for equal opportunities for survival."

However deep-seated were

the problems of racism, Mays did not believe Christian teaching had to be discarded in order to
address the evil. In contrast to the thrust of early Black theology, Mays acknowledged that
black churches could be just as unchristian as white churches regarding the (racial)
universality of the Church. Rather than suggest any preferred status, "Mays cautioned Negroes
not to think that they were more virtuous than whites simply because they were oppressed."

The history of white Christianitys failure (in America) to address, prophetically, the

practice of slavery, the attacks on emancipation and reconstruction, and the dehumanizing act
of segregation contributed to the environment from which Black power/theology emerged.

Nation of Islam

Second, Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam (NOI) were issuing stinging

critiques of Christianity as the "white mans religion" that was merely used as a tool of
oppression and imperialism. Preceding the rise of Black theology, the NOIs chief spokesman
was Malcolm X. His rhetoric provoked and challenged black clergy and layman to reconsider
their affiliation with a religion that had historically sanctioned their oppression and the denial
of their humanity. In addition to critiquing Christianity as a whole, Muhammad and Malcolm X
often critiqued the ineffectiveness of the Black church as an agent of social change in the black
community and the immorality of the Black churchs leadership and membership.

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Cleveland: Mendian Books, 1929),

244. Also see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1982) and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978).

Mark Chapman, Christianity on Trial: African-American Religious Thought Before and After Black

Power (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1996), 4.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid., 33.