HOLY GROUND, SACRED PLACE: THE ROLE OF PLACE IN THE RELIGIOUS IDENTITY In the History of Myrtle Baptist Church
Greetings Blog Readers,
This blog is going to be a looooooong and tedious one to read so I am going to break it up into 5 parts so that hopefully each week you will be excited about reading whats next. (Smile) I want to preface this by saying that this blog entry was originally a paper to fulfill a course requirement in a SOCIAL THEORY & RELIGIOUS IDENTITY class last semester. To my church members and former residence of the village, I urge you to read this blog generously. This blog is based off of an interview that I had with Rev. Haywood our pastor emeritus. This blog is an exploration of the relationship between Myrtle Baptist Church and the history of the village in hopes of understanding the role that place has in the formation of religious identity. Also, it may be hard to just read one part of it without having read the previous parts.
Enjoy!
In Newton, Massachusetts, the Myrtle Baptist Church Neighborhood Historic District is affectionately known by native African American Newtonites as the “village”. In 1952, rumors spread that the Massachusetts Turnpike would be extended through this West Newton village. This information was devastating for the African-American families who made up ninety-nine percent of the village’s residents. Most of these families had lived in this predominantly black community since the mid 1800’s. Their religious and social identities were explicitly interwoven with the history and culture of this village. In the 1960’s, almost all of these African American homes were taken by eminent domain by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. 2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of this beloved community. The only standing portion of the village is a portion of Prospect Street and Simms Court and Curve Street the location of Myrtle Baptist Church, which was organized in 1874.
This project is an exploration of the relationship between Myrtle Baptist Church and the history of the village in hopes of understanding the role that place has in the formation of religious identity. I interviewed the Seventy-two year old former pastor of the church who served for about 24 years. My research examines the role of place in defining personal and religious identity. It seeks to better understand how place lies at the center of many African American religious and spiritual institutions. I hope to prove that the religious identities of African Americans who reside, work, and worship in a single community is interconnected with the idea of place.
My hypothesis is that a better understanding of the significance of place is imperative for understanding how persons, like those who lived in the village, understand and negotiate their blackness, class, concepts of God, and communal narratives, all of which are major factors in how African American communities define their personal and religious identities. I will define the African American community and its relationship to the church using the works of Dubois. I will also use The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Additionally, I will be looking at the works of Mary Jo Neitz in her article Reflections on Religion and Place: Rural Churches and American Religion, Rhys Williams’ Forum -- Religion and Place, and Eiesland's A Particular Place to discuss the ways in which a congregation's place shapes its identity. I will use Lincoln and Mamiya’s The Black Church in the African American Experience to talk about the black church as a "home church" and homecomings. And finally, I will also utilize the work of Sascha L. Goluboff an anthropologist who has written about southern rural African American "homeplace" churches in Virginia.
My arguments are as follows: Since African American churches are symbolic places that African American people identify with whether or not they attend services regularly, in this research blog entry I will examine how a historically black congregation's place shapes the identity of its congregants. Furthermore, I will explore the role of narratives in the development of the identity of African Americans living in the village. My key research questions are: (1) What role does the concept of place play in defining personal and religious identity?; (2) What constitutes a religious/spiritual place?; (3) What is the role of a narrative as it pertains to the importance of a place and the development of identity?
I. The Importance of African American churches in the Development of Identity
In their book, The Black Church in the African-American Experience, Lincoln and Mamiya discuss the undeniable influence of the universal black church on black culture and society in America. To them, “The black church in the USA is widely recognized as the central, oldest, and most influential institution in the black community.”[1] The Black Church is a key component to understanding the ethos of Black America because it is the progenitor of the black community.[2] “What is often overlooked is the fact that many aspects of black cultural practices and some major social institutions had religious origins; they were given birth and nurtured in the womb of the Black Church.”[3] Thus, African American cultural identity is entrenched in Black Churchisms. Because the black church expresses itself in cultural forms like “music and song, styles and content of preaching, and modes of worship”[4], Furthermore, even Weber, who never systematically defined or addressed religion in a traditional sense, believed that the fundamental aspects of society could be traced back to the elementary processes of religion.[5]
Black cultural identity is identical to what Robert Bellah calls Civil Religion. Bellah argues that “Civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people.”[6] For Bellah, Civil religion is “a genuine vehicle of national religious self understanding”.[7] Likewise for the African American community, there is a black civil religion that serves as a vehicle for African American self-understanding and identity. Black civil religion is rooted in Black Churchisms and it is revealed through the experiences of African American people. Furthermore, it shapes black identity because black civil religion was the sustaining force behind survival through segregation, racism, Jim Crow, slavery, and oppression. For this reason, there is a firm argument for the affectivity of the African-American Church in the history of black people and their suffering. Many scholars like E. Franklin Frazier have questioned the relevance of Black spirituality and the Black Church, but it was this very institution that spawned the African Americans’ need to create a community amid their suffering and to act with God in order to create a temporary liberation from their pain which lead to the construction of a Black theodicy.
