touchy (possibly) race/religion question

Great Debates
1

Okay–for the record, both my friend and myself are of the Caucasian persuasion. She brought up this question, and the more I think about it, the more it bugs me.

First off, I believe that the majority of people who refer to themselves as black/African-American/etc in the US are descendants of slaves forcibly brought to the US. In my history classes, I learned that slaves were stripped of their identities and forced to accept the religion of those who enslaved them—Christianity.

Now, the question is—since African-Americans were intially forced into Christianity (as we know it—yes, I know about Coptic Christians & know that Christianity originated in Africa), why are so many African-Americans now deeply religious?

More to the point, why is there an exceptionally large number of African-Americans who feel compelled to force their religion on others? I’m talking about the folks who go around yelling “Praise Jesus” and the people who insist on saying “God Bless You” at every turn. Frankly, I don’t go around shoving my beliefs in other people’s faces and I find it extremely offensive when others do so. Would someone please explain what the deal is here?

2

You were persuaded to grow white skin? sorry

Lots of people are deeply religious. Christianity is an easily supportable religion in North America. In fact, there are a large number of blacks who have rejected Christianity for Islam, specifically for the reasons you outlined. (Others will point out that Muslims were every bit as active in the slave trade as Christians, and they do not turn to Islam.) Since there are very few animists in Norh America, black society finds it easier to place its religious energies into either the Christian or Muslim faiths.

You’ve lost me, here. The black culture within North America tends to include communities that are very emotionally demonstrative, but I have never encountered a black person who was trying to “force” their religion on me. (I am sure there are some out there.) Insistent proselytizing is much more common among whites (in North America) than among any other ethnic group.

3

Oh, come on, Tom . . . don’t you know about all the blacks who attend Westboro Baptist? :wink:

4

Boy, you lost me there, too. Got any kind of statistics, or a cite, for either the statement, “there are more black Christians than white Christians in America”, or the statement, “black American Christians are pushier about proselytizing than white American Christians”?

I doubt it.

5

Christian theology is not tied to race. Perhaps black American Christians are involved in the religion because of its ideas, just like the rest of Christians all over the world?

An anology: my maiden name is Dix, French for 10. My father is from Germany. The reason for our last name was that, many centuries ago (15-1600s), my ancestors were Huguenots who were forced to leave France. The families sent out were numbered, mine was number 10. Boom. Dix. Knowing all this, I feel no reason to convert to an antiquated version of Christianity to honor my ancestors. Obviously there are some significant differences between being banished from one country because of religious persecution and being forced into slavery in another, but still. Theology isn’t dependent on heritage.

6

I assume that you don’t mean this literally. I have lived in the Bible Belt all my life (if you count growing up in New Orleans as part of the Bible Belt!) and have not run into a single person this ardent anywhere but on the streets of the French Quarter during Mardi Gras time and on the campus of Louisiana State University in Free Speech Alley presentations. And in college, it’s mostly a show, anyhow.

Do you mean saying “God Bless You” at innocuous times such as after a brief conversation in an elevator with a stranger, or upon leaving a store after having been helped by a salesperson? On par with “Take it easy”, “Take care”, “Good luck”, or “Do come again”? That hardly qualifies as “shoving their beliefs in other people’s faces” – they are just being polite and friendly in their own way.

Goodness – has it come to the point where even minor expressions of religious belief is prima facie offensive?

7

First off, I didn’t say that there are more black Christians than white Christians is the US. This whole thread is a personal-observation thing.

I’m saying that I live in DC, and what I see with my own eyes include: the woman on my bus who says “God Bless You” to everyone boarding/exiting the bus, African-American people who bring God into every single freakin’ conversation they have (i.e., “Good weather today, huh?” “Yes, the Lord has blessed us!”), and black people who look down on those who don’t attend church.

And, ** tomndebb ** the caucasian persuasion thing is a joke. To me, saying someone’s of an “x” persuasion means they are a certain thing. And if black people can refer to each other by the n-word, I’ll refer to myself by any darn thing I like.

To me, it just doesn’t make sense to avidly adopt & promote anything honored by people who once enslaved your relatives—that’s the pointof this.

8

booklover: To me, it just doesn’t make sense to avidly adopt & promote anything honored by people who once enslaved your relatives—that’s the pointof this.

By that token, it didn’t make sense for black people in the 1960’s to “avidly adopt and promote” the egalitarian principles that were honored (though not consistently) by the slave-owning founders of this country—and boom, there goes the civil rights movement. It’s kind of silly to reject what seems true and good to you just because in the past it was espoused by some people who also did things that weren’t true and good.

As for complaining about people expressing their religious beliefs in personal conversation: committed atheist and civil libertarian though I am, this is something I couldn’t care less about. We have enough to deal with in attempting to keep religious expression and coercion out of government. It is in no way an infringement of anybody’s rights to have to listen to another individual expressing their own beliefs in the course of a casual conversation voluntarily engaged in.

