This article calls forth a vision for the future study of African American religions in the United States by examining how transnational contact and diasporic consciousness have affected the past practice and are likely to affect the future practice of Christianity, Islam, and Africanderived, Orisha-based religions in Black America. It offers a synthesis of scholarly literature and charts possible directions for analyzing Africana religions beyond the ideological and geographical boundaries of the nation-state. The article focuses on two primary forms of imagined and physical movement: the immigration of self-identifying Black people from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, and other places to the United States; and the travel, tourism, pilgrimage, and other movement-whether physical or not-of American-born Black people to places outside the Unites States.the District of Columbia (DC), and other locales where Black immigrants tend to cluster. As of 2016, 9 to 10 percent of all self-identifying Black people in the United States (about 4.2 million people) were foreign born (Pew Research Center 2018). Approximately one-half of this group came from the Caribbean, although the number of Caribbean-born Black immigrants slowed considerably in the late twentieth century. Contrariwise, the number of Black immigrants from Africa, which totaled almost 1.6 million in 2016, has more than doubled in each of the last three decades. Self-identifying Black Africans have arrived mainly from West and East Africa, especially from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya (Pew Research Center 2018;Capps, McCabe, and Fix 2012).As this article will illustrate, Black immigrants have established separate churches, mosques, and other religious institutions, but they have also joined and helped to shape existing religious congregations. Some African-born Black Christians, for example, have contributed to the global spread of the so-called prosperity gospel and an emphasis on individual salvation as the basis for positive social change. Many first-generation immigrants such as the Senegalese followers of the Muridi Sufi order-also known as the Mourides-have cultivated distinct ethnic, trans/national, and linguistic identities as part of their religious activities and organizing. Some others-for example, Sierra Leonean men in Washington, DC-have questioned their national and ethnic practices of Islam, seeking to fashion a more standardized, pan-ethnic, global, and universal approach to Islamic religious norms. Finally, Black immigrants' theological orientations, ethical norms, ritualistic practices, and aesthetic forms have contributed to and often influenced African American culture outside of formally constituted religious communities as well.The article will also reveal that as important as Black immigrants will be to the future of African American religions, the transnational and diasporic nature of these religions is not a one-way 4 affair. The twentieth-and twenty-first century religious imaginations and peregrinations of American-born Bl...
Beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery, which forced hundreds of thousands of people into what is presently the United States, religion among African Americans consistently featured a complex of efforts toward innovation, preservation, and agential intervention rooted in efforts toward survival against structures of racial domination. Social factors including slavery, black responses to a range of political conflicts, influences of immigration, and the varieties of genealogies that have constituted religious formations among African Americans contributed to the creation of formal Christian denominations, intentional communities of Orisha, and transnational movements of Islam. Also important are the insurgent challenges that African Americans have proffered as a rejoinder to social oppression. But this progressive tendency has been paralleled by sharply conservative religious formations that check any easy generalization of African American religions as being predisposed toward social justice movements. Also important are social sources of autonomous church formation, the role of Black Nationalism, anticolonial forms of religion, and Yoruba revivalism of the mid-20th century.
This book provides a narrative historical, postcolonial account of African American religions. It examines the intersection of Black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom. Rather than treating freedom and its others (colonialism, slavery and racism) as opposites, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets multiple periods of Black religious history to discern how Atlantic empires (particularly that of the United States) simultaneously enabled the emergence of particular forms of religious experience and freedom movements as well as disturbing patterns of violent domination. Johnson explains theories of matter and spirit that shaped early indigenous religious movements in Africa, Black political religion responding to the American racial state, the creation of Liberia, and FBI repression of Black religious movements in the twentieth century. By combining historical methods with theoretical analysis, Johnson explains the seeming contradictions that have shaped Black religions in the modern era.
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