Abstract
African American megachurches are part of a larger trend in American Protestantism reflecting the ecclesial shifts that have taken place in America during the final quarter of the previous century. There are, however, historical and religious distinctions that differentiate African American congregations from this broader, largely evangelical phenomenon. The purpose of this article, then, is to introduce and analyze African American megachurches in such a way that they are historically situated, racially located, and ecclesiastically differentiated. This article addresses the precipitous rise of black megachurch congregations in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and ethically examines shared institutional and ideational values. And it argues that the professional identity, mass culture compatibility, and theological creativity that broadly define black megachurches represent creative fusions and internal tensions that pose ethical challenges to their congregational missions.
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Notes
This approach is theoretically informed by Stuart Hall’s use of historical specificity in regards to race and culture. For Hall, this involves analyzing the changing contours of race (and, for me, race-based institutions such as African American megacongregations) within societies structured by other forms of dominance and political realities. Hall’s concern is twofold: First, he seeks to identify an adequate theory of racism that takes into account the economic and superstructural features of a given society without falling into the economic reductive traps of classical Marxist approaches. Second, by doing so, he seeks to steer away from viewing racism (and, for me, race-based institutions) as a general feature of human societies not dictated and determined, in part, by economic relations and political realities. Therefore, Hall’s call for historical specificity rejects a general theory of racism in some transhistorical or universal manner. Just the same, it prevents us from viewing black churches as ahistorical and racially and theologically bound to a “pure” tradition, rather than beginning with an assumption of racial and ecclesial difference (specificity) in relation to a given historical epoch (Hall 1996).
The “unmasking” dimension is essential to the ethical process insofar as one seeks to hold communities of faith both responsible and accountable for their ecclesial activities. Following H. Richard Niebuhr, an ethic of responsibility neither proceeds from the questions, “What shall I do?” nor “What is right?” Rather the fitting action, which for Niebuhr is “alone conducive to the good and alone is right,” proceeds from the question, “What is going on?” This is why this paper seeks to identify, compare, and analyze African megachurches, within their specific historical contexts, in order to rightly interpret the meanings of their activities, and, in the words of Niebuhr, “so that they come to us not as brute actions, but as understood and as having meaning” (Niebuhr 1999). The responsible self: an essay in Christian moral philosophy. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.
My use of the terms “faithful” and “devout” here seek to capture the polysemic nature of both within the context of a white supremacist, slaveholding, Christian community. Here, they are used to describe not only the ways sympathetic whites perceived Andrew Bryan’s faith commitments in relation to the sacred, but how they interpreted his fidelity and devotion to the system of white supremacy in Savannah. In other words, according to their logic, a truly faithful and devout black Christian translates into a faithful and devout enslaved body. Now of course, this is neither true for the enslaved nor the enslaver. Prohibitions against independent black worship would not be necessary if it were. Yet, this is part of the lie and racial game that created the ideological conditions to allow for such oxymoronic identities as “good slave,” and, more importantly, “benevolent slaveholder.”
See the recorded history of First African Baptist Church on the church’s current Website: http://www.firstafricanbaptist.org/aboutus.htm
Civil religion is concerned with the religious dimensions of the public realm such as singing the Star Spangled Banner, while a conception of black churches as a public sphere emphasizes the public character of African American congregations (Higginbotham 1993).
In the Mississippi Delta, for example, historian John Giggie notes that despite the presence of several church-based mutual aid societies with the intent of offering assistance to the ill as well as death benefits in the 1870s and 1880s, most were short-lived. They may have been modeled after black institutional churches in the Northeast, but the fragile financial condition of these organizations translated into minimal life spans (Giggie 2008).
At the turn of the century, less than 740,000 African Americans lived outside of the South, a mere 8% of the total African American population of the United States. By 1970, 10.6 million, 47% of the total African American population, lived outside the South with a third of those being southern transplants and even more the children or grandchildren of southern migrants. The dramatic population shifts of the migration eras are important when giving an account of the development of densely populated African American communities in major cities that made large black congregations possible and arguably necessary. I am conscious of historian David Wills’ concern that sociologically inflected before and after narratives hinged on the Great Migraton can create a problem for our understanding of the postreconstruction era and twentieth century. So, this is not a Robert-Park-inspired narrative of black folks trapped in a premodern Gemeinschaft waiting for the Great Migration to usher them toward a modern Gesellschaft. The important insights of Elsa Barkely Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Jane Dailey, and John Giggie reveal the post-emancipation efforts of varying African American communities from the Deep to Midsouth (Gregory 2005; Wills 2009; Park 1974).
The identified congregations include Bridge Street Baptist, Fleet Street AME Zion, Berean Baptist, and Holy Trinity Baptist, all located in Brooklyn. And Metropolitan Baptist and Abyssinian Baptist, both in Harlem. Its important to note also that a few other congregations such as Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist and Bethany Baptist grew exponentially by the 1950s (Taylor 1994).
Ibid.
In addition to expanding membership rolls of the established black mainline congregations, the Great Migration spurred an additional religious phenomenon, animated by and for Southern migrants. Persons began to join together in houses or untraditional rental spaces to form independent religious communities with such regularity that the phenomenon has come to be known as the black storefront movement. But, storefront congregations cannot be reduced to a particular religious affiliation or denomination. These churches included Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal-Holiness, as well as several other independent religious organizations that developed which traversed the religious landscape; i.e., black Muslims, Jews, Spiritualists, as well as Vodoo and Hodou groups. Thus, the term “storefront” does not constitute a substantive definition, as much as a physical characteristic.
Ibid.
See “Who We Are” on Windsor Village’s website at: http://www.kingdombuilders.com/templates/cuskingdombuilders/details.asp?id=23260&PID=68419
Ibid.
Elsewhere, I systematically trace and chart what I consider to be the dominant theological orientations that structure the phenomenon of black religious broadcasting. Since local megachurches serve as studios for leading black evangelical religious broadcasters, I am confident that the categories of neo-Pentecostalism, black Charismatic mainline, and neo-Charismatic Word of Faith work as descriptive, though far from exhaustive, ideal-types to make sense out of the crowded terrain of contemporary megachurches (Walton 2009).
Ibid.
Numbers here are based on an analysis of the “Database of Megachurches in the U.S.” compiled by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and my own research on African-American megachurches. http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/database.html In regards to the paucity of female solo preachers, I welcome any correction. Unfortunately, even if another African American woman megachurch pastor is identified in any of these areas, she will still be the exception that proves the gender-biased norm.
The current leadership structure and office holders of the FGBCF can be accessed here: http://fullgospelbaptist.org/html/tiers.html
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Walton, J.L. For Where Two or Three (Thousand) Are Gathered in My Name! A Cultural History and Ethical Analysis of African American Megachurches. J Afr Am St 15, 133–154 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-011-9163-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-011-9163-4