When Prophet Hosea Belcher, a devotee in the Black Coptic Church (BCC), joined the religious movement, he was in search of a religious world that would valorize his Black identity. “The white Jesus on church walls was not a Jesus I could identify with,” he explained. “White Jesus was a Jesus who was passed down from slave masters to kidnapped Africans. He was a Jesus who ignored blacks on the slave plantation after our identity was stolen and we were called niggers and negroes.” However, Prophet Hosea continued,
When I joined the [Black] Coptic Church I heard about a Black Jesus, and when I say, “Black Jesus,” He has to stand up; He understands the unique condition we were under here in North America. We are a people who come from ancient kings and queens. Slavery rocked our world. In the [Black] Coptic Church we are in the business of putting lives back together again. That was the mission of Prophet Cicero, to tell us who we are.
Religious studies scholar Sylvester Johnson has noted that “the globalization of West Africa’s gold trade was in and of itself a watershed event that, like an earthquake, quickly transformed the very ground beneath the feet of merchants in Africa and Asia’s European cape.” Earthquakes, both literal and metaphorical, shatter societies. Whereas the 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed over 300,000 people and brought the country to ruins, the transatlantic slave trade displaced over twelve million Africans and dispersed them across the globe, engendering fractured lives, loss of identity, and their reduction from persons to non-persons.
Rebuilding after both such tremors requires imagination and creative genius. Yet earthquakes do not merely cause physical damage and social chaos; they also stimulate a sense of displacement, exclusion, and isolation, as those impacted ponder the state of their being in relation to the broader society. In this sense, rebuilding in the aftermath of an earthquake requires an orientation toward otherwise, or the imagination and performance of a new world. My book, The Black Coptic Church, is about the religious imagination of Black Coptic believers, like Prophet Hosea, as they seek to build in the afterlife of an earthquake.
Historic realities of anti-Black violence, precipitated by colonialism, enslavement, de jure segregation, physical and social displacement, and hyper invisibility stemming from the presumption that Black bodies do not fit into the category of the human, have long defined Black folk’s engagement with civil society. The afterlife of Black enslavement, notes literary scholar Saidiya V. Hartman, is a life in which access to necessities such as healthcare and education, and opportunities for human flourishing, are skewed. Such experiences of North American Blacks have given rise to a sense of precarity in which Black life operates in a state of perpetual re-imagination and re-construction; that is, a constant quest to locate oneself. Black religions have been instrumental in this reconstruction effort.
Couched within the archives, both oral and written, of Black religions are stories of imagination and performance. Not performance as an actor on stage “in character,” but rather as it reflects the praxis of imagination that moves beyond time and allows for the possibility of transcendence; that is, the potential to experience joy in chaos. Within the diversity of Black religious life, stories of these varied imaginations reveal a shared history of Black folk contending with theological and religious questions such as the relationship of God to human suffering and the place of religion in their quest to locate meaning and personhood. Questions about sinister white religious ideas, such as the elevation of white religious iconography as the symbol of divinity, come alive in Black religious imaginaries.
Simply put, as Black religions contend with such theological questions, they aim to debunk narratives of anti-Blackness. Religion thus becomes a foundation for Black hope as well as the means through which questions about Blackness, Black history, and Black futures are addressed. While Black religious imaginations have tended to center on Protestantism, there are, within the undercurrents of Black religious life, a plethora of diasporic religious experiences. These spawned in the wake of the Great Migration to the urban North, as Black migrants turned to diverse religious worlds and practices in their journey to create and fashion an identity not beholden to Western ideals or conventional forms of Black Protestant religion. These new religious movements afforded Black folk a means by which they made broader claims about Black existence and Black life in North America. They are a critical feature in the study of Black religions, demonstrating the multilayered and diasporic religious sensibilities of Black folk. Indeed, these traditions exhibit various paths toward rebuilding after an earthquake.
