-Phillis Wheatley
18th c. African American Poet
The ideation of the cross as the central motif in past and current
African American religious expressions is traceable to enslavement and
the process of Christianization. In and since slavery, black Christians
realized that their experiences of discrimination, abuse, torture and death
were analogous to the sufferings of Jesus, other biblical characters and
the incipient church, which had similarly undergone state-sanctioned
persecution and martyrdom. The experiences of the first Christian communities
significantly informed the early church's understanding of Jesus'
death as an act of unconditional, sacrificial love for his people. Although
he was crucified for sedition, to his first interpreters Jesus' death involved
his own agency and contributed to their development of a hermeneutics
of sacrifice, which is ensconced in the Bible and Christian tradition
and which has a historical corollary in an ethic of love—seen as the
very heart of Christian morality—in the African American community.
The early Christians provided African Americans historical precedents
for interpreting theologically the meaning of their particular experiences
of suffering, fully engaging intellect and emotion in the service of the
community of faith in the activity of apologetics. Through apologetics,
both groups of Christians developed comprehensive reckonings of the
meaning of their suffering, thereby demonstrating their human, moral
and artistic agency in contexts that denied them social, economic and
political freedom and sought even to proscribe their religious freedom.
THROUGH THE FIRE: SLAVERY AND CHRISTIANIZATION
Through the lens of slavery, African Americans—bond and free—fixed
their gaze on the cross of Jesus, deriving from it a way to understand
and cope with their own painful experiences of proscribed existence.
Jesus' presumed innocence, his betrayal by his friends, and his arrest,
torture and execution in occupied Palestine mirrored the brutal conditions
the slaves experienced in antebellum America. Just as Judas
"handed over" Jesus to his detractors in exchange for thirty pieces of
silver (Mt 26:15), likewise sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs from the
north bartered away the lives of their black-skinned sisters and brothers
to Portuguese, English, French, Dutch and Spanish merchants in exchange
for a variety of inducements—among them, similarly shiny and
deadly "trinkets" (weapons)—that held a bogus promise of industrialization
and the supposedly civilizing influence of monotheistic faith. Not
all the slaves were subjects of barter; as the severity of slavery under
European domination became known, outraged tribal leaders began to
resist actively the merchants and missionaries who foraged the continent
for free labor and lost souls for Christendom's sake. Among the
African abolitionists Queen Ann Nzinga (c.1580-1663) of the area now
known as Angola was the dreaded nemesis of the Portuguese, who,
among the Europeans, exhibited the most missionary zeal toward the
Africans, performing wholesale baptisms of slaves as they made their
perilous journey to other lands.
The European settlers of the New World sought survival and a quality
of life that preserved or created social, political and economic privilege
for themselves. Some were parties seeking to escape religious intolerance
and/or poverty in their former homelands; others were commissioned to
expropriate the land and mineral wealth of New World natives. Harnessing
the considerable resources of North America required a labor pool of
sufficient size and experience in agricultural methods superior to that of
the indigenous populace, which the (mostly English) settlers decimated
and effectively vilified. Construing skin color as a stratifying device, the
colonists systematically extracted the "bound, controlled labor" of black-skinned
peoples through the imposition of chattel slavery. The white-skinned
traders and raiders of the Gold Coast assumed full, lifelong
control of the individual and collective destinies of the captives they
brought to America: breeding, buying and selling them and their progeny
according to caprice and capital needs; committing acts of personal
violence against the slaves—raping, beating and lynching them—in order
to bolster their seized authority. Gradually eliminating indentured
servitude, a temporary albeit brutal contractual arrangement under which
white-skinned people, male or female, could be obligated, the settlers
created a racial caste system that defined slavery and that still shapes
the American socioeconomic and political context. There, the imported
Africans were made to experience the cross of Jesus. Like the biblical
African conscript Simon of Cyrene (Mt 27:32; Mk 15:21; Lk 23:26),
they not only bore the cross, but they also quite literally wore the designated
emblem of suffering and shame on their backs and arms and legs
and faces, for Christ's sake.
Undoubtedly, religion and law were the most significant factors in
the reification and expansion of slavery in North America, and they
buttress the racial caste system to this day. Styling themselves as the
ancient Israelites and the sprawling territory as "Canaan" (Ex 3:8) and
the "new Jerusalem" (Rv 21:2) of scriptural promise, many of those who
had left their homelands for religious freedom and economic gain regarded
themselves "elected" to enjoy the bounty of America and to
exercise dominion over the native inhabitants and the imported slaves.
