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Come Shouting to Zion
: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830
By Sylia R. Frey and Betty Wood
Univ. of North Carolina Press
285 pp.; $16.95
The conversion of African slaves and their descendants to Protestant Christianity represents one of the most significant episodes in American social and religious history. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, nearly 40 percent of African American adults living in the South became associated with evangelical churches. Until recently, however, the process by which slaves converted to Christianity remained ambiguous even to historians of African American religion. Come Shouting to Zion is one of the first comprehensive studies to chart this momentous transformation.
Building on the work of anthropologists and historians, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood place the process of slave conversion within the broader context of West African religious history. Rather than assuming that the story of black Christianity commenced when the slave ships set shore in the New World, the authors argue that "Africa is the starting point" for the study of African American Protestantism. Thus the book begins with an exploration of the interactions between European Christians and West Africans that took place in the mid-fifteenth century.
Throughout, Frey and Wood show "that religious change was everywhere the product of a reciprocal process rather than of conversion by confrontation." Africans and their descendants actively appropriated those elements of Christianity that they deemed "useful," while at the same time infusing European-style Protestantism with insights from their own inherited cosmologies and ritual practices. Rejecting the common perception that the slave trade shattered traditional African religious systems, the authors hold that enslaved Africans "brought with them a variety of cultural forms" that influenced the subsequent shape of evangelical Christianity. The result of this "dialectical process" of religious transformation was an American Protestantism that bore the imprint of both Anglo and African cultures.
Frey and Wood suggest that slaves converted to evangelical Christianity because it enabled them to shape a religious identity relevant to their situation as an oppressed people. Staid and formal Anglicanism that reinforced a hierarchical view of society held "little intrinsic appeal" for enslaved peoples, whereas the ardent evangelicalism of the Methodist and Baptist missionaries resonated with traditional African spirituality and offered the possibility of a universal fellowship that subverted established notions of racial inferiority.
While the book succeeds in illuminating the complex patterns of cultural exchange that accompanied the development of African American Christianity, the authors' functionalist bias limits their understanding of conversion. Frey and Wood seem unable to embrace the possibility that some slaves espoused Christianity because they actually believed it. Even as they seek to attribute agency to their subjects, the authors fail to do justice to African American converts as sincere Christians who would have put God, and not themselves, at "center stage."—Heather Curtis
Fundamentalism and Evangelicals
By Harriet A. Harris
Clarendon Press/Oxford Univ. Press
384 pp.; $92
The great merit of Harriet Harris's thoughtful study is the care with which it asks an important question: are evangelical accounts of Scripture as epistemologically rich, as experientially persuasive, and as thoughtfully Christ-centered as the best expressions of evangelical life?
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