In describing why she joined the Black Coptic Church and her relationship to her spiritual teacher Queen Rebekah (1923–2005), who was known as the mother of the BCC, Black Coptic devotee Brenda Drake noted:
I am glad, so glad, that I found the Coptic faith and my teacher Queen Rebekah. She brought peace, love, and understanding into my home and life. When my life was filled with misery and hopelessness, she brought sunshine. When I felt no one understood me, and there was no one to belong to, she gave me someplace to go, and showed me how to love, and then I started to receive love.
Likewise, Pamela Miller, a Black Coptic disciple, reported:
Life for me began anew on Wednesday afternoon, July 7, 1976, when Queen Rebekah laid hands on me and healed my body and my mind. She took me as a newborn babe and nursed me through the summer until classes began in the School of Wisdom in September. At this point in my life, she has helped me to elevate my mind to such an extent that each day is an adventure to look forward to. Queen Rebekah has taught me about my true self, but more importantly, she has taught me about my God who is I Am that I Am. She has taught me about his son Black Jesus, whose image I am created after. Because I have been taught to call upon I Am That I Am Black God, my trials and tribulations have only served to strengthen me. Queen Rebekah taught me to stand still, hold my peace and let God do the job for me. Through the Coptic teaching I have gained inner peace, immovable faith, personal strength, and a new awareness of myself as a Black woman.
These stories evoke personal earthquakes related to the search for meaning and belonging, but they also narrate a search for racial identity and pride. Miller, for instance, discovered a way to read and situate her Blackness alongside a belief system that emphasized a “Black Jesus,” which contributed to her “new awareness” as a Black woman. Miller was in search of an identity, one that permitted her to integrate her spiritual world with a performance of her racial identity. These are the sorts of possibilities that unfolded with the founding of the Black Coptic Church.
I argue elsewhere that Black religions that developed during the Great Migration in response to racism attracted followers seeking alternative religious models outside of mainline Christianity to provide them with the tools they needed to reconstruct their identities after an earthquake. The long history of Black North America has encompassed many such quakes, what sociologist Orlando Patterson describes as social death, resulting from the collision between the enslaver, who performs unchecked power, and the slave, who operates from an extreme position of powerlessness. According to Patterson, the condition of the slave, and the aftermath of enslavement, contributed to a loss of identity, a sense of alienation, and a psychological reality in which slaves’ and their progeny’s perception of their nature was drastically altered. Such social experiences, compounded by decades of recurring tremors, were intended to damage the souls of Black folks. Black religions have sought to provide refuge, hope, and an identity in the face of moral pandemonium.
Significance
The Black Coptic Church is about one group’s religious imagination spurred by living in the aftermath of moral and social earthquakes. It describes religious activities of resistance against social constructions that posited Black life as lacking value, meaning, and even being. Of the Black new religious movements that developed during and in the wake of the Great Migration, some, like Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement and the Moorish Science Temple, stood outside of Christianity, while other movements that took shape during this time remained at least somewhat within the Christian tradition. The Black Coptic Church is one of the latter. It combined elements of Black Protestant and Black Hebrew traditions with Ethiopianism, providing a divine racial identity and a royal Egyptian heritage for its African American followers—a heroic identity that was in stark contrast to the racial identity imposed by the white dominant culture.
I argue that a theologically hybrid approach, one that is primarily Christian but that also borrows from other groups, including Black Jews and Black spiritualists, fused with a reclamation of Egyptian and Ethiopian religious and cultural sources, assists the Black Coptic Church in fashioning a Black identity that, for believers, disrupts biases against Black people in North America. Black Coptics embrace the idea that Black people are the “chosen people,” and thereby embody a sense of divinity due to their relationship to God. Black Coptics enact religious performances connected to their belief that Black people are part of a royal lineage, and that believers are royalty in a “spiritual kingdom,” in which they accept titles such as Queen, Empress, Princess, Prince, and King. I ask, “what does it mean for Black Coptic followers to imagine and perform Blackness otherwise through a religious lens?” The Black Coptic Church provides a more detailed look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-mainstream Christian churches.