Over time, and with the southward and westward expansion of the nation,
the settlers legally defined both groups as ontologically inferior,
keeping the social and civic prerogatives of "life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness" for whites only—white men, in particular.
Different social and theological dynamics predominated in the North
and South. New England Puritans possessed a strong sense of social
cohesion formed in the crucible of persecution in their former homeland.
Congregational polity and structures in the North evinced a covenantal
theology premised upon the idea of their communal election.
Evangelicalism, pervasive everywhere, but institutionalized in the denominational
structures of the South, emphasized religious conversion
and stressed a more privatistic religious consciousness, although it
brought poorer whites of diverse national origins together in their search
for a common social identity. Church historian Donald Mathews attests
to the idea that Evangelicalism started out as a social class movement:
As social process, Evangelicalism enveloped the South in the following
fashion: it first broke into the South as an extension of
revivals throughout the British world, a volatile social movement
providing a value system to raise converts in their own esteem,
give them confidence in themselves and their comrades and create
the moral courage to reject as authoritative for themselves the
lifestyle and values of traditional elites.
Covenant theology socially leveled whites, and evangelical piety
morally leveled every person (including those slaves admitted to communion),
regarding each as a sinner "saved by grace" (Eph 2:5). But in
the formative years of American agrarian capitalism, driven by slave
labor and characterized by economic and social stratification, Christianity
so defined made economic prosperity part of one's expectation
of blessedness, obfuscating class differences among whites and thereby
mitigating class struggle among them.
By the eighteenth century the agrarian economy was the major source
of white prosperity in the southern colonies. Although U.S. law outlawed
the international slave trade in 1807, by the mid-nineteenth century
the national traffic in black humanity was itself a principal source
of income for whites, who equated social status with the number of
slaves held in possession, and for whom a rise in social status was occasioned
by the purchase of at least one slave. James Oakes reports:
Slaveholding was the symbol of success in the market culture of
the Old South. It was an ambition, an achievement, a reward for
diligence, hard work, and tenacity. As one Louisiana master wrote,
"A man's merit in this country is estimated according to the number
of Negroes he works in the field." And as widespread as
slaveholding was, it was no mean goal.
Cliometicians Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman argue
that, although slavery and the Civil War constituted the nation's "time
on the cross," evoking a sense of national shame, economic analysis shows
that on a quantitative basis slave economy was a rational, adaptable and
efficient system of production and the southern slavocracy a model of
labor relations (if not of social relations) because of high regional growth
rates and the increased market value for slaves during the late antebellum
period. They assert that the rise of the southern secessionist movement
coincided with a wave of optimism or "sanguinity" on the part of
slaveholders concerning their economic prospects prior to the war. The
sanguinity of the planters and the efficiency of the slave-labor system
redounded to the material well-being of the slaves, relative to that of free
industrial workers. According to Fogel and Engerman, this is evinced in
"typical" clothing and food allotments, housing and medical care (as reported
by slaveholding planters) in comparison with that for free laborers
in and beyond slavery. These were putatively of nearly the same or
superior quality to that of free laborers, as the planters would have wanted
to provide for and protect their costly investment.
Fogel and Engerman's assertions belie reports of the brutality of
American chattel slavery. Although the testimony of former slaves is
ambiguous in some instances, most often it severely indicts the system
of slavery. Some of the ambiguity stems from the fact that brutality—namely,
whipping, branding, mutilation, other forms of corporal punishment
and rape—was an integral feature in the day-to-day lives of the
slaves. Former slave Delia Garlic testified: "Folks a mile away could her
dem awful whippings. Dey wuz a terrible part of livin'." Another source
of some slaves' hesitancy to define their experiences as brutal was the
paternalistic ethos in which the slavocracy was shrouded, and the ways
it sacralized the slaveholders. Alex Woods attests to the thinly veiled
idolatry of the slaveholders in the exercise of their authority:
Dey wouldn't allow 'em to call on de Lord when dey were whippin'
'em, but dey let 'em say, "Oh, pray! Oh, pray, Marster!" Dey would
say, "Are you goin' to work? Are you goin' visitin' widout a pass?
Are you goin' to run away?" Dese is de things dey would ax him,
when dey wus whippin' him.
