The Black American Church: A Reactionary and Ideological Apparatus of Slavery

Abstract

This work argues that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, amongst a few others, were the reactionary (dialectical) exceptions to the black church, not the norm, an (ideological) institution established to interpellate and indoctrinate blacks to accept their conditions in slavery and integrate them into the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In other words, the aforementioned were the enslaved who used Christian dogma to (negative dialectically) respond to the barbarity of slavery by violently convicting white Christian society for not living up to its values, ideas, and ideals given the treatment of African people by so-called Christians. In the latter sense it was reactionary; in the former, it was an ideological apparatus of domination and control for the institution of slavery and black integration into the bourgeois living of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The contemporary attempt to racially vindicate the black church as a sui generis revolutionary institution overflowing with Africanisms that stood against the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism is ahistorical and ideological reaped in pseudoscientific propositions stemming from postmodern and post-structural theories.