Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [344]
Neither the Methodists nor the Baptists were strangers to emotional fervor in worship; indeed, that had been a source of their appeal to the slaves. What many of the missionaries now appeared to suggest, however, was that emancipation demanded a new dignity and decorum in religious worship, and that these objectives could best be attained through instruction by an educated clergy. The Christian Recorder, as the official spokesman for the AME Church, deemed this point particularly critical as it described the activities of the church’s missionaries in the South.
There was a time when white ministers thought any kind of preaching would do for colored people, and they would deal in small talk. There was a time when colored ministers could glory in their own ignorance before a congregation, and succeed in making the people believe they were Divinely inspired, and secure their respect and homage. There was a time when clownishness and incorrect speech were admired, and a swollen pomposity and conceit were mistaken for ability.
Such primitive conceptions of worship, the newspaper suggested, would now have to be discarded, along with the other relics of bondage. By exposing the freedmen to higher standards of worship, a white cleric hopefully declared, they would learn the meaning of order and restraint—prerequisites of freedom whose importance went beyond the realm of religion. “Order in one kind of gathering will tend to the same in other things. They are ignorant & unaccustomed to plan & manage for themselves and I cannot help feeling strongly that their greatest need is orderly Churches, under the care of educated men. For the effects of such religious order is not easily overestimated, as it regards both spiritual things and temporal.”18
Until such order prevailed in the freedmen’s worship, both black and white northern missionaries would share some common concerns. Upon visiting their first black prayer meeting in the South, white ministers conceded a certain admiration for the “simple and childlike” faith of the freedmen, their evident “sincerity and earnestness,” their “implicit belief in Providence,” their demonstrated love of prayer, and the powerful emotional impact of their music and hymns. “It took me nearer to heaven than I had been for years,” one missionary said of the singing he had heard. Still another spectator at a black religious service came away impressed not only by the “purity and simplicity” of the slaves’ faith but also by its practicality. “They believe simply in the love of Christ, and they speak of Him and talk to Him with a familiarity that is absolutely startling. They pray as though they thought Christ himself was standing in the very room.” Even though he considered the preachers “very rude and uncultivated,” exhibiting little understanding of the Bible, he would conclude from his observations that the freedmen were “the only people I ever met whose religion reacted on their daily life.”19
What appalled the white missionaries and visitors about black religious worship made by far the deeper impression—the emotional wildness and extravagance, the unlettered preaching, the “incoherent speeches and prayers,” the “narrowness” of the religious knowledge,