The African American Religious Experience

The African American Religious Experience – talk given by Harry Singleton, Minister and Theologian, Professor for Religion at Benedict College, Columbia

When Harry Singleton, a minister and professor for religion, talked about the black religious experience, he mainly referred to the experience with Christianity. He said that the belief in God and the adaptation to Christianity was relative to survival and liberation.

But this religious experience was a very complex one. Although “white Christianity did not mean us to be humans, but was a means of social control of the slaves” – he says – the black experience had different understandings of God: the belief in God was important for liberation thoughts. But there were two strains of solution thought:

1. The priestly dimension, which meant that the solution to get out of slavery was divine.
2. The prophetic dimension, which was always in tension with the first one, says that “God calls us to engage with our lives”, that faith meant a commitment to change things. The prophetic dimension aimed to humanize black history.

Then he talked about the complex experience of Dr. Martin Luther King and the tension with his own Baptist congregation and the Black Baptist Convention.

In the discussion time we talked with Harry Singleton about the role of Churches in bonding experiences, the role of Islam (which he says implies a different experience, because it is seen as providing a more global and international connection than Christianity and as a “religion of protest that allows to fight for freedom”) and the roles of African based religious survivals (which he believes did not have any significant relevance in the struggle for freedom – but which might be arguable, since for example folk medicine and magical practices must have been important in the daily struggle, and there is evidence that many of these aspects survived to the present day).

Elisabeth Thiele