Hollywood has filled the big screen with images of African American slaves joyfully lifting up their voices in praise of Jesus as they labor on southern plantations. Like with many creations of the entertainment industry, the viewer rarely stops to ask the five questions taught in elementary school language arts classes: who, what, why, when, and where. Viewers numbly accept that slaves spoke English, albeit poorly, because that is the delineation planted in our mind’s eye by film directors and producers. Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood answer the questions: who witnessed to the enslaved black community; when was Christianity introduced to Africans; why did the white man Christians endeavor to convert the black population; when and where did conversion efforts begin.
Both Frey and Wood are academic historians. Come Shouting to Zion is an historical account of the conversion of Africans practicing traditional religions in their homeland to African American Christians worshiping in both segregated and biracial congregations. Frey and Wood also dispel the illusion that slavery was limited to the southern United States and moreover provide the reader with a chronology and mental images of slavery in the American South and British Caribbean before the American Civil War. Frey and Wood thoroughly examine the process of religious evolution from Africa, through colonization, through the American Revolutionary War, to within three decades of the American Civil War.
Frey and Wood describe both Islamic, catholic and protestant missionary ventures in Africa in great detail. Without judging, they note the direct involvement between the slave trade and Christian missionaries (p.27). Come Shouting to Zion calls out the bastardization of faith that these missionaries accepted in their quest for converts. Both African Christians and African Muslims incorporated into their new world religions traditions and rituals of their indigenous religions. New practices also introduced traditional African religious artifacts to world religion traditions and rituals.
These missionaries taking Christian theology to native peoples were confronted with religious, social, and cultural traditions that were so paradigmatically juxtaposed to their own traditions that they were unable to recognize some aspects. The role of religious women figures is one distinct difference between western and Islamic culture and the traditional African religions. Christian missionaries were particularly disconcerted by the practice of polygyny and confused it with polygamy (p.49). This was one practice the Protestants struggled to abate in the colonies.
In addition to Christian evolution, Frey and Wood devote much discussion to women’s roles in the family, in religion, in the Christian church, and sexually. It seems that women’s issues and racial issues are inextricably linked in history. Come Shouting to Zion does not examine the relationship between these two forces, but, does present facts regarding gender in African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean.
While presenting an excellent history of African American Christian evolution, Come Shouting to Zion fails to present all that is promised in its opening sentence. Frey and Wood assert that Christianity in African American history “created a community of faith and provided a body of values and a religious commitment that became in time a principal solvent of ethnic differences and the primary source of cultural identity.” This statement sets lofty expectations from the reader that these assumptions will be proven. Come Shouting to Zion fails to delivery on this assumption (p.1).
Come Shouting to Zion serves as reminder that slavery and the christianization of Africans in the American South and British Caribbean led to the loss of indigenous language and traditional religion among the enslaved. This historical account dispels many myths and solves the mystery of Protestantism among slaves prior to the American Civil War. ( )