Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830By 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 EvangelicalsBy 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?
Harris’s answer, which is shaped by critiques of evangelical theologies of Scripture made by John Barton and especially James Barr, is “no.” In her terms, the “wider aspects of evangelical faith” and what she calls “the rational and historical grounding of their faith” do not harmonize well. In her view, a distinctly fundamentalist commitment to rationalistic evidentialism still occupies a very large place in most evangelical views of Scripture. Unlike Barr (as in Fundamentalism, 1977, and Escaping from Fundamentalism, 1984), however, Harris displays a keen sense of intra-evangelical diversity. She accounts for that diversity by noting characteristic differences between British and Americans; she describes well a range of efforts at linking a priori deductions about the character of divine revelation with empirical efforts aimed at proving the errorlessness of Scripture; and she examines carefully the varied philosophical influences that have come to bear on evangelical views of the Bible, from eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense realism, the Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper (developed in several different directions), and hints of current phenomenological hermeneutics. Only at the end of the book does Harris spell out her own position clearly, which is that “the doctrine of inerrancy is an inadequate expression of the simple trust in scripture which evangelicals desire to have.” In her understanding, the Bible’s encouragement to prayer, godly living, and loving trust in Christ has, in actual practice, very little to do with “a conviction of [the Bible’s] factual accuracy.”
Even readers who are impressed with the drift of Harris’s argument may question whether doctrines of Scripture proposed by evangelicals like James Orr, J. I. Packer, John Stott, or I. Howard Marshall divorce explanations of biblical truthfulness as much from Christ-centered piety as she suggests. It would also be intriguing to know what Harris thinks of recent, self-consciously postrationalistic, but also self-consciously orthodox accounts of Scripture proposed by the Calvinist philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff (Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks, 1995) and the Wesleyan theologian William Abraham (Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism, 1998). In addition, the debt of scholars like Barr to intellectual fashions of the twentieth century could have received fuller attention. Yet as itself an investigation rooted in Christian piety, even as it wrestles with the sharp intellectual critiques of modernity, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals well repays the close reading its weighty argument deserves.
—Mark Noll
Fiction
Making History By Stephen Fry Random House 381 pp.; $24
Stephen Fry (the unflappable Jeeves of British television and the witty Wilde of last year’s biopic) has written another enormously entertaining novel, his third. But dash it all if this one isn’t filled with dangerous ideas.
Near the end of the novel, Fry’s sexually ambiguous alter ego discovers that history is fate and that the real point of it all is not freedom but love. Unfortunately, Fry’s insight is not what the ancients knew (amor vincit omnia, love conquers all), but something closer to a gay liberation philosophy that desire justifies just about anything.
Making History is ostensibly about the course of history and human freedom. But the book’s plot has all the logic of a musical comedy. Michael Young, who has nearly completed a doctorate in history at Cambridge, links up with a guilt-ridden physicist and his time machine to lace the water supply in Brunau-am-Inn with a male contraceptive drug, hoping thus to change history for the better by ensuring that Adolf Hitler is never conceived.
This experiment not only lands the historian and the physicist in an alternative world, but a worse one. Or so it seems to Michael, now Mikey, Young, an undergraduate philosophy major at Princeton. It is a repressive world (particularly toward his newfound homosexual friend Steve), and a world where genes and economic forces bring about many of the same things as happened in the “real” world they had tried to erase. While Hitler himself is never born, the volatile mix of rampant anti-Semitism and German economic woes still explodes on the world scene. And our guilt-ridden physicist must still torture himself over his father’s involvement in the extermination of the Jews. “[T]his was predetermination either way you sliced it,” muses Mikey. ” The will of history or the will of DNA. What happened to the will of man?”
Well, if history-with-Hitler could be restored, then at least Steve would be able to live openly as a gay in the liberated what-the-heck world we know as the ’90s. Jews get wiped out either way, and so it is back to the time machine to un-neuter Hitler’s father and bring back the Third Reich. For all Fry’s clever humor, Making History is more or less bunk.
—David Neff
Heather Curtis is a doctoral student at Harvard University. Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought of Wheaton College. In a forthcoming issue of B&C he will report on the December 1998 conference “The Financing of American Evangelism,” sponsored by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
