ABSTRACT
I n a classic essay on black religion W.E.B DuBois, probably the greatest African-American scholar of the twentieth century, wrote: “Three things characterized this religion of the slave—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.” Although this brief but suggestive description captures the dynamic of the Africans’ earliest appropriation of evangelical Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic, contemporary studies reveal a more complex and comprehensive pattern of religious development. From a perspective that includes not only what DuBois called “an adaptation and mingling of hea-then rites … roughly designated as Voodooism,” but also the later institution-alization of early slave worship in black churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three dominant themes or motifs stand out as foundational from the first arrival of African indentured servants at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to the present. They are survival, elevation, and liberation.