However, if it really bothers you, why don’t you try handling it on an individual social level? Simply say “Excuse me ma’am, but my religious convictions are opposed to the use of the word ‘Lord’ or ‘God’, so I would be very grateful if you wouldn’t mention those words in speaking to me.” Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t, but it’s a better solution than complaining that in your opinion American blacks shouldn’t even be Christian at all.

9

Which is fine, but as I noted, there is not a lot of support for animism and other religions indigenous to Africa. Some folks have, indeed, reacted against the historical connection between slavery and the Christians who practiced it. A number have embraced Islam (rather ironically, given history in that regard) and others have decided that the historical connection is not that big of a deal.

Carried to a logical extreme, very few people in Europe would also be Christian, given the number of people who were converted at the point of the sword between Constantine and the late middle ages. Similarly, Mexico and the nations to its South should also reject Christianity for the reasons you have outlined. Obviously, people, in general, are not as concerned with that logic as you are. That is not to say that your logic is in error, only that such logical distinctions are rarely a part of the equation when people embrace religion.

What you have described as “forcing religion” on people appears to be simply people embracing their religion to the point of making it a part of their lives and including those beliefs in their daily expressions.
Since they do not seem to be intrusively trying to convert you to their beliefs, I think you’ll just have to learn to live with it. There are sections of the country where you will find white (Anglo/Irish/Scots) Protestants expressing religion in most of their speech and places where Hispanics or Polish or Irish Catholics do the same. I don’t know what to tell you, since I am not inclined to tell them they have to hide their religion when they are in public.

It sounds as though it is a cultural issue more than anything else.

(Oh, and whooooosh.)

10

Ahhh. There’s your problem, booklover: You’re seeing religion and a choice of religion as something that should “make sense,” that is, be rationally supportable.

Religion and rationality are separate and distinct expressions of the human mind and can not be mixed without running into conflicts such as the one you point out.

Religion fills a spiritual, emotional need while rationality, “making sense” feels a different need entirely.

My advice is to not worry about it and, instead, apply your energies to creating interesting responses to the intrusive “God Bless You.” One, perhaps, would be “She has, brother. She has.” :slight_smile:

11

And another answer:

Immediately following slavery (especially during the Jim Crow South) Blacks were forbidden from forming or joining organizations. Churches were the exception to this rule. Consequently the Black church took on a much broader social role than it’s “white” counterpart.

As for Praise Jesus/ God Bless thing…don’t know, maybe it’s a denominational thing.

12

Doesn’t anyone else feel like there is something else going on here, that booklover isn’t telling us? For instance the only time in my life that I have felt that people were looking down on me for not going to church, was when I was feeling bad about it myself. If I was going through a search for what I believed and I kept hearing someone say “God Bless You” it might get to me that someone has found the peace of conviction that I’m looking for in my life.

Just a thought.

13

Or maybe its all this cumberson genitalia.

I’m sorry. I’ve just come from this thread and my mind has not risen from crotch level yet.

14

Cumberson, combersome. What’s the diff? We’re talking genitalia here!

15

I do get a glimmer of what booklover is talking about, I think. Let me expound.

First, my own background:

My parents tried to raise me as a charismatic fundamentalist–Holy Roller is the impolite term–but it didn’t take. In my teens, I was a rabid atheist but that mellowed over the years to agnostic and later to autarchist. (‘Autarchist’ may be defined, for these purposes, as someone who believes in a spiritual something but also believes that that belief is his own business, not to be shared, not to be formed into an organization.)

I have spent most of my life searching for meaning, in both rational and spiritual directions. I’ve studied and discussed and experienced and once spent several weeks sitting in the woods and just thinking. Truly. :slight_smile: Having now reached a point which makes me happy and where the expressed beliefs of others neither threaten nor offend me, I’m usually able react favorably to good wishes from others.

I’m also suddenly reminded of the dedication to Vonnegut’s novel [und]Cat’s Cradle[/und]: May you believe in whatever pack of lies make you healthy and happy and kind.
HOWEVER:

A couple years ago, I accompanied a friend, out of friendship, to her Sunday morning services at the Christian Reformed Church. The CRC is the American version of the Dutch Reformed Church, Calvinist but not extreme.

As I was sitting in this church, listening to the sermon and watching the people around me, the thing that struck me the strongest was how proud of themselves they all felt. Others might stay at home or go to some other church but they, THEY were the ones with the direct line to God and the others were poor sinners, soon to be lost to eternal damnation.

The feeling of self-righteousness was so thick you could cut it. The overall effect to an outsider could easily be both patronizing and offensive. I was polite enough when discussing it with my friend…but I found it very sad indeed.
THEREFORE:

I really do believe that when someone gives you a gratuitous “God Bless you,” they are NOT genuinely wishing you well but actually proudly displaying their piety and asking you to be impressed with it. In other words, unsolicited comments with a religious note are for the benefit of the one speaking. The women to which booklover refers are attempting to make themselves feel happy and secure by patronizing him, putting him down by showing how close to God they are and, by extension, how much of a sinner he is.