It is important to acknowledge that many academics would disagree with the previously stated assertion. For instance, according to Marla Frederick, Professor of African and African American Studies and the Study of Religion at Harvard University, the significance of an African American believer’s individual experience is far more important than the significance of the church in the believer’s spiritual development[8] because the most influential spiritual formation happens once church is over.[9] However, according to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, it is critical for persons who are seeking to understand black identity and black communal life to acknowledge the role of the Black Church in the development of individual and collective black religious identity.[10] “For African Americans, long excluded from political institutions and denied presence, even relevance, in the dominant society’s myths about its heritage and national com- munity, the church itself became the domain for the expression, celebration, and pursuit of a black collective will and identity.”[11] In other words, this black collective will and identity developed into a religion and an organization, the black church, which aided blacks to deal with oppression on a regular basis. The music, preaching, and communal aspects of the black church has helped persons to cope with their oppressive and depressive realities. The black church tradition of dancing in sorrow, praising in pain, and jubilation in tribulation is a sort of theological meaning making.
II. What Constitutes a religious/spiritual place
The black church has historically been and continues to be a leading institution of support and nurture for the oppressed and racially discriminated populations.[12] According to James Cone, the black church created a black identity that assisted black people "whose daily existence was an encounter with the overwhelming and brutalizing reality of white power. For the slaves it was the sole source of identity and sense of community. The black church became the only sphere of black experience that was free of white power."[13] Cone argues that one way that the black church became the sole source of identity for black people is through its biblical interpretation of a Jesus in the New Testament who identified with the oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised. “And because we blacks accept God’s presence in Jesus as the true definition of our humanity, blackness and divinity are dialectically bound together as one reality. This is the theological meaning of the paradoxical assertion about the primacy of the black experience and Jesus Christ as witnessed in Scripture.”[14] In other words, the black church aided blacks in dealing with oppression and discrimination is through a form of biblical interpretation that emphasized a theology of liberation and freedom that dismantled the Christology that substantiated slavery with Pauline Epistles. Thus, it was through this sort of self-validating biblical interpretation that the black church became a sort of hub for identity formation and validation. However, not only is the black church itself significant to the African American community, but the physical buildings and places of these churches also hold equal significance. Thus, the black church is a religious/spiritual place.
Before we go further with the exploration of what a religious place is, we must first unpack the word religion/religious. Durkheim defines religion as: a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden -- beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.[15] I use Durkheim’s understanding of religion because it situates it as the primary contributor to the protraction and conditions of society thereby supporting his theory that religion is the adhesive that binds societies through the affirmation of common values and beliefs. Thus, it is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things that creates a moral community called a Church, that is then situated in a particular place. As social organizations with divine missions[16], churches, or for the sake of this blog entry, religious/spiritual places are traditionally physical places located within a particular community and are “dedicated to sacred things”[17] and “exist in relation to an environment”[18]. Spiritual/religious places are complex historical objects that have their own ‘‘’paradoxical’ relationship with Christianity’s main message of transcendence and its stance toward ‘modernity’’’.[19]According to Eiesland, the environment in which a church/religious place exists is wide in scope because it is “linked to networks and events across geographic and temporal” spaces/places that are “discrete locations with stable boundaries and fixed constituencies”.[20] Although it is not blatantly relevant to this work, it is important to note that Eiesland’s work also examines the importance of global places in relation to local churches. Most importantly, her work provides the perfect formula for examining and interpreting the place of a congregation. She contends that the environment that a church exists in relation to is best conceptualized from the discipline of sociology as a three-layered conceptualization.