Black people under the laws of slavery had no rights that any white
person was obligated to respect. Privileged whites historically have had
and presently have no obligation to redress this state of relations. Through
the social power it grants to white people and to those non-whites who
identify themselves with whites, the racial caste system facilitates the
concealment of the true nature of economic power, which is the domain
of very few in a capitalistic economy. As a result, to this day even
the poorest whites can cut non-whites to the ontological core with very
little fear of censure, through random and systemic discrimination, directed
violence and unsavory epithets.
Moreover, according to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, a historian of class
struggle, "The fact that mid-nineteenth century American slaves were
relatively many times as costly to buy as fifth/fourth century Athenian
ones was due primarily to a large and expanding foreign market for
cotton." From 1820 to 1860 the forced, unpaid labor of black Africans
in cotton fields signally accounted for the prosperity of southern, white
Americans. As per my childhood insight, the white, lightweight stuff in
croker sacks was a supreme symbol of black oppression. Gavin Wright
likewise argues that there was only
one fundamental dynamic force in the southern economy: expansion
of cotton demand. From the time of the cotton gin until World
War II, the only periods of prosperity and progress for the South
were periods of acceleration in world demand for this basic export
crop. The greatest of these episodes happens to coincide with
the late antebellum slave period ... High regional growth rates,
the apparent efficiency of slave labor and the sanguinity of
slaveowners all rested on an inherently impermanent foundation—the
extraordinary growth of world demand for cotton between
1820 and 1860. As the demand for cotton stagnated between 1860
and 1895, slave prices would have declined, and the growth rate
of regional incomes would have been drastically reduced.
Slavery benefited not only fledgling, southern America. Profits from
the trade also financed the industrial revolutions of England, France
and the United States. All these nations depended heavily upon the
natural resources of Africa and the innovations of Africans to build up
maritime trade and create technological advances in their social and
cultural milieux. After the northern states prohibited the traffic in their
territories, they still benefited from southern slaveholding (as did Europe)
in that profits made from slavery went first to commercial ports
and industrial cities such as New York, Boston and Portland (and
Liverpool, etc.). African Caribbean historian Walter Rodney states:
Slavery [was] useful for early accumulation of capital, but it [was]
too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude,
non-breakable tools which held back the capitalist development
of agriculture and industry. This explains the fact that the northern
portions of the U.S.A. gained far more industrial benefits from
slavery than the South, which actually had slave institutions on its
soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the American
Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within
the boundaries of the U.S.A. so that the country as a whole could
advance to a higher level of capitalism.
Despite becoming later the locus of abolitionist activity, the North
was no paragon of either moral or civic virtue. In most of the northern
colonies that had previously permitted slaveholding, the "peculiar institution"
lasted upward of a hundred years. Although slavery in the colonies
actually began in 1629, statutory recognition of the institution began
in Massachusetts and lasted from 1641 to 1780; in Connecticut, from
1650 to 1784; in New York, from 1664 to 1799; in New Jersey, from 1664
to 1804; in Rhode Island, from 1700 to 1784; in Pennsylvania, from 1700
to 1780. With the exception of Massachusetts, all of these northern colonies
passed gradual emancipation laws. After the passing of the Fugitive
Slave Act (1850), white northerners "handed over" both free persons
and former slaves to almost any white person making a claim on
them. Its rabid enforcement indicated the extent and rigor with which
the law provided for mutual respect among whites and for cooperation
in the protection of white property. By contrast, toward the end of the
Civil War, significantly, after federal emancipation, northern ambivalence
toward slavery in general and African Americans in particular
turned to outright hostility in the New York Draft Riots (1863), during
which largely Irish mobs murdered scores of black folks and hanged
their bodies on lamp posts.
As proprietors of the church and as lawmakers in the process of nation-building,
white northerners and southerners alike assaulted the humanity
of African Americans with the duplicitous use of the Bible. The
distinctly religious character of both groups of settlers generated intense
debate concerning their chattels' spiritual status. Slave catechists employed
the Bible in a literalist manner that sacralized black suffering and justified
white privilege. Some whites reasoned that they were the "providential
guardians" as well as the temporal owners of the slaves, sanctioning
black bondage with the so-called Hamitic curse (Gn 9:20ff.) and white
dominance with the injunction, "Slaves, obey your masters" (Eph 6:5).
Others posited the subhumanity of the Africans, constitutionally defining
them as "hewers of wood" (Dt 29:11) and "drawers of water" (Jos 9:21),
rendering moot any consideration of their spiritual status. In questioning
the humanity of black people, the churchmen-cum-statesmen in America
long and legally perpetuated the cross of slavery through the establishment
of whites-only institutions and the enactment of laws prohibiting
social intercourse between the races in a bid to keep the slaves and their
descendants ignorant and materially impoverished, forever enslaved.