The Scene
Sprawling throughout Chicago is an assembly of Black Coptic churches. Prophet Louis Cicero Patterson (1895–1962) originated the BCC there in the early to middle twentieth century, following his movement north to Chicago after experiencing racial and religious tensions in Atlanta. These tensions were related to his spiritualist ministry of faith healing, which encompassed performance—such as laying on of hands to the sick—that was common among African Americans after enslavement. The BCC flourished among other Black new religious movements in the Southside community of Black Bronzeville. The community emerged within the context of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of Blacks from the South to the North from 1910 through the 1970s, as Blacks sought to escape racism and lack of economic upward mobility in the South, with the hopes of benefiting from a perceived less vicious racism in the North. BCC temples, as they are called within the religious group, are generally inner-city storefront institutions located in economically depressed communities. This has been the case since the Church’s beginning, as many of the early converts were migrants who arrived in the North as members of a lower economic class.
The BCC, given its emphasis on identity formation and appropriation of royal titles amongst its membership, offered a sense of social compensation for this generally lower economic class. The roughly thirty Coptic temples in existence today are outgrowths of the second and (for nearly twenty years beginning in 1967) sole BCC in Chicago, the True Temple of Solomon, led by Prophet Peter Banks (1929–1989), successor to the Church’s founder. An intimate cluster of several thousand devotees, composed of practicing and inactive members, the BCC is an insular religious community. Most members are Black women, with men accounting for less than twenty percent of the group. Rarely involved ecumenically with other religious organizations, the BCC is an inward-looking society of believers who can be seen on Sundays in Chicago’s South Side and West Side communities (where most Southern migrants had settled), wearing their unique religious regalia of long robes and headpieces called crowns. While the BCC has expanded beyond Chicago, Chicago has long been recognized as the hub of the group.
These churches are mostly headed by charismatic men known as “spiritual leaders” or pastors. These were mostly self-appointed to their position of leadership, typically in response to instability in their religious community due to the lack of a succession plan or blueprint following the death of Prophet Peter. Historically, the BCC has approached theological education with suspicion. For Prophet Jacob, a Black Coptic spiritual leader in his early fifties who became affiliated with the BCC as a teenager, following his mother’s conversion,
It is not so much that Prophet Cicero and Prophet Peter did not want us to have education. The reality is that the theology they were teaching in many of the seminaries was the same theology they used to oppress us. So, Prophet Cicero wanted to train us and teach us in the Black Coptic Church and not rely on white theology schools. So, we have never placed a huge emphasis on getting theology degrees. We believe God has given our prophets divine wisdom which they have in turn given to us.
Thus, many Black Coptic spiritual leaders lack formal education or theological training, but rather rely on “the spirit” and revelation for their instruction. As Priest Meshach asserts, “Like the prophets of old who received visions from God, God still speaks to us today.” These leaders wield extraordinary and unchecked authority within the group and may not be removed from office by their local congregation. They represent the vanguard of the BCC.
Priest Meshach helped me to frame the social context within which to understand the religious world of Black Coptic believers. Priest Meshach became affiliated with the BCC when his mother, who had been introduced to the Church by a friend, converted when he was nine years old. Like most converts to the BCC, Priest Meshach’s mother accepted the invitation from a friend who was “fishing” for new members, an evangelistic practice in the community whereby members invite potential converts by word of mouth, usually through stories about how Black Coptic teaching had transformed their life. Priest Meshach is now in his late fifties and a spiritual leader in the community. We sat in the backyard of his South Side home as he described at length the BCC’s recovery and performance of what he termed “divine Blackness.” Analogous to Prophet Hosea’s narrative, Priest Meshach maintained that
Blacks have a history, a lineage, and an identity that supersedes American slavery. We only became descendants of slaves when the old slave master kidnapped us from Africa, made us into niggers, and told us that we were nothing. Prophet Cicero came as a Prophet to teach us back to our identity, a divine identity. He came to heal us from the nigger mind, teach us about our God, and prophesy about our future.
