African Americans and the Bible: Dr. M. Shawn Copeland
Explore the profound relationship between African Americans and the Bible in this enlightening video featuring insights from theologian M. Shawn Copeland. This deep dive into Black theology and African American faith examines how scripture has been used in different ways, including as a source of resilience, liberation, and hope. Perfect for viewers passionate about theological learning, curious faith, and the intersection of Christianity and social justice. Whether you're studying the Bible, exploring African American theology, or seeking to understand the role of faith in Black history, this video offers valuable perspectives. Join us as we unpack the cultural, spiritual, and political dimensions of the Bible in African American Christian faith traditions.
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Description
This theology related video explores how Womanist theology emerges. It is part of Highrock's Black theology course, featuring Prof. M. Shawn Copeland. This video dives deep into how faith, Scripture, and theology speak to the lived experiences of Black women, addressing themes of justice, liberation, and resilience. Rooted in Black theology and African American faith traditions, Womanist Theology centers the voices of Black women in the fight for equality within both the church and society. How does the Bible inform this movement? What role does Christian faith play in the pursuit of justice and wholeness? Perfect for those studying the Bible, African American theology, and Black women's faith, this video unpacks transformative theological perspectives.
Resources
Here's a link to the discussion guide for this Black Theology course: https://live-highrock-network.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DiscussionGuideBlackTheology2022v2-1.pdf
Generated Transcript
Shawn Copeland (00:15.566)
In this talk, I look at the relationship between African Americans and the Bible. I focus first on the initial contacts between indigenous peoples and the Bible during the exploratory and commercial ventures of Europeans on the African continent. Second, I consider how in spite of being forbidden by law and custom to attain literacy, the enslaved people came to reframe the Bible as oral text.
as a life-affirming work. Finally, I take note of a crucial and ongoing challenge to that legacy.
Shawn Copeland (00:56.15)
The noted biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush reminds us that any discussion of the relationship between African Americans and the Bible begins on the continent of Africa. Long before chattel slavery swallowed thousands of black children, women, and men sold into the United States, the indigenous peoples in Western, Central, and Southern Africa were confronted by European force and biblical power.
Certainly the intentions and interests of those European sailors, merchants, and missionaries who traveled to Africa were contradictory. While missionaries may have sought selflessly to convert the Africans to various forms of Christianity, all too often their efforts were subordinated by the exploitative motives and conquering aims of their secular counterparts. The Bible was a crucial instrument
in the missionaries' efforts to evangelize the peoples of the continent. The missionaries understood the scriptures to be God's direct word to them, but their understanding was flawed. For them, the Bible was a reproduction or mirror reflection of their own European world.
The book of God's decrees ordered the world. White European Christians were superior. Black African pagans were inferior. The missionaries, Wimbush argues, used the Bible as a socializing agent, as a framework for reasoning and as an ideological mandate for practices of domination. In other words, the Europeans weaponized the Bible.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that the initial responses of many Africans, who may have listened with respect, gave way to what Wimbush names, befuddlement and contempt.
Shawn Copeland (03:01.731)
Having been sold or betrayed or kidnapped, then forced march to the Atlantic coast, various peoples of Africa found themselves chained in dark and foul dungeons, then herded onto sailing ships and shackled below deck, bound for another world. Once out to sea, children, youth, women, and men endured filth, handling, severe beatings, torture.
sexual assault, and immeasurable psychic trauma. Statistics suggest that 15 to 30 % of the captives died in the Middle Passage. From Boston in New England to Montevideo in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, writes Rachel Elizabeth Harding, the Africans found themselves scattered throughout the Americas, quote, in gold mining towns in central Brazil.
on sugar cane plantations in Jamaica and Cuba, in the coffee producing hills of Venezuela, on cotton and indigo estates in the southern regions of the United States, and in homes, streets, rivers, fields, and even small factories everywhere in between, Africans and their descendants, in generations of bondage, encountered and helped create the new world."
cut out of the category human, deprived of personal liberty, denied political and legal rights, the enslaved people endured continual threat of psychological and bodily violation. The various forms of enslavement that they confronted aimed to control, possess, and dominate, and just as often sought to reduce incarnate spirit to mortgageable property, merchandise, fungible objects.
Thus, the enslaved peoples had to wrestle with the tension between their commodified reduction and their own sense of who they actually were. To negotiate this tension, they reconfigured their religious and cultural worldviews, asserting their humanity in an inhumane situation.
Shawn Copeland (05:23.56)
If, as historian of religions Charles H. Long explains, religion is, the capacity of human consciousness to apprehend and to signify ultimate meaning symbolically, close quote, then religion is deeply entwined in who we are as beings that possess a natural tending toward transcendence, toward the transcendent.
toward God.
For the peoples of the African continent, whether Ashanti, Bacongo, Bini, Dahomian, Fonte, Fulani, Igbo, Mende, Wolof, Yoruba, and many others, African traditional or indigenous religions were distinctive and particular. Yet these religions coalesce as innate tending toward transcendence. Thus, among these people,
Religion permeated every domain of human life, and the universe radiated and mediated powers and forces of the sacred, the supreme deity, lesser divinities and spirits. These people set no formal limits or rigid distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the spiritual and material domains of human living. The whole person and the
whole of a person's daily living were suffused with religious significance. African traditional or indigenous religions neither proclaim nor exegete scriptures, neither require nor profess dogmas that demand assent and obedience. Rather, religion, this tending toward transcendence, is inscribed on the people's hearts and minds through oral histories, stories, poetry, song.
Shawn Copeland (07:22.358)
ritual, dance, drumming, ceremonial practices, and religiously endowed personages.
