Wednesday, February 27, 2008

12. Master's Religion

Southern Baptist is called SOUTHERN for a reason. It's mostly followed along the embarrassing stretch of America called the Bible Belt. And it's also the predominant faith of most southern blacks.

Suprised? You shouldn't be. When African slaves were purchased from the Muslims and brought to America, they were mostly owned by plantation owners in the South who needed entire groups of people to work the land (unlike up North where they only had one or two for household chores). Because of this, the majority of African slaves were exposed to the Southern version of Christianity.

Over the decades, when slaves were freed many of them stayed in the same towns they had once been enslaved in because it was the only home they had. Thus the large amount of black people who are still Southern Baptist. Big example: Rev. Martin Luther King.

Also, just incase you want to argue that many have converted "back" to Muslim and Islamic faiths recently: Remeber who the Europeans purchsed the slaves from? That's right, the Muslims. The "original" faith of Africans was not Muslim or Islamic. It was just the faith they had at the time they were sold to Europeans because they had been enslaved for hundreds of years by people with those faiths.

This is nothing new or exclusive to black people. Whenever a culture is overrun by another, the belief system is usually one of the first things to alter. Look at the Anglo-Saxons' conversion to Christianity or the Roman gods who took over much of the Eastern world. It happens.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Ummm. The vast majority of African slaves were not purchased from Muslims, but were either:

1)bought from enemy African tribes that had captured them;
2) bought from their own tribes (if they were outcasts of some kind);
3) captured by forced.
The *limited* enslavement of Africans by Arabs mainly took place in East Africa, while the European slave trade took place in West Africa.

Unknown said...

And now you dun fucked with the south? I'd like to know where you're from. Is it completely free of any past discrepencies? I'm sure it's not.