The first layer, demography, examines the characteristics, ages, numbers, sexes, ethnicities, races, and class of a church’s place. The second layer, culture, examines the systems of meaning, values, and practices of the persons living around and or worshipping within the place. And the third layer, organization, examines the “roles and relationships that structure the interaction of people in the place”[21]. The examination of a religious place is important because, in the words of Crispin Paine “What we need now is much more study of people, how we imagine special places, how we agree to define them, why we want them, how we behave toward them. Particularly interesting are those places that attract more than one understanding”[22] According to Belden C. Lane, whose works examine the geography and narratives of American spirituality; literal spiritual places are the landscapes of the sacred.[23]For the social scientific study of religion, the physical and sacred place of a religious community is integral and “at the center of many human religious and spiritual systems”.[24]
Because the physical and sacred place of a religious community is at the center of human religious systems, it is important to understand the role of that system in the development of religious identity. Religious systems are extremely influential because religion itself is the functional system of society.[25] Religion is so influential that it “can have an effect on what one eats, how one dresses, with whom one socializes, how resources are used; in short, how everyday life is conducted and construed can potentially be invested with religious meaning”.[26] Thus, since the place of a community is integral, it is only in a place that different types of systems can share complexity and demonstrate their interpenetration”.[27] For this reason, religious places also contribute to the development of religious identities.
III. The Importance of religious/spiritual place for Identity Formation
It is important to understand that the development of a religious community’s identity and spirituality, like that of a black church, is embodied in particular, patterned, and varying ways and it is emplaced in a particular location.[28] In other words, according to Rhys H. Williams, the development of a religious community’s identity and spirituality “happens somewhere, and the somewhere should seem to matter”.[29] Traditionally the black church has been theologically interpreted as the metaphysical landscape and a major prototype of African-American/black spirituality. However, from a social scientific point of view, “context matters.”[30] Attention to the actual places of black churches will “help us to see how ‘otherworldly’ experiences are embedded in the particular of ‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’”.[31] Thus, it is important to take the understanding of the black church beyond its metaphysical significance in order to acknowledge “sacred spaces, as literal locations, are at the center of many human religious and spiritual systems”.[32]
In his introduction to the forum on religion and place, Williams argues that although social location has often been set in opposition with and has somewhat ignored physical location, a social scientific turn towards a more thorough understanding of the significance of place may offer a beneficial and profound challenge to sociological theorizing. For instance, according to the recent work of Neitz, “Understanding the significance of place is imperative for understanding why the three Methodist churches in Benton Township have not merged….the call to attend to place also calls us to the local and particular”.[33] Furthermore, even in my interview with Rev. Haywood, it was evident that the particular spiritual experiences of Myrtle Baptist Church were not only linked to the land, building, and culture of the church, but also to the community there known as the village, which was also a physical location.[34] He said:
So the church starts in 1874, so after 1874, in 1886 those, the, the new maps were redrawn for the city, which showed all those streets completing the village. It was comprised of six streets: Curve Street, Prospect Street, Hicks Street, Douglas Street, Simms Court, Prospects Place, and Allen Avenue. Probably seven So my, my opinion is that the village, the church was the, was the initiation of the, or what brought -- the church brought the village The church -- in my opinion, the church predated the official formulation of the village, even though some of those original people lived here, a few of them. That was -- I don’t think that was the village. The village was when the church started and then more families came. So I think, I think that the village, that the church was-- the village -- the church created the village, and the church became... You know the old saying about, you know, the black churches were institutions? They were not only religious institutions, but they were, you know, social institutions and... To some extent that was true here, but more so, this church became more of a religious . It kept that for the people of the village,……… I could take you to people that grew up in this village that have never came to this , and if you asked ’em “Do you have a church home?”, they’ll tell you Myrtle Baptist Church. They’ll tell you that in a minute, because they have a spiritual connection to this physical place and that’s what it was.[35]
Thus, Rev Haywood’s account above substantiates Neitz claim that “spirituality is linked to the histories of particular groups of people who settled, made lives, and did church in those places”.[36] For instance, the physical place of the church in the village was so sacred and important that persons who were not regular attendees of Sunday morning worship services identified themselves as believers and congregants because of their spiritual connection to the “place” of Myrtle. According to Rev. Haywood, the “place” of the church was important to the community because the church predated the official formulation of the village. The village formed because the church started and families moved to be close to the physical church. Thus, the church was the center of the community. In the interview he said:
“the church needed to be the spiritual place, the place that was there, where they could worship with their own kind, and even though we came together in this community with important, critical political issues that was discussed here in the church, more so it was a spiritual refuge for the people of this village, and in some times, especially in crisis, in racial crisises [sic] around the country, it became the spiritual resources for people outside this village.[37]
Like the churches that Neitz studies in rural Missouri, Myrtle’s stories are “stories that were significantly shaped by place”[38]. For example: (1) Rev. Ford’s broom factory that was built near the church, (2) the church picnic that was held at a physical place, (3) the streets and the family homes, (4) and the construction of the turnpike that destroyed the physical place of the village. These stories about place(s), like the stories of the rural churches in Missouri that Neitz studied come together to construct a spiritual and religious identity for a population of black people who experienced many changes and encounters as a community which had and thereby developed cultural traditions out of new and old problems.[39]
IV. The Importance of Place to a Black Congregation Like Myrtle
During this semester, I was granted the opportunity to conduct research on the village of the Myrtle Baptist Church in West Newton, Massachusetts. The village is the spiritual and literal place or location of the church. In the 1870’s there were about one hundred and thirty black living in the city of Newton who had migrated from the South. They were former slaves; some of them were just free people that had lived in Massachusetts for a long time. First Baptist Church, now Lincoln Park Baptist Church, became their first spiritual home, some having been members since 1869. Because the blacks wanted to worship in their own tradition and the freedom to sit in the front of the church as well as in the rear, they decided to start their own church.
Eventually the first church structure was built in 1875 on land in the village given as a gift by D.C Sanger, a Deacon at Lincoln Park Baptist Church. This place or gifted land that would eventually become known as the village was a marshland and consequently could not be built upon. But, due to the construction of a railroad, the land was filled in to be buildable. Therefore, when the railroad was built, the white legislator also made the land functional for the church and the other African Americans build homes there in order to be near their new sacred place, Myrtle Baptist Church. After which time, streets and about 50 homes that included maybe 65 families were built on this sacred place just for the freed slaves. For this reason, the place of Myrtle, the village, was and still remains just as important to villagers as their relationship with the God they worshipped in the church because this church was theirs and theirs alone.
The church and the land was theirs to manage and control as they wished. This is the history of the Myrtle village people and it is still very much alive. On any given Sunday, members of the church tell stories about the village in order to bring hope into their present circumstances. This validates Sascha L. Goluboff claim that “black Christians tend not to reject the past but embrace it as an inspiration for building a better future”.[40]The spirituality of persons living in the village in the 1800’s and 1900’s was and is tied to the past and the place just as much as to God. Although they never considered the place to be God, the place was their gift from God and consequently it has become a major part of their religious and spiritual narratives.
In the words of Yvonne V. Jones who conducted an analysis of annual homecomings in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, the blacks in the village retell their narrative and hold it in such high regard in order to “assure the recognition of genealogical ties to the land and to the past, and thus serve to articulate familial expectation in the present and future”.[41] Consequently, their belief and faith in God is tied to their narratives about the village as a place. Goluboff would agree with this assertion because she argues in her article “communal bonds, as rooted in a sense of place, work to strengthen an individual’s relationship with God”.[42] Furthermore, their concepts about community and love are also based upon their interpretations of their spiritual/religious place that they called the village because the village was their home. “Theoretical attention to this worldly home, as well as to God, is key to understanding the process of belief.”[43]For people living in the Myrtle village this, homeplace was of special spiritual significance because just like the family reunion of Reverend Burgess Harper in Halifax County, North Carolina that was examined in the ethnographic fieldwork of Faye Harrison, because it “symbolizes freedom, family, and the fulfillment of God’s promise”.[44]
V. The Relationship Between Place And Identity
In my interview with Rev. Haywood he talked about village, which we are calling the spiritual/religious place for Myrtle members and village dwellers, as a sacred and enchanted place. For him, spirituality did not stop nor begin at the threshold of the doors of Myrtle, but it spilled out into the community. For him, it was living in the place of the village that taught him how to be a Christian just as much as hearing sermons on Sunday because the village upheld what the church taught. He says:
