The Limited Empowerment of Women in Black Spiritual Churches: An Alternative Vehicle to Religious Leadership

Abstract

In their efforts to compensate for the barriers emanating from the racist and class structure of American society, black men tended to monopolize positions of religious leadership in most African American religious groups. Some black women turned to Spiritualism as an alternative vehicle to religious leadership. Indeed, women played an important role in the establishment of the earliest black Spiritual churches. As the Spiritual movement became institutionalized, the battle of the sexes ensued, and men came to appropriate the highest positions of leadership in certain Spiritual groups. Nevertheless, even in these groups, women tend to occupy more significant positions than they do in Black mainstream churches and even many Black HolinessPentecostal sects. Whereas the Spiritual movement empowers women at a personal level, it has not empowered women at a structural level Women often have compensated for their relative powerlessness cross-culturally by participating and even sometimes rising to positions of leadership in sectarian or cultic movements. As religion became a differentiated and institutional sphere of social life, many women's roles and expressions were excluded or were kept alive in nonofficial forms, such as possession and healing cults. In the case of tribal societies, Lewis (1971:31) maintains that women's possession cults constitute thinly disguised protest movements directed against the dominant sex which provide women with oblique strategies for expressing their hostility and obtaining material or social privileges. Although women generally have not established separate religious organizations in