Transcript 18th Century African and Native American Religions

Persistence and Transformation
A re-enactor at
Colonial Williamsburg
plays Gowan Pamphlet
African and Indigenous Religion
encounters Christianity, 1600-1800
Graveyards—relics of syncretism
• Despoliation of native American and AfricanAmerican graves reveal both syncretism and a
determination to avoid Christian rites in burial.
• Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (1990)
• Disease wiped out much indigenous religion
because it wiped out so many indigenous people:
• Negro Burial Ground (1991)
The General Service Administration
Building in lower Manhattan (1991)
was built on top of the old
NEGRO BURIAL GROUND.
Native Americans and Xianity in 17th
century Br. North America
• Indigenous people in Powhatan’s Confederation resisted
Christianity, burned Jamestown in 1622, and persisted in
their folkways until aggressive expansion and warfare by
the whites reduced their numbers in Va. to 1,000 (1676)
• In Massachusetts, Puritans converted many Indians and
had created some 30 “praying towns” by 1674, but most
Indians in those towns didn’t receive baptism.
• King Philipp’s War (1675-76) reduced overall Indian
population, the number of praying towns to 4, and led the
Puritans to move Indians out of areas where whites settled.
• Jesuits did better (ceremonial objects and learning Indian
languages) in introducing Catholicism among the Hurons.
John Eliot (1604-1690)
produced a grammar of the
Massachussett Indians and
Translated the bible.
Native Americans and Xianity in 18th
Century Br. North America
• Eleazar Wheelock (1711-1779) worked with
Algonquian speakers in the Connecticut River
Valley, converted Samson Occum (1723-1792),
and helped found Dartmouth College.
• Occum became a clergyman and published
pamphlets in English.
• Moravians had some success converting Indians in
Western Pennsylvania.
• Exceptions to the pattern of resistance.
Wheelock and Occum
Syncretism among Native Americans
• Use of rosary beads (object) in healing ceremony
is the employment of something new to preserve
something traditional.
• Ned Bearskin, a Catawba—itself a syncretic
Indian nation—told William Byrd about a welter
of beliefs, including a judging God, but his beliefs
would not be recognized as Christian, even if
some ideas had been borrowed from the
missionaries.
Erected in 1988, this marker
in southern Virginia commemorates
Byrd’s conversations with Ned
Bearskin.
African-American Religions
• Attempted to preserve pure African Forms,
but these were lost over time. White
authorities forbade African practices, but
little effort was made to evangelize slaves.
After 1750, both syncretism and AfricanAmerican Christianity operated side-by-side
in British North America.
Late 18th century African American marriage ritual in
South Carolina.
Persistent Africanisms
• Newly arrived slaves practiced “rites and
revels”.
• Conjurers and sorcerers.
• African burial rituals
• “Obeah men”
African American Christianity
• Rise of evangelicalism and directed
ministry by Baptists and Methodists to
enslaved persons after 1760.
• Emphasis on emotion, felt religion, and
lived religion attracted enslaved persons.
• A few bi-racial congregations along with
separate African American congregations.
Elhanan
Winchester,
1751-1797,
wrote
(The Reigning
Abominations,
Especially the
Slave Trade )
Ordained a Baptist in Massachusetts, Winchester
converted at least 100 African Americans around
Welsh Neck, S. C. He said:
“The prejudices which the slaves had against
Christianity, on account of the severities
practiced upon them by professing Christians,
both ministers and people, might be one principal
reason why they could not be brought to attend to
religious instruction. But they had no prejudice
against me on this score, as I never had any thing
to do with slavery, but on the contrary
condemned it; and this being generally known,
operated so upon the minds of those poor
creatures, that they shewed a disposition to attend
my ministry, more than they had ever shewed to
any other .”
African American Preachers
• George Liele (1752-1820), First African Church,
Savannah, Ga.
• Gowan Pamphlet (1748-1807), founded the
African Church in Williamburg that affiliated with
the Dover Baptist Association in the 1780s.
• Absalom Jones (1746-1818), began as a Methodist
and became the first African American Episcopal
minister in the United States.
• Richard Allen (1760-1831) founded the African
Methodist Episcopal Church
Gowan Pamphlet’s manumission paper