“Living in the village is what taught me how to be a Christian because, in the church, because despite these men having these issues they still came to church, and the people still loved them --being a Christian -- the village There was no line of demarcation between the church and our place. Although the church theologically shaped my religious identity but I’ll tell you what: the relationships in the village kind of affirmed that spiritual strength that the church gave me. In other words, that people could be good together, you go to church and you weren’t -- if you love one another, that’s what counts. So you go out to the community and say, “Does this work?” I learned in this community that that works. That works.[45]
The above narrative that Rev. Haywood shares is what Margaret Somers would call an ontological narrative. In the excerpt above, he orients and emplots his own life by sharing “socially constructed stories that are carried by the individual actor”.[46] Ammerman prefers to capture this idea by calling it an autobiographical narrative instead of ontological because it “makes possible the predictability with which we respond to each other and imparts a certain trustworthiness and integrity to our action”.[47]
Another fond memory of spirituality in the village that Rev. Haywood considered to be reflective of his life montra about love had to do with the church picnic. He says:
the Sunday school picnic, the third Saturday of July. It used to be the third Thursday. You know why it was on Thursday? Because all the work and, the women who worked in service were off on Thursdays, so it always was the third Thursday in July. We’d get buses. We always get ’em. It was a big deal, like everybody used to laugh about the Friday night before the picnic you’d walk down the village you could smell chicken fryin’ all over the place. (laughter) And then the church would get a few buses, would get on the buses. A pastor would come and say a prayer, and we’d go there and have a great time and come back, and that was the church. That, that was the church [brought?]... And like I say, everybody in the whole village would go, and that, that was a, that was a spiritual church event because everyone shared. It was a time of love. That meant a lot to me. That’s why I preach about love and loving one another because that’s what the village was about and that’s what I’m about…loving people.[48]
In the excerpts above, Rev. Haywood, as a former pastor of Myrtle and leader in the village, takes the liberty of interweaving his person narrative in with the narrative of the village in order to express the ways in which the village, as a place, was the hub of black spirituality in Newton.
According to Goluboff, it is common for church members’ to become so attached to their home churches and home places that they interweave individual life stories with the histories and stories of the community and the church.[49] This is the case with Rev. Haywood’s account of the village because, his “home place and home church were two intertwined places of positive identity”.[50] Who he is – is the product of the religious and spiritual place he was reared in. Because Rev. Haywood’s value of church reflects his value for his home place, he therefore constructs and enacts his agency within parameters of community norms that were established by his home place.[51] This assertion is loosely based on and substantiated by Goluboff’s argument that children raised in a particular home church and homeplace, like the United Methodist church in rural Western Virginia, become the product of the community norms they learned as children. Likewise, as an adult, Rev. Haywood’s identity is so attached to the village and Myrtle Baptist church because his spiritual strength ultimately comes from his place of residence, Newton, which is located near the church and his present membership in his home church.[52]
In her article entitled The narrative constitutes of identity: A relational and network approach, Margaret R. Somers argues that the concept of narrative is extremely important and informative for the study of identity formation. She argues that narrative identity is the belief that a person’s narrative is the setting of their individuality, understanding of self, thought processes, behavior, organizations, associations, and society. She contends that narrative identity “builds from the premise that narrativity and relationality are conditions of social being, social consciousness, social action, institutions, structures, even society itself”.[53]
Furthermore, for Somers, the usage of a narrative is the medium through which humans “make something understandable in a context in order to give it historicity and relationality”[54]. Narrative identity assists a person in locating their identity with in the context of a particular event while also making connections to other events.[55] Somers argues that “the self and the purposes of self are constructed and reconstructed in the context of internal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantly in flux”[56]. For her, social identities are established and social action is guided through and by the usage of narrativity. It “provides a way of understanding the recursive presence of particular identities that are, nonetheless, not universal”.[57] Thus, it is safe to say that Rev. Haywood’s interweaving of his individual life stories with the histories and story of the community and the church is his way of contextualizing his narrative in order to make it understandable and to give historicity and relationality.[58] Therefore, since Rev. Haywood’s narratives are based on the religious/spiritual place known as the village, I contend that Rev. Haywood’s religious identity and possibly the identity of most persons raised in the village was shaped by their religious/spiritual place, the village. The village, which is the place of the church, constructed for Rev. Haywood and other villagers their understanding of “social being, social consciousness, social action, institutions, structures, even society itself--that is, the self and the purposes of self”.[59] The village and narratives about the village as a religious/spiritual place situates religious identity into a context of “internal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantly in flux”.[60]
