Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles Antonio T. Bly Richard J. Boles, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North (New York: New York University Press, 2020) "It is appalling," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously noted, "that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning."1 Long before the civil rights movement, the apostle of non-violence declared that Americans venerated a God who had seemed "a respecter of persons." Indeed, throughout America's long history, the cursed children of Ham had been compelled to acknowledge the God of Abraham in segregated spaces. Racism defined, in both implicit and explicit ways, the marrow of America's religious traditions. In Dividing the Faith, Richard J. Boles revisits the early history of churches in the North, challenges this conventional wisdom, and uncovers a forgotten world in which Dr. King's aphorism might not have always held true. An insightful analysis of extant church records, meeting minutes, and unpublished manuscripts of over four hundred congregations, the portrait Boles reveals is an appealing one. Building on the work of John Wood Sweet, Joanne Pope Melish, Gary B. Nash, Margaret Ellen Newell, and others, Boles argues [End Page 99] that early churches in British America were more integrated than segregated. Between 1730 and 1776, integrated churches were more or less a common part of life in the North. From the early to mid-eighteenth century, segregated congregations were incongruous to the practice of the Christian faith. Instead, "most Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the northern British colonies were interracial congregations as blacks and Indians participated through weekly church services and the rituals of baptism and communion" (5). Between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, the number of these churches increased significantly. Among the famed devotees who considered themselves members of these multi-racial and multi-ethnic houses of worship were Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones. One hundred years before the Tremont Temple Baptist Church of Boston had been recognized as the first integrated church, the Gospels had been preached in numerous churches to mixed-race congregations. These diverse places of worship peaked around the advent of the new century (4, 222). Then, between 1821 and 1850, the number of integrated churches fell as African Americans, Afro-Indians, and Native Americans began to establish their own churches. In retelling the history of these mixed communities of faith and how they varied over time, space, and denominations in the North before 1860, Dividing the Faith seeks to challenge our understanding of race, history, and religion in early America. A comparative analysis of African American and Native American peoples' participation in white churches, Boles's study encourages us to reconsider the conflicting politics of history and memory; specifically, how the social and cultural views of subsequent generations of Americans have distorted the assorted nature of the past (92–131, 106–107, 70–73, 158–159, 162–234). However, missing in this study of the rise of segregated churches in the North is a much more nuanced account of the politics of race in America and the role it undoubtedly played in dividing the faith. Before the Revolution, African Americans and Native Americans were indeed members, but they were not members in full. They could not, as Boles makes plain, vote or lead the congregation, rendering questionable the extent to which they actually participated as members of these supposedly integrated flocks (6, 164, 182). Even when their numbers grew as a result of the Awakening and the Revolution, whites continued to hold fast to their position as the theological heads of the congregations. Why? Clearly, Boles overreaches; he downplays the nature of race in the northern colonies, conflating, inadvertently, obligatory attendance and participation. Little is made of the fact that baptism signified, at once, education and the possibility of a better life for most, if not all, African Americans and Native Americans. Even less attention is given to early African American and Native American expressions [End Page 100] of religiosity (66–67, 194–195). Phillis Wheatley embodies best...