How do black Christians justify being christians?

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.

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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.

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.