Teaching us back to ourselves, explained Priest Meshach, means “to help Black people reject the idea that we are negroes and for us to reclaim our divine image, which is in the image of God.” Crucial within the story of chattel slavery is the invention of the “negro,” and the concomitant development and propagation of a negative racial stereotype about Black people, which some Blacks internalized as their identity. Priest Meshach captures the essence of the ontological problem that the BCC strives to overcome: the reduction of Black being and Black humanity from something to nothing. Priest Meshach painstakingly described a situation in which Black life and Black history were harmed by a tragic lie that deemed Black life expendable.
In the wake of Black earthquakes, questions about “being”—or the lack thereof—emerge as Black folk wrestle with the precariousness of their displaced situation. For some, the “negro” symbolizes a catastrophic and enduring loss of identity. Questions about belonging, one’s place in the world, life, death, and the meaning of existence, as well as ones that ponder God’s relationship to suffering, materialize as individuals and groups aim to “make sense” of the human condition—or lack thereof. The turn toward religion as a means with which to grapple with such questions is captured in conversion narratives of those who become members of religious movements.
In describing why individuals converted to the Nation of Islam, for example, religious studies scholar Edward Curtis notes the following:
Any of these stories were classic American religious conversion narratives whose form will be familiar to many readers, and they evidence how the styles of religious practice and patterns of conversion in the NOI echo those of other American religious groups. These testimonials often described how a convert faced a crisis or lingering problem before they found Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. Converting to Islam provided a way out and a solution to their problems. Some of these narratives, like those of born-again African American Christians, discussed conversion as a sudden and powerful moment in which the believer experienced God’s presence.
These stories, many linked to a personal crisis or earthquake, are specific conversion accounts of Black people who were in pursuit of a religious identity beyond mainline Christianity, which many associated with pie-in-the-sky, or escapist, theology. Converts were interested in a religious experience that would save them—as in personal and social soteriology—from a crisis, such as drug abuse or legal problems, or a general sense of social and racial isolation. Such stories are not exclusive to the NOI or the BCC but illuminate a common thread that connects Great Migration new religious movements: they attract adherents who have experienced detachment from the broader culture and a feeling of disenchantment from established forms of religion. In the case of those who converted to the BCC, for example, testimonies, which are usually provided by members during their Sunday service, offer an array of individual accounts of people in search of a new path that would reverse their loss of identity. Yet, while personal crises are part and parcel of explanations concerning why believers converted to the BCC, a dominant testimonial theme among Black Coptic members is that the Church inculcated a sense of pride in being Black. Priest Eli, for instance, a seventy-plus-year-old believer who converted in his thirties after visiting the BCC at the invitation of a friend, reports that:
When I visited True Temple of Solomon [Black Coptic Church] it was like a sea of Black royalty. I wasn’t a stranger to religion or the church per se, but this was different. There was no shame in being black in that place. Everyone in the temple walked with their head up. They spoke with authority. They were proud to be black and it showed. I had found my home.
Often, a believer’s experience of a personal earthquake is not detached from, but rather tied to, the BCC’s general theology and praxis, manifested in a search for identity. Queen Huldah, a seventy-six-year-old spiritual leader at Coptic Temple of Kemet (located in Lansing, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago), reports that her conversion happened in 1973 after she faced legal problems while living in New York. At the urging of a friend, she visited True Temple of Solomon BCC in Chicago in hopes that she might find spiritual assistance as she faced her legal woes, as well as an ethos that would speak to what she described as her “Black consciousness,” developed while in conversation with the Garvey movement in New York. Queen Huldah was not in search of a traditional form of religion. Rather, she was in search of a religious community that connected her to a sense of Black pride. She found in the BCC a “religious way of life that was unashamedly black, and black people who were unafraid to say I’m black and proud, and who rejected nigga and negro identities.” This was important to her “because traditional forms of black religion were too focused on dying and flying and not about connecting black people to our true identity.” It was the religious order’s focus on her social location as a Black woman who desired a “deeper connection and celebration of [her] black history, including the black presence in the bible,” that she found particularly compelling.