Thus the survivors of the Middle Passage did not meet the New World bereft of religion and tradition, history and culture, virtue and morality. Insofar as the enslaved peoples remembered, recollected, fused and improvised fragments of traditional practices and rituals, customs and mores, over time they developed root paradigms.
cognitive and moral ways of being, rites and rituals, ascetic sensibilities and cultural mores. They were synthesized to ground a collective and individual religious consciousness for the Middle Passage survivors that differed from their past traditions in Africa.
These root paradigms form the first stratum of a worldview that encounters the Bible and critically re-envisions Christian preaching and practice in the traumatizing experience of chattel slavery. From an early point in colonial history, enslaved people showed interest in Christianity. Because it was forbidden to enslave Christians,
Slaveholders initially were reluctant to baptize the enslaved Africans. But some slaveholders proposed that baptism could shape the enslaved people to docility, to an acceptance of their fate as divinely ordained. Womanist ethicist Katie Cannon argues that three notions undergird the way that slaveholding apologists approached scripture. First,
Shawn Copeland (09:22.819)
the charge that the enslaved Africans were not human. Second, the claim that God had foredained black people to a life of subjugation and servitude to white people. And third, the assumption that because the Bible does not expressly prohibit the buying and selling of human flesh, slavery was not a breach of divine law. To this end, the Bible was used to legitimate
and to sacralize perpetual bondage. Through travelers' letters and reports of journalists, historians have documented the ambiguity of slaveholders toward the religious lives of their so-called human property. But in order to gain a firsthand understanding of the religious lives of enslaved women and men, we turn to slave narratives.
You can find some of the key resources I draw from here in the group discussion guide for this talk.
Slaveholders attempted to control the enslaved people's every gesture of independence, and many even monitored the people's efforts at prayer and worship. On some plantations, the enslaved people attended white churches, sitting or standing in designated areas. On others, they were punished severely for praying and singing. On some plantations, a white minister was assigned to preach to the enslaved people, while on others,
they were permitted to hold unsupervised praise meetings that were led by an enslaved preacher. In other situations, the people withdrew to woods, gullies, and thickets called brush arbors or hush arbors to pray and sing. Alice Sewell told her interviewer that many people in her area, quote, used to slip off in the woods on Sunday evening, way down in the swamps to sing and to pray to our own liking.
Shawn Copeland (11:25.935)
In such tentative yet electric privacy, the enslaved peoples reconfigured African customs and spiritual practices of shouting, moaning, and dance. They experienced spirit possession and not infrequently prepared for escape and strategized rebellion. Not surprisingly, the enslaved people turned a suspicious eye
on Christianity as practiced by slaveholders and their collaborators. One formerly enslaved man gave this account to an interviewer, quote, I often heard select portions of the scriptures read. On Sunday, we always had one sermon prepared expressly for the colored people. So great was the similarity of texts that they are always fresh in memory.
Servants, be obedient to your masters, not with eye service as men pleasers. He that knoweth his master's will and doeth it not shall be beaten with many stripes." And verses of this type. One very kind-hearted clergyman was very popular with the Coler people. But after he preached a sermon from the Bible that it had been the will of heaven from all eternity that we should be slaves,
and our masters be our owners, many of us left, considering like the doubting disciple of old, this is a hard saying. Who can hear it?" Close quote.
Enslaved people were prohibited de jure and de facto from learning to read and or to write. Those people who dared and were discovered reading or writing were whipped and sometimes mutilated by having a finger cut off. But the people persisted, often with the help of an enslaved person who surreptitiously had learned to read or with the assistance of a free black person or a white person willing to defy legislation.
Shawn Copeland (13:33.912)
and custom. With or without such help, the people took confidence in their own ingenuity and mnemonic skill. They listened intently during public readings of the Bible and sermons. Some among them memorized chapters or portions of the Bible. These spoken fragments and passages became material for their meditation, reflection, sermonizing, and song.
In this way, the enslaved people developed a tradition of African-American interpretation of the Bible. Hebrew Bible scholar Renita Weems argues that, since slave communities were illiterate, they were therefore without allegiance to any official text, translation or interpretation. Hence, once they heard biblical passages read and interpreted to them, they in turn were free to remember and repeat
in accordance with their own interests and taste. For those raised within oral culture, retelling the Bible became one hermeneutical strategy, and resistance to the Bible or portions of it would become another." The enslaved people created what womanist theologian Dolores Williams calls an oral text, a life-affirming work.
Indeed, womanist sociologist Cheryl Townsend-Jilks declares this to be the creation of an African-American biblical tradition. The composition of this oral text was a communal process. From among biblical texts preached in sermons or passages read aloud at white family prayers, members of the enslaved community apprehended, evaluated, judged, and selected life-affirming texts.
These passages or stories or sayings were memorized, repeated, reshaped, and purged of racist inferences. The resulting oral text was judged to be the true word of God. Truly, African-American Christian faith came about in a powerful way by hearing and a critical listening with the ear, the mind, and the heart.
Shawn Copeland (16:02.361)
For many African Americans, the Bible is an intimate and familiar place of healing and wisdom where courage and hope, past and future, meet present need and joy. Indeed, the legacy of a generative, life-affirming African American biblical tradition reverberates in the Negro or African American spirituals, in the 19th century speeches of Mariah Stewart and pamphlets of David Walker.
in the 20th century, Jeremiah's of Martin Luther King Jr. and the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar. Yet poignantly, the Bible, as Renita Weems writes, quote, has been the most consistent and effective book that those in power have used to restrict and censure the behavior of African-American women. quote. Still,
Dolores Williams concludes, quote, the Bible cannot be scrapped because it has been and continues to be fundamental in the life, faith, and hope of many women and men. There is a liberating word in the Bible, even if women have to turn over many layers to get to this liberating.