When speaking of identity in the context of Myrtle and the village, it is important to note that persons in the village, like Rev. Haywood, have not been disembedded from their traditional religious spaces and relationships. Although the Massachusetts turnpike authority took large portions of village homes and properties from residents to build a toll road, the primary religious place for which the village was built, Myrtle Baptist Church, has never been destroyed, displaced, or disembedded. For this reason, despite the cultural devastation that was caused by the construction of the Turnpike, villagers were never left asking such questions as Who am I? or Where do I belong? The primary religious place, Myrtle Baptist Church has and still serves as a constant reminder of the village that was. Congregants regularly tell stories about yesteryear. During a regular Sunday Morning worship service it is common to hear stories of old that are told consciously and subconsciously to keep the village history fresh and alive while also using the narrative to remind villagers of who they are and where they belong. Once again, we see the ways in which “narrative may prove a helpful metaphor for understanding the nature of identities”[61]. Thus, according to Margaret Somer, those persons who lived in the village years ago were who they were and, for those still living, they are who are because they located or locate themselves in the social narrative of the community.[62]
Conclusion
In an effort to be sensitive to the history of the village, it is important to state the obvious limitations of my work. Because this blog entry is written to fulfill a class requirement, my fieldwork was limited to one interview. For this reason, it is not my intent to generalize the narrative of the village. Likewise, although Reverend Haywood once served as the pastor of the Myrtle Baptist Church, it would be unfair to a claim that his views and understanding of the village is the most accurate or void of any bias whether conscious or unconscious. In the words of Ammerman:
It is important to note here that individual internal narratives may be at odds with the story projected to others. Persons are quite capable of acting strategically and/or without sincerity, creating a narrative more situated to what they think others will reward that to their own conscious autobiographical narrative. [63]
Furthermore, we should also consider the possibility that some accounts in any historical/autobiographical narrative may be a bit exaggerated for the sake of institutionalizing a particular perspective of a narrative that was memorized differently from others. This is an important fact because “autobiographical narratives may guide behavior in ways that do not include the ‘rational’ assessment and critiques of the larger community”.[64] However, to a certain extent, Reverend Haywood’s narrative could be categorized as a retelling of a public narrative just as much as it could be considered an autobiographical narrative. Yet, in order to label his accounts as public we would have to examine if his stories were actually publically constructed and shared without the agency and consciousness of a single individual, which would be challenging considering our singular source. According to Somers, the “public narrative” is attached to groups, categories, cultures, and institutions.[65] “Public Narratives reside in what Bourdieu would call ‘fields’, the operative arena that determines which forms of cultural capital and which habitus will come into play”.[66] Thus, it is important to note that identities are intersectional and no one story can give an adequate account of the identity of everyone living in the village. Re. Haywood’s story can only contextualize and shed light on his personal religious identity.
However, it can also be used, as it was in this blog entry, to draw connections to the common identities of others living in the same area. Furthermore, this type of sociological examination of religion, place, and identity helps us to gain a greater understanding of how communities of faith work and what they mean to those persons who participate in them. Ammerman writes, “One of the clear lessons of this study for all students of religion, then, is that religious traditions, embodied in institutionalized patterns of organization and interaction, are a significant structural reality that should be taken seriously,”[67] and, “even if we believe religion to be increasingly individualized and denominations to be in decline, organized traditions have not disappeared, and they have powerful effects on the lives of those who participate in them.”[68] These two propositions on religion in the everyday are central to my future research as a practical theologian. It is my desire to investigate the idea of religion as a product of human society while retaining the communal value that being a part of a faith community produces.
[1] Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African-American Experience. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990, p 243
[2] Dubois, The Negro Church
[3] Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African-American Experience, p 7
[4] Ibid
[5] Weber, Marx. "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism" in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ch. 5.
[6] Robert Bellah, Civil Religion in America, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, "Religion in America," Winter 1967, Vol. 96, No. 1, pp. 1-21.
[7] Ibid
[8] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, ETHOS, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp. 368–394
[9] Marla F.Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p 16.
[10] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, ETHOS, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp. 368–394
[11] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993, p 9.
[12] Griffin, Horace. