There would seem to be many who think that the only “authentic” black worship is of the Pentecostal variety. The DNA of African Americans, so the theory goes, requires “emotionally expressive” music, preaching and congregational interaction. Thomas Sowell, scholar at Stanford University, Hoover Institute, offers another perspective. He connects inner-city African-American culture, including black dialect and music, the ghetto culture of violence, promiscuity, and indolence, as well as the oratorical style and the emotionalism of African-American church culture, with the northern Britains who populated the Southern states in the eighteenth century. They brought their social pathologies with them from the lawless, violent, barely civilized border regions of late 17th to early 18th century northern Britain including Scotland, and northern Ireland, and perpetuated them in what became white “redneck” culture. Poor “crackers,” as rural southern whites are sometimes called, provided the cultural context within which slave and post-emancipation African-American culture developed. It was “cracker” social and religious behaviors which southern blacks often mimicked. Sowell maintains that,

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.

Professor Willie Ruff of the Yale School of Music has demonstrated that even the origins of black music, spirituals, blues, gospel, and so on, are to be found in the psalm-singing, even Gaelic psalm-singing, of the Scottish and Scots-Irish slave owners.

The “cultural values” and “social patterns” of which Sowell writes were absorbed by southern blacks. At the same time they were not characteristic of northern blacks or of blacks from the Caribbean Islands. These characteristics, Sowell insists, cannot in any sense be considered genetically or racially inherent. Sowell laments the association of this negative, largely borrowed, white southern culture with what many consider to be authentic black culture:

What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behavior are projected today as aspects of a distinctive “black identity” when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.5

Gunnar Murdal, in his landmark book, An American Dilemma, recognized the influence of Southern white religious culture upon the culture of American blacks noting that religious “emotionalism was borrowed from and sanctioned by religious behavior among whites.”6 For Sowell, the prevailing black religious culture is part of the redneck culture “whose track record has been largely negative for both black and whites.”

There are voices from the past who would concur in this criticism of black religious culture. Thabiti M. Anyabwile, in his The Faithful Preacher, chronicles the concerns of nineteenth and early twentieth century black preachers who were eager for the development of a disciplined religious life among African-Americans.8 Daniel A. Payne (1811–1893), a founder and President of Wilberforce College and a Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, championed order over emotion in the Black church. At the General Conference of 1852 he cautioned against emotionalistic preaching consisting of “whooping, stamping and beating the Bible and the desk.”9 He recognized the need to correct “the religious errors of the freedman and to bridle their wild enthusiasm.”10 He even sought more “civilized” and rational music for the church and disparaged what he called “cornfield ditties.” He characterized the hand clapping, foot stomping, and dancing in black religious gatherings as “ridiculous and heathenish,” even “disgraceful to themselves, the race, and the Christian name.”

Similarly Francis J. Grimké (1850–1937), son of a slave mother and her master, educated at Princeton Seminary under Charles Hodge, trustee of Howard University and a founder of the NAACP, denounced the emotionalism of the African-American pulpit, which, in Anyabwile’s words, “yielded little or no biblical instruction for the people, required no serious study from the preacher, lowered the spiritual state of the congregation, and defiled the very idea of biblical religion.” The “House of God in many cases,” Grimké complained, had become “a mere playhouse for the entertainment and amusement of the people.”13 Grimké was particularly critical of “Afro-American pulpit,” whose “aim seems to be to get up an excitement, to arouse the feelings, to create an audible outburst or emotion, or, in the popular phraseology, to get up and shout to make people ‘happy.’”

Noting that “people do not shout and get happy over the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount,” he denounced the “utter hollowness of the whole thing” and characterized the emotionalism as an “evil” that “is to be greatly deplored.”15 Emphasizing the importance of the “line upon line and precept upon precept” teaching of God’s word for Christian growth and health, he insists, “We cannot get up there on the wings of emotion; we cannot shout ourselves up to a high Christian manhood and womanhood any more than we can shout ourselves into heaven.”

What was true when Grimké first spoke these words (1892) remains true today. There developed, in fact, two traditions of African-American worship, the emotive Southern tradition and the more restrained northern and Methodist tradition.17 When the great migrations of Southern blacks in the early twentieth century brought new comers north they “broke the decorum,” says James M. Gregory, with their loud “Amens” and “Hallelujahs.” “Initially, congregations resisted these southernisms,” he says.18 Over time, however, emotionalism came to be all but universal in the African American church. (to be continued)