Trabelin' on: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith

by Mechal Sobel

Mechal Sobel's fascinating study of the religious history of slaves and free blacks in antebellum America is presented here in a compact volume without the appendixes. Sobel's central thesis is that Africans brought their world views into North America where, eventually, under the tremendous pressures and hardships of chattel slavery, they created a coherent faith that preserved and revitalized crucial African understandings and usages regarding spirit and soul-travels, while melding them with Christian understandings of Jesus and individual salvation.

Genres: History, Religion, Race

454 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 1979

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

written about the same time as Raboteau’s more well-received Slave Religion, Sobel makes numerous contributions and arguments parallel to Raboteau’s. for instance, institutional black churches were very much up and running before the civil war. she expands our view of antebellum black Baptist life in a number of ways and makes a series of arguments about the continuity of (with significant changes) African spirituality in “Afro-Baptist” Christianity. In that way, she rounds out Raboteau’s claim that the African gods “died” in North America. West African views and practices regarding spirits remained relevant all the way through the antebellum period, and the classic evangelical conversion experience, here viewed through historical testimony of Baptist conversions, provided fertile ground for the continuation of African belief in and interaction with spirits (mostly through Jesus and the Holy Ghost) through black Baptist Christianity. She is convincing in that regard.

Her framework of “world views,” however, is far too clean-cut. Her assessment of African world views, their disruption and “incoherence” or “dichotomous” state when they were starting to be combined with white and white Christian “world views” is frustratingly stiff, even if she acknowledges that the process of changing world views happened at different times and different places for different folks. Her conclusion, then, that the Afro-Baptist faith provided a “coherent” world view for black Baptists stands on awkward and shaky warrants and risks painting too neat of a picture. Throughout, she has a tendency to compress and condense nuance into clean “world views,” such that, when she encounters tension in her sources, she has to conclude that the people whose stories are contained in those sources were generally living without direction or coherence. That’s a different thing to claim, or for her argument (to put it more accurately) to imply as a consequence, than to acknowledge the contradictory demands on one’s identity and ethical formation of African heritage and antebellum southern white Christianity.

Moreover, she makes several generalizations about the history of revivalistic Christianity and Christianity in the United States that are equally frustrating, and occasionally just untrue. Primarily in mind is her discussion of evangelical religion, actually stating that speaking in tongues was happening in the antebellum period and in the preceding centuries. There is general historical agreement that speaking in tongues, in today’s form, have little precedent in the early modern and modern periods before the turn of the 20th century. Any exceptions are vague such that we can’t state the reverse with any confidence. Moreover, she overstates popular belief in witchcraft and spirits in the antebellum period among white Christians. Or at least she doesn’t closely date her characterizations of popular white Christian belief in spirits and witchcraft such that it feels like she is extending them too far for the sake of her arguments.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four starts because the thesis is elegant and satisfying and I really want it to be true. Not-five-stars because I'm not sure it is.