Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American
Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel
Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, pp. ix, 285.
"The passage from traditional religions to Christianity," write Sylvia
R. Frey and Betty Wood, "was arguably the single most significant event in
African-American history" (1). Yet much remains to be learned about the
origins and extent of that momentous transformation during the second half
of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth.
Building on earlier work by Carter G. Woodson, Albert Raboteau, Mechal
Sobel, Eugene Genovese, and many others, Frey and Wood combine recent
scholarship in anthropology, African studies, and Caribbean history with
their own prodigious archival research to venture a new synthesis that is
likely to become the standard work on the subject.
"Come Shouting to Zion. . . . takes its place as the most
comprehensive single-volume history of the religious transformation of
Africans in the English-speaking Americas. "
The authors situate their volume in a long-running scholarly dispute
over the extent to which African religious cultures informed the emergence
of black Christianity in the Americas. They vigorously challenge the
view, taken by E. Franklin Frazier and, most recently, Jon Butler, that
the slave trade and Middle Passage from Africa to America obliterated
African beliefs and resulted, in Butler's words, in a "spiritual
holocaust" of unimaginably catastrophic dimensions. Instead, as most
scholars have done during the last twenty-five years, Frey and Wood
emphasize the active role of captive Africans and their descendants in
adapting West and Central African religions to New World circumstances by
fusing their beliefs with Christianity, thereby creating dynamic new
Afro-Christian faiths.
In retracing this profound shift,
Frey and Wood assume that "religious
change was everywhere the product of a reciprocal process rather than of
conversion by confrontation" (xii). This process involved the negotiation
and contestation of religious beliefs among multiple African ethnic groups
and nationalities as well as Euro-American settlers, leaving all parties
changed. Grounding their study on a survey of recent literature on
precolonial African cultures and religions, the authors' broad geographic
and temporal scope enables them to investigate the transfer, continuity,
and change of African beliefs in the Protestant plantation societies of
the Americas with a larger empirical base than scholars have heretofore
had available. Employing an enormous array of African-American
narratives, planters' diaries, and church records, Frey and Wood explore
the conversion of enslaved workers to evangelical Methodist,
Baptist, and Moravian faiths and their membership in those churches. The
book charts the rise of racial distinctions within evangelical churches in
the early nineteenth century that led to eventual separation into "white"
and "black" churches. And it demonstrates convincingly that the adoption
of a Christian identity was a crucial cultural passageway for many
Africans and their descendants as they became African-American or
African-Caribbean.
The general contours of this story are familiar, but there is much
that is new in Come Shouting to Zion. The authors call deserved
attention to the role of women in transmitting and shaping African and
Afro-Christian religious cultures. They use new research from numerous
archival sources to emphasize the outreach of black evangelical preachers
in helping to spread Afro-Christianity in the second half of the eighteenth
century. And they investigate the role of emergent evangelical and
African-American churches in shaping black family life and find that
religion was a source of strength for enslaved families under enormous
duress from the threat of separation.
Frey and Wood are right to emphasize the creative cultural adaption of
Africans in the Americas, but their work, like that of all others who have
studied the problem, still skirts the edge of a conceptual
imprecision about African acculturation that is probably unavoidable given
the sketchy nature of the evidence. "For more than a century and a half
the vast majority of Afro-Atlantic peoples had clung tenaciously to their
ancient beliefs," they write (118). Yet what does that broad statement
mean? No one has yet solved the probem of which specific ancient beliefs,
tenaciously maintained, were passed from African parents to their
American-born children, and thence to successive generations, and what
was lost, gained, and reworked in the transition. For example, the
authors describe the case of David George, born in eastern Virginia to
African parents, who wound up a slave in the Georgia Lowcountry, where he
converted to Christianity and was a founding member of the Silver Bluff
Baptist congregation in the 1770s. George's story, contend Frey and Wood,
"underscores the aggressive involvement of African converts in the
religious awakening and in the process of African religious
transformation" (116). But was George African, or was he American? How
much of his parents' culture did he inherit, and how much of it informed
his post-conversion Afro-Christian sensibility and that of his new church?
These questions are probably unanswerable. But when eleven million
people are uprooted and forcibly removed to another
hemisphere and largely forbidden from practicing their religions openly,
something is lost. The idea of spiritual dislocation, of an appalling
assault on the religious universe of the enslaved, is not easily
dismissed. Creative adaptation by Africans and their descendants there
undeniably was, and African cultural "survivals" transmitted from
generation to generation there were in abundance. But in vast sections of
the Caribbean and the American South, people of African descent inhabited,
and invested with meaning, a religious cosmos different from that of the
first generations of African captives. Perhaps the rise of
Afro-Christianity represented not only the triumph of African-American
creative agency but also the continuing dialectic between spiritual
destruction and rebirth, as lived daily by the children of the African
diaspora.
Whatever the case, Come Shouting to Zion is a great achievement of
research, synthesis, and interpretation. It takes its place as the most
comprehensive single-volume history of the religious transformation of
Africans in the English-speaking Americas.
