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chapter 6 Transformed Religion and a Proliferation of Churches A Negro people coming from the country to cities find more diversions and more things bidding for their time and patronage. . . . City churches must offer the people and carry through a religious program that will be passionately human, but no less divine. It must be a program dealing with the life and everyday problems of the people. —Rev. Lacey Kirk Williams, 1929 Granted that political and economic forces and influences greatly affected the whirl of life in the Black Metropolis, they did not preclude the dynamic power of religion from exerting its sway. African American religious belief and practices were indeed unfettered in their scope. The case was so much so that E. Franklin Frazier in his analysis of religious practices could have added that they manifested themselves among Christians in the increase in independent, Spiritualist religious bodies housed in storefronts along major thoroughfares, along with the breakaway community churches that were founded in 1920 as part of the nationwide Community Church Movement. Further evidence of religious zeal appeared within the Abrahamic tradition, expanding from the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam to adherents of the Moorish American Science Temple that was founded in Chicago in 1925 by Prophet Drew Ali. From Judaism, the black Hebrew, or Jewish, movement arose. This liberating fervor in religion that at times seemed to hold reign over all other matters also crossed the gender divide. A synergy in religious belief strengthened during the decade, related also to new economic opportunities, to the transformation in the status of women who now possessed the ballot and were separated from traditional domestic roles, and to the wave of restlessness that enveloped the nation. The migrants from the war years and those still arriving daily in Chicago brought more than muscle for labor and capital for commercial investment; they introduced into a black society in flux their particular spiritual needs and accordingly sought out groups and institutions to meet them. The black institutions that nurtured them attempted as best they could to serve dually the spiritual and social service needs of this variegated Chicago African American community, which had reached over 200,000 persons by 1930. In the midst of all these forces fomenting change, the determining influence of this period emerged from the folk religious beliefs readily discernible since the beginning of the century, and now blossoming because of the demand of the tens of thousands for spiritual relief of one kind or another. Any other than a spiritually based solution paled in comparison. These included the political sway of the black South Side organization under the control of Wright and DePriest that proved effective only in the sense that it helped arouse popular awareness of material possibilities. Interestingly enough, the reverse situation existed as a counterbalance, with neither a leadership nor domination from religious ranks in the political sphere.1 The economic world likewise affected this world to a lesser extent, with folk belief allowing believers to transcend economic deficiencies and seek relief in alternative experiences in this world or the next. The older churches among the Baptists and African Methodists (AMEs) struggled to retain their prominence as “first churches” as the full effect of the new migration was being felt. While a Baptist church such as Olivet counted over 10,000 members, the AME bodies overall experienced decline as the newcomers sought newer religious outlets.2 A portion of the emerging segmentation by class and culture was evident likewise in this turnover. “The mass of the working class Negroes are to be found in the orthodox churches, principally Baptist and Methodist,” reported the usually authoritative Frazier, “where they enjoy a service which is free for the most part from the primitive forms of worship.”3 But how accurate was he? Contemporary documentation indicated that this decade witnessed a chasm in religious practice and preference that further presented a challenge to the melding process that brought all African Americans into a cohesive racial cohort but with vastly different religious preferences. As to the mythical Old Settler–migrant divide, the variegated migrant experience pushed that inaccurate depiction of intragroup tension further backward into a disposable past. Yet divisiveness about and over religion was corrosive to the social fabric and required more of a solution than found in adequate seating in church. Persons desirous of spiritual nurturing demanded a familiarity in greeting and intimate fellowship, energetic and interactive preaching, fervency in music, and a sublimation of ritual to informality and warmth...

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