For believers, the BCC provided a theology and way of life that united them to a view of Blackness that contradicted remnants of social, political, and religious orders that were tethered to anti-Blackness.
In Search of Zion: On Ethiopianism and the Black Coptic Church
Several scholarly works offer compelling investigations into Great Migration new religious movements that sought to map and trace their identity back to Africa, toward the establishment of individual and collective identity. Part and parcel of this exploration and longing for identity is the notion of forming an “imaginative birthplace,” that is, a homeland in which individuals envision themselves, even though they may be outside its geographical limits. Among Black Coptic believers, their search for identity manifests in the intentional and normative framing of Ethiopia as a source of spiritual and national identity. An enduring theme in these works, therefore, is that of Ethiopianism, which can be succinctly described as the veneration of the African country toward the telos of constructing an elaborate idea of Blackness—Black life, Black culture, Black people.
Centrally present in the BCC is the idea that Black people are of Ethiopian descent, or a performance of Ethiopianism. Within the context of the racialized world of oppression and white supremacy within which the BCC was birthed, looking toward Ethiopia as a homeland was a way to promote and perform racial redemption of Africans worldwide. Prophet Cicero Patterson believed that Ethiopia was the true homeland for Blacks, and that Black people would be redeemed by the “spirit of Ethiopia.”
Ethiopianism as a political and religious ideology is not represented by a single strand of thought. Indeed, various conceptions of Ethiopianism are held throughout the Caribbean world, on the African continent, in Jamaica among the Rastafarians, and among North American writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Phillis Wheatley, who used the term “Ethiop” as a way of naming Africans and African Americans. Nonetheless, within the diversity of Ethiopianist thought, there are core ideas that connect the various dots. These include the belief that Ethiopia has special significance for Blacks throughout the diaspora, most notably in light of the biblical reference to the Prince of Ethiopia in Psalm 68:31. Moreover, as seen in the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ethiopia was cast as a representation of the struggles of African Americans but also as a source of national hope that justice would prevail. In Dunbar’s “Ode to Ethiopia,” written for and to the “Mother Race,” he writes:
On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope’s swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbor;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammersring, their forges smoke,—
They stir in honest labour.
Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia’s glory.
Indeed, as anthropologist Charles Reavis Price notes, “In the thoughts and writings of the Ethiopianists of the 1700s and 1800s, Ethiopia and Egypt were significant as emblematic of a golden age and the high civilization of Black life. In true millenarian fashion, some looked to it as the future that awaited them.” For proponents of Ethiopianism, Ethiopia was a symbol that pointed toward the redemption of Black people. In the BCC, this idea of redemption is manifested by naming Ethiopia as the ancestral homeland.
Ethiopianism functions as the means to construct transcendental conceptions of the Black person and Black culture that move beyond reading blackness, determinately, in opposition to whiteness—what Victor Anderson neatly describes as ontological Blackness. The notion of Ethiopianism also contributes to a heroic read of Black culture that aims to de-colonize Blackness, and portrays “Ethiopia as an ancestral homeland [that] has played a major role in nourishing racial pride among Blacks of the New World.”
Indeed, for proponents of Ethiopianism, including Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887–1940), Ethiopia was a holy land of sorts, one that spoke to the promise of Black autonomy in overcoming colonialism. Ethiopia’s victory at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, for example, is not only seen as a military triumph, but as a divine conquest, one in which God was with the Ethiopian people in their struggle to maintain autonomy. In this spirit, Garvey—in his role as president general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association—sent a telegram to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I (1892–1975) on the emperor’s coronation, addressed from “Ethiopians of the Western World.” Garvey maintained that,
The Psalmist prophesied that Princes would come out of Egypt and Ethiopia would stretch her hands unto God. We have no doubt that the time is now come. Ethiopia is now really stretching forth her hands. This great kingdom of the East has been hidden for many centuries but gradually she is rising to take a leading place in the world and it is for us of the Negro race to assist in every way to hold up the hand of Emperor Ras Tafari.
