ABSTRACT
Liberia is a small West African state with a lengthy evangelical Christian tradition. 1 The Protestant religion arrived with the first American slaves who were repatriated to Liberia in 1822 as part of a scheme of the American Colonization Society. Over the next forty years twelve thousand colonists settled there, until the American Civil War effectively stopped colonization. Also settled were fifty-seven hundred Africans who had been freed from their transport ships before they could be delivered into slavery. Today the descendants of ex-slaves, Americo-Liberians, form a small but dominant group in a nation of 2.5 million; the majority of the population (the Afro-Liberians) belong to sixteen principal tribes that never left Africa. In 1870 the Americo-Liberians created a political party, the True Whig Party, that ruled the country for over one hundred years. Liberia was a one-party, Christian state. When the party was dissolved in 1980, the president of the country was the chairman of the Liberian Baptist convention, the vice president was bishop of the United Methodist Church, and the chairman of the True Whig Party was the moderator of the Presbyterian Church.