Despite the universal justice claims in America's sacred documents,
which are themselves belied at every turn in the nation's juridical history
by the experiences of African Americans, the legal, social, economic
and ecclesial constructs derived from the covenantal theology of
the settlers and the pietistic fervor of the evangelicals are essential elements
in African American religious thought. Both election theology
and Evangelicalism gave shape to American civil religion and impetus
to the Protestant work ethic, another key element in the sacralization of
America's violent history relative to the native inhabitants, poor whites
and the slaves. They provided the foundling nation with a fundamentally
Christian character, a template, to which black people are also heir
and onto which they interpolated the story of their cross, that is, of the
spiritual, psychological and physical burdens associated with their unjustly
wrested labor. Like white Americans, African Americans freely
used the motif of the Exodus to articulate their experiences of siege,
sojourn and settlement, giving voice to comprehensive theological reckonings
of their collective suffering. Former slave Isabella Baumfree
changed her name to Sojourner Truth after her release from bondage
(1827) because, as she stated, she wanted to keep "nothin' o' Egypt on
me." Harriet Tubman, "the Moses of Her People," brought over three
hundred bondsmen and bondswomen out of the slaveholding South
and into the free North on the Underground Railroad.
In and beyond slavery African Americans found themselves in the
Bible among those for whom, with whom and as one of whom Jesus lived
and died: the poor, the alienated, the tortured, the condemned.
Humbled, they did not assume that their collective story was more important
than his story; merely the inference that the crucifixion of Jesus
was a mirror of their own suffering did—and, often, still does—cause many
people within the black Christian community to "tremble, tremble,"
their trepidation perhaps also a mirror of their sometime hesitation to
engage the opposing powers more proactively. But, despite their compassionate
embrace of one who so identified with them, both cross and
croker sack were thrust upon these latter-day "black Simons" through a
hermeneutics of sacrifice ensconced in the Bible and Christian tradition.
Having etiological roots in the Exodus experience of Passover (Ex
12:12-14) and Israelite/Jewish sacrificial tradition, it exhorts the followers
of Jesus, the "Lamb of God ... slain from the foundation of the
world" (Rv 13:8) to imitate substantively his life of service, down to his
final sacrificial act. A biblical outline and history of the Christian hermeneutics
of sacrifice are instructive in order to illustrate its ideological
utility in supporting the institution of slavery and the structures of domination
that yet delimit black people and perpetuate their suffering.
THE HERMENEUTICS OF SACRIFICE IN BIBLICAL
AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In Israelite religion animal sacrifice was the instrument of reconciliation
with Yahweh, which the Priestly writers regarded as Yahweh's own
gracious provision to the people. The agent accomplishing this "at-one-ment"
was believed to be the very blood of the sacrificial victim, by
reason of the life, or vitality, that blood proffers (Lv 17:11). The nature
of a sacrificial transaction is alternately described as an expiation or a
propitiation. In the Hebrew Bible the word signifying atonement is kaphar,
in the Greek New Testament the word is hilasterion. The clear meaning
of the Hebrew term is "to smear" or "to wipe" with blood, and thus
oblige God to "cover" sins and "pass over" those who are covered. The
institution of the Passover in Exodus 12:1-28 gives a context for understanding
the expiatory nature of sacrifice in the Israelite system. The
meaning of the Greek term is "mercy seat" or "place of propitiation."
Propitiation implies more forcefully that a penalty for sin is paid in the
act of sacrifice, such that God is objectively changed by the sacrifice
performed. At issue is whether the sacrificial system was intended to
appease or assuage Yahweh. According to Frances Young, in early Israel,
sacrifices were not simply gifts to turn away God's wrath, since
only part was given to Jahweh. The purpose of the offerings is
described as lekhapper, a term whose origin is disputed, but which
has come to mean technically "to make atonement for." In the
Old Testament it is construed with the priests or Jahweh as the subject,
and the Temple, altar or iniquity as the object. The object is never God,
though the action is performed in God's presence. The only possible
conclusion is that the rites were not propitiatory, but were expiatory,
a means given by God to wipe away sin and cope with the problem
of failure to fulfill the Law. God acted through these cultic
instruments to keep Israel from sin and calamity, making her ritually
clean so that she could offer [him] fitting worship?
Continues...
Excerpted from Power in the Blood?
by Joanne Marie Terrell
Copyright © 2005 by Joanne Marie Terrell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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