Ethiopianism, for those attracted to the ideology, “transforms the narratives of Ethiopia into metaphors of African magnanimity and correspondingly decodes them as a commentative script to autonomy and assertive sovereignty.” Such was the notion of Ethiopianism that Prophet Cicero embraced. For him, Ethiopia indexed a presentation of Black life that disavowed colonial ideas about Blackness. Consequently, conceptions of collective Black history, as well as aims to construct an identity in relation to that history, are at work in the BCC. For Black Coptic believers, Ethiopianism provides a common historical narrative that negates and rejects the supposition of a limited history sprouting from modern tension or existential crisis. Indeed, according to Priest Meshach, for the BCC, “Black history does not begin on slave plantations. Ethiopia is a symbol that gives us our identity and pride. While some were hoping for a return to Ethiopia, Prophet Cicero brought the spirit of Ethiopia to us. [Prophet Cicero] took us back to the beginning of all creation . . . because Ethiopia best represents the nation he wanted us to become.”
Prophet Cicero’s vision of the BCC was therefore one in which he performed a sort of “going beyond” the spiritual and priestly dimensions of religion via a hermeneutic of retrieval, which was meant to free an “authentic” Black identity from the imprisonment of the white dominant culture. Claiming a Hebrew-Christian theological context, and coupling it with a reclamation of Egyptian and Ethiopian religious and cultural artifacts, the Black Coptic Church reimagines and reconstructs Black identity, and disrupts “normative” assumptions about Black persons in North America. To this end, Prophet Cicero rejected even “modern” twentieth-century terms like “colored persons.” This aim to “identity otherwise” is further demonstrated in the Black Coptic Church’s weekly Sunday ritual recognizing women adherents via the proclamation: “Hail to the Queens of Ethiopia.” In other words, the Black Coptic Church, from its genesis, did not seek to jettison racial categories. Rather, it aimed to devise a racial paradigm that was correlative, corrective, and constructive, on its own terms, through a recovery of a heroic and monumental African [Ethiopian] past that represented, for the Black Coptic community, divine Blackness.
Why Coptic?
It is important to note that the BCC does not have an ecclesial relationship with the Orthodox Coptic Church, founded in Egypt by St. Mark around 42 CE. The naming of the BCC as a “Coptic” Church sprang from its founder’s goals of theological liberation and identity construction. For Prophet Cicero, “Coptic” resurrects an ancient heritage of Black persons through an imaginative relationship between North American Blacks and that Egyptian Christian community. This framing will be profoundly important as we consider the group’s magnanimous and grandiose reading of Black history, especially the Church’s lofty and uncritical elevation of Egypt and Ethiopia. Prophet Cicero articulated a radical disconnectedness caused by the transatlantic slave trade and North American chattel slavery. Because followers trace their religious and ancestral heritage to Ethiopia and Egypt, colonialism and slavery are understood as a disruption of their history and future. The BCC becomes instrumental in reconnecting to a glorified and often romanticized past. The designation of this community as Coptic imaginatively connects North American Blacks to African civilizations, which the community uplifts as symbols of Black achievement.
Members of the BCC assert not only “direct lineage” to ancient Egypt, but also that they are Black Jews “out of Israel.” Historian Jacob Dorman’s analysis of claims made by Black Israelite religions that they are the descendants of Ancient Israelites and that “the ancient Israelites were the ancestors of contemporary West Africans,” is helpful here. Dorman contends that “the Israelite faiths of the 1890s arose from ideational rather than ancestral genealogies.” And, therefore, “Black Israelites did not descend from ancient Israelites or contemporary Jews in either Africa or the Americas. Rather, like most other “imagined communities” of the late nineteenth century, [these groups] invented their identities from a host of ideational rhizomes.” The BCC belongs to a category of Black religious traditions that not only constructed imagined communities but asserted what I call assembled heroic identities. By this, I mean that they brought together, or collected into one place, a host of cultures and lineages that contribute to a transcendental read of Blackness, advancing Black life beyond categorical and immediate historical circumstances. In spaces where oppression exists, assembled heroic identities enable Black folk to imagine and perform notions of the self that counter socially constructed notions of Blackness. Moreover, assembled heroic identities are integral to the social salvation programs of those groups that embrace them, like the BCC. Prophet Cicero’s declaration of a Black Coptic identity as an umbrella term for a more complex identity is an example of constructing a relationship between social and spiritual salvation.
The Black Coptic Church in Context
The BCC does not exist in isolation. Rather, as we have seen, it is connected to a larger aspect of Black religions during the Great Migration; one that expands our understanding of what constitutes the “religion” of Black religions. The complexity of Black religion(s) lies in the fact that we are not dealing with a neat set of beliefs that point toward a monolithic, shared theology. This is the generative nature of these religious traditions. They exhibit a range of religious activities and theologies steeped in a desire to be free. Without question, in Black religion “evil is accounted for and hope, at least for some, is assured. In short, African American religious life is as rich and complicated as the religious life of other groups in the United States, but African American religion emerges in the encounter between faith, in all its complexity, and white supremacy.”
The racial and social circumstances of the early to middle twentieth century urban North provided the conditions necessary for the evolution of independent Black religious movements. The BCC was birthed in a social and cultural milieu that reduced Black people to racialized classifications such as “negro.” Therefore, in places like Chicago, new religious movements determined to address both the religious and racial identity earthquakes within Black communities emerged. Together with the Black Coptic Church, other smaller religious sects and groups that collapsed spiritual identity and racial formation thrived and flourished. Arthur Fauset asserts:
With the migration of Negroes from the rural South to urban centers, a transformation in the basic religious life and attitudes also is observable. The church, once a sine qua non of institutional life among American Negroes, does not escape the critical inquiry of the newer generations, who implicitly and sometimes very explicitly are requiring definite pragmatic sanctions if they are to be included among churchgoers, or if indeed they are to give any consideration at all to religious practices and beliefs.
Additionally, historian Milton Sernett notes, “Refugees from the South often dreamed of a specific place in the Promised Land. For many of them, [Chicago] was the mecca of the Midwest.” Similarly, in his Canaan Land, historian Albert Raboteau presents a historical narrative centered on the migration of Black folk from the South to the North during the interwar period. Push factors, such as lack of jobs, problems with crops, and segregation in the South, were influential in the Great Migration. Additionally, pull factors such as the availability of unskilled manufacturing and industrial jobs presented the potential for upward economic and social mobility. Yet, as Raboteau highlights, “The urban situation turned out to be less rosy than the migrants had hoped. As they settled into the poorer sections of the cities, they encountered conflict with white neighbors and white workers, frequently immigrant.”
Still, this migration north had a major impact on the religious life of African Americans. In many instances, the established Black Church, to which many of the migrants already belonged, was a place of refuge. However, and more significantly, “migration also increased the variety of Black religious life by exposing people to new religious choices.” Beyond the Black Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, and other Christian denominations, Northern Blacks were also exposed to a variety of Black religious sects and movements that provided an alternative to mainline Christianity. Sociologist Ira De Augustine Reid summarizes these new religious movements as establishments that were disgruntled with the “prayerful procrastinations” of the more established Black church traditions, particularly concerning race and economic relations. He observed the significant rise of what he identified as “religious cults and sects.” Reid notes, “Today, Father Divine, Elder Michaux, Daddy Grace, Moslem sects, congregations of Black Jews, and the Coptic Church have been added to the church organizations existing among Negroes.” This emergence of new religions, therefore, in part, can be attributed to the social, political, and economic crises which Southern migrants faced in the North.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion (NYU Press, 2023). All rights reserved.