My self-security is to the point where I can laugh and accept such things in good humor, usually :slight_smile: …but most people who don’t share the self-righteous faith of the blesser would probably find it offensive in subtle psychological ways.

The question, as I see it, is: What’s the most effective, healthy way to react?

16

LOL! Biggirl, I know what you mean, girl. Lord have mercy, my clitoris has just been draggin’ me down lately, it’s so huge. :rolleyes:
Seriously, I agree with tomndebb and stuffinb. To add to what they’ve said, during slavery, black folks really only could organize to worship. They would many times gather during the weekdays to worship in secret, say in the woods late at night, in addition to attending church with their owners on Sunday. I think that sometimes they would openly have their own worship services on Sundays, and this would be sanctioned by slaveowners if the church the slaveholder attended didn’t have a place for blacks. At the secret worship meetings, I imagine other things in addition to worship went on. If you look at the spirituals, they are really codes designed by enslaved folks to communicate openly in front of white folks about what their condition is or the status of the Underground Railroad or just to gossip about things that may have been going on at neighboring plantations. The spiritual code has not been cracked, and I doubt it ever will be because the folks who used it have long since been dead. Since slavery was in part justified by Christianity, a lot of slaveholders didn’t feel threatened by black folks being Christian or gathering to worship. However, the church and Christianity has in addition to being a major social outlet for the community had a much more political and subversive role in black culture and history. During slavery, enslaved folks learned how to read by using the Bible as the first text to learn on. During Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, the black church served as the major focal point for planning and implementing socio-political agendas (Read up on Vernon Johns (spelling?) and MLK, Jr.). In many Southern small towns and cities, the church is the primary social outlet for blacks and whites.

You wonder about why some black folks would adopt the religion that was used to justify slavery. I should note that some of black Christianity is to some degree a complex syncretization of African spiritual/religious practices that have over the generations been toned down as well as European interpretations of Christianity (i.e. VooDoo or Santeria, or even look at the Holiness churches where folks are dancing and singing for a good percentage of the service). So some blacks who are Christian didn’t completely adopt the version of Christianity that slaveholders espoused. There are some black folks who did adopt the version of Christianity that slaveholders espoused, and there are some black folks who will try to preach their religion to and “save” other folks.

Basically inserting words like “Lord,” “Lord have mercy,” “Bless your heart,” “God bless you,” etc. . . is a Southern and to some extent a black cultural thing. You say you live in DC or you’ve observed this linguistic phenomena in DC where there’s good percentage of black folks. Well, DC is a city in the South, and I imagine it has a large population that comes from the South, and they bring their cultural elements up there with them. I’m black, a Southerner who grew up attending church and the social functions that surrounded it, and I’m now agnostic bordering on atheist, but I find myself uttering the aforementioned religious sayings in various forms, but I just consider them fillers or cultural things that I’m really not aware of and don’t feel pressed to get rid of, and I’m certainly not trying to shove Christianity down other folks’ throats. Lord, I actually find it amusing that I use these terms considering how much of a heathen I am. :smiley:

17

Well, as someone who lives in the DC suburbs, I can tell you that there are a lot of large “black” churches in this area and DC as well as the Maryland suburbs where I live are predominantly black. Therefore, you probably just notice it more because of the population.

How could slaves not like the Bible? At least, after someone who could read told them all those Moses stories that Old Massa forgot was in there? Let my people go…

18

So, Blacks shouldn’t smoke or wear cotton? After all, they were enslaved to pick tobacco and cotton primarily.

At some point you are not a member of a race, but a member of a society. Maybe that society consists of one race or mostly one race, but if the society has decided that a religion, or smoking, or cotton, is acceptable or even preferred, you won’t be able to fight it.

You can make arguments saying that you should do this, how can you do this, etc., but it’s not going to change.

Perhaps religion was the one good thing about slavery (I don’t know if it was - it’s hard to believe that religion would be a good thing anywhere from my point of view). Or as stuffinb said, it was the only organization they could join and they became indoctrinated like the Simpsons and “The Leader” (that last part was mine, not stuffinb.

19

What are spirituals? And what is the spiritual code?

20

Black Christianity is the last badge of slavery.

We went to africa to get slaves… brought them back here and enslaved them, and taught them about our white (jesus) god… and once the slaves were freed, most remained illiterate for quite some time, and the “feelgood-ism” of christianity probably helped them through rough times. But, blacks who are christians today are simply showing the remaining scars of slavery.

Not to imply blacks should never be Christians or that they should immediately run out and become Muslims, but don’t kid yourself into thinking the fact that the white slaveowners forced their own white god upon the black slaves has nothing to do with current black christianity.