How do black Christians justify being christians?

[mswas]

@MichaelQReilly

To get things back to the OP, I think that this post hit the nail on the head. At their most basic level, before all of the dogmatic crap of the various churches got added on, Christianity is essential an anti-establishment movement. It posits a god who loves everyone irrespective of birth, non-violent resistance, rails against wealth, advocates an individual relationship with god, and views life’s tribulations as temporal with regard to eternal life. There is alot in there that would be very appealing to an enslaved people. I’ve also read that black slaves identified very strongly with the stories of the Isrealite’s enslavement and subsequent exodus.

In a way, its ironic that the southern society insisted on stripping blacks of thier culture and forcing them to accept, among other things, Christianity. Because while one can construe pro-slave positions from the religion’s teachings and use that to keep your slaves down. There is as much, and probably even more, in there to give slaves succor against thier own trials.

Another thing that’s interesting is that it also obliterates the benefit inherent in stratification of culture. They tore families apart so that they would have a harder time organizing with slaves not of their own or a related tribe. Then by supplying them all with Christianity they gave them a common theme and unity of purpose around which they could organize.

I’d like to give a shoutout to Monstro for her great post.

[DrDeth]

@BrainGlutton

Anyway, there was no one “African religion.” Each nation and tribe had its own gods, myths and religious practices, except for those who were Muslims or (in Ethiopia) Jews or Monophysite Christians. And modern African-Americans have no cultural identification with any particular African culture or nationality – there’s no way they could, their bloodlines having gotten all mixed up in the second generation off the boats.

.

Right. The slave ships made special efforts to split up tribes so that any given boatload would consist of many mixed tribes from different areas. In that case, those that wanted to continue with the tribal gods would not have very many co-religionists. Those of other tribes would traditionally hate the other tribes religion and so they’d face strong opposition amoung their fellow slaves. Finally the local priets/witchdoctor would be very uinlikely to have been captured and sold as a slave.

Nor was Xtianity pro-slavery, if anything the opposite. Of course anything could (and was) *justified *in the name of Xtianity.

And we are all forgetting that while the slave-owners (in America) were Christians, the slave-raiders were either Muslim or another tribe.

[ITR_champion]

@BluePitbull

Well, an atheist classmate asked a few questions about slave owners and how they used christianity to control slaves. Since they were never given a real choice to practise their own African religion, how can they justify being christians now?

Christianity is the only one of the world’s major religions that would naturally appeal to blacks in America or any other group with a long history of oppression. It would seem extremely odd if blacks shifted en masse to any other religion or to a lack of religion. In addition to what MichelQReilly said, there’s another, even more obvious, reason. If you were a slave or in any similr situation, wouldn’t you feel uplifted by the idea that a poor carpenter from an occupied nation could be the central figure in human history? It’s not just that Jesus preached to the downtrodden; He also was one of the downtrodden.