Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow

CHAPTER 5. "Peace and Harmony of the Church": The Secularization of Black Savannah

CHAPTER 5 “PEACE AND HARMONY OF THE CHURCH” The Secularization of Black Savannah It has long been an article of faith among scholars that from antebellum times through the modern civil rights movement, black churches have been the principal social, economic, and political institutions created and sustained by black Americans. Much has been written about black churches, without question the most diverse of all black institutions from the period of Reconstruction to World War I.1 While it cannot be disputed that black churches have been important centers of organizing social and ritual life since the days of slavery, the continual process of diversification of black institutional life since emancipation gradually undermined their predominance. Relationships between the churches and their communities and the interactions of church members adjusted to the evolving social geography of the city. In the early 1920s the churches still dominated black institutional and associational life. They accommodated a variety of activities ranging from worship to welfare and included education, church politics, concerts, and games. Mainline black Baptist churches monitored their members’ religious and social behavior and those who were suspected of transgressing church morals and manners were 150 brought before sacred tribunals for trial and sentencing. By the early 1930s the churches became more tolerant of nonconformist behavior and even church doctrine, and they sought less influence over their members’ private lives. The internal workings of the churches corresponded to larger social transformations . As black Savannahians joined the Great Migration to the North, mainline church congregations decreased in numbers. The Depression-era weakening of black business—the material basis of Black Christian Nationalism —accompanied the rise of secular social and political organizations. The emergence of a new black middle class, more educated than previous generations of black leadership, was less insular and focused on self-help and community uplift as it readied itself for the postwar civil rights movement, when, like black Americans everywhere, it would demand equal treatment before the law. The churches were vibrant institutions, abundantly endowed with secular and sacred ritual. Membership in a black Baptist community of faith was much more than an escape into a sanctuary from the harshness of racism, economic hardship, and threats of violence. While the churches did provide protection from the brutality of the outside world, they were also dynamic communities in which each person had a defined role that was performed through church conflict and harmony with purpose and clarity. Membership in a faith community involved real concessions to the corporate community. Upon joining the church, members pledged not only to contribute to its economic viability, they also undertook to adhere to prescribed standards of behavior that on the face of it seemed rooted in nineteenth-century Victorian conventions of morality. But churches were not merely following rote behavior ; they were responding to contemporary social developments over which they had little control. Their rituals ran a gamut from fanciful diversions to reflexive cultural performances in which participants and observers became subject and object, and the rites themselves became part of the social context. Baptist churches operated with complex governing bodies that included a separation of powers, judicial structures, and elections. In the Baptist denomination , unlike “high church” Episcopal and Catholic denominations, the minister acted not as an intermediary or conduit between congregants and God, but as an example and a guide. Baptists believed that each saint communicated directly with the Almighty. When black evangelical Christians set about to pray, they did so more with the idea of having a “conversation with God,” rather than through supplication and entreaty. Ecclesiastical authority resided with members of the faith community and not the lay or ordained leadership. Through the congregation, God, the eternal head of the church, bestowed all of his authority on the pastor. The Baptist denom- “Peace and Harmony of the Church” 151 ination, the most “democratic” of all the mainline religious orders, did not have bishops or cardinals, nor did it operate synods, presbyteries, or any larger body with greater governing authority. A Baptist minister was not dispatched to a church by a central office but was “called” to the pulpit by the individual congregation, which exercised sovereignty on such matters. Like white Baptists , black Baptists linked their churches into larger associations and conventions . These denominational organizations—Georgia’s General Missionary Baptist Association, the Berean Baptist Convention in Savannah, and even the National Baptist Convention, Inc.—did not...