Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion

ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 1, Number 2 (Spring 1998)

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. By Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood. University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 285pp. $16.95.

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 is written in the celebratory tradition of African-American religious history and its authors, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, have crafted a narrative which foregrounds the agency and resilience of people of African descent in their encounters with Europeans and with Christianity. In the Old World of West and West Central Africa, Africans skillfully incorporated, and sometimes wholly adopted, Christianity to gain political advantage over their trading partners from the North. In the New World, people of African descent often held fast to their "traditional" religious beliefs and practices. When they did adopt Christianity, New World Africans did so on their own terms, "Africanizing" rituals, reinterpreting scriptures, and building autonomous institutions.

Come Shouting to Zion engages an ambitious time frame, beginning in fifteenth-century pre-colonial West and West Central Africa and an investigation into the inroads Christianity and Islam made into the lives of the regions' peoples, and concluding in the 1830s with an analysis of the religious lives of people of African descent in the American South and the British Caribbean. This grand scale of inquiry leads to both strengths and weaknesses in the text. Frey and Wood's willingness to explore anew the nature of early African religious life, allows them to offer important insights. For example, a significant number of West and West Central Africans, they explain, were familiar with Catholicism through their trade relations with the Portuguese. Thus, some Africans came to the New World with a complex religious cosmology which included "traditional" beliefs and practices as well as a familiarity with Christianity and Islam. Despite the potency of this insight, Frey and Wood fail to carry its implications across time into their discussion of "African survivals" in the New World religious experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, for example, questions about how Old World contacts with Christianity facilitated African encounters with Protestantism in British North America or influenced the syncretic character of Afro-Christianity are left unaddressed.

Frey and Wood also adopt a grand "spatial perspective," which incorporates the religious lives of Africans in both the American South and the British Caribbean (with an emphasis on Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua) and seem to lay the groundwork for a rich comparative analysis. There already exists an extensive body of literature which emphasizes the differences between slavery in British North America and that of the Caribbean and the extension of such an analysis into the realm of religion would have been welcome. Frey and Wood, however, have a very different view and it is continuity, rather than contrast, they find. They ground their argument in what they describe as these regions' common institutions and missionary conversion techniques, migration patterns, and nineteenth-century American missionary endeavors in the Caribbean. The text does not, unfortunately, develop this provocative re-interpretation. Too often the discussion of the American South dominates, with only brief mentions of the Caribbean experience. Without a fully developed analysis of the Caribbean, it is not possible for Frey and Wood to overcome the weight of the evidence for the discontinuities between slave life in the U.S. and that of the Caribbean, a discontinuity that the reader is left suspecting had consequences for religious life.

But for a passing mention of Richard Allen, co-founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, nowhere in the book's discussion of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth America are northern black Protestants considered. This omission raises an additional concern about Frey and Wood's geographical framework. Limited to a consideration of the American South, we learn that waves of that region's black congregants rejected the indignities associated with bi-racial church life and set out to establish black-controlled places of worship. Throughout this discussion, but particularly in the section pertaining to upper-South cities such as Baltimore, the relationship between these events and those similar occurrences in northern cities, including Allen's home of Philadelphia, seems significant. Yet, constrained by the text's geographical parameters, Frey and Wood leave the impression that these events are unrelated. The knowledgeable reader cannot help but think that this regional constraint is not wholly appropriate to an understanding of the rise of separate black Protestantism in the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries.

Frey and Wood are clearly mindful of the turbulent historiographic terrain onto which they have tread when they explain that one of their underlying premises is that "religious change was everywhere the product of a reciprocal process rather than conversion by confrontation." Here they explicitly challenge scholars of American religion, such as Jon Butler, who have argued that the Middle Passage shattered West and West Central African religious practices. Building on the works of Mechal Sobel and Sterling Stuckey, among others, Frey and Wood, successfully buttress their view with rich evidence. New World Africans became drawn to Christianity in its evangelical and experiential form because its rituals resonated with longer-standing African religious practices. In this encounter, Africans also altered Christian rituals, bringing new forms of expression to revivals and camp meetings. A strong case is made that these are the roots of the Afro-Christian traditions and institutions that emerged throughout the nineteenth century. Less well developed is the question about how people of African descent influenced or shaped the religious rituals of white southerners. We see that white missionaries adapted their techniques to meet the preferences of their black intended converts, but what of bi-racial, planter-dominated congregations, or later all-white congregations. Were they in any respect Africanized, and if so how? It seems that reciprocity may have had notable limits in the relationships between black and white Christians, but Frey and Wood leave unexplored what they were.

Another of Frey and Wood's important premises is that women of African descent played critical roles in the development of religious rituals, institutions and traditions in their communities. The narrative reminds us that, as they had in Africa, black women in the New World were important collaborators in the shaping of religious life. And while such a claim should be axiomatic, it still requires the marshalling of evidence for those who would attempt to explain the history of black religious life without attention to women, and in this Frey and Wood have made an important contribution to the historiography of African-American religion. The reader who has already accepted the "critical role" of women may be left wishing that the authors had taken their analysis beyond black women's contributions into the realm of gender analysis, however. Frey and Wood do not address the particularity of what meant to be a woman (or a man, for that matter) under chattel slavery. Thus, they pass-up an opportunity to explore the ways in which gendered identities were negotiated within religious communities. For example, numerous instances in which black women asserted, and sometimes successfully claimed, leadership roles within religious life are described. Yet we do not learn why some women prevailed, while others did not. Nor do we gain insight into how the acceptance and/or the repression of women leaders reflected and shaped community members' broader notions about manhood and womanhood.

Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood have boldly engaged the African-American and Afro-Caribbean religious past and, in doing so, challenge scholars to rethink many of the premises upon which earlier histories have been based. They are most successful in making the case that future histories in this field must grapple with the role of women in (and the gendered nature of) black religious life in the New World. Similarly, they suggests that there are yet new turns to be taken in the African survivals discussion. Even when they are less persuasive, Frey and Wood importantly ask us to reconsider long-standing analytical frameworks when they suggest that, for example, discussions rooted in the particularity of the British North American experience may overlook important connections to the lives of Africans in the British Caribbean. Even their somewhat flawed discussion of the emergence of separate black Protestantism reminds scholars of the "northern-centric" perspective that that has brought to this issue to-date. Its willingness to challenge some seemingly well-established premises of African-American religious history makes Come Shouting to Zion is a worthwhile read for those interested in pressing the field forward in new directions.

Martha S. Jones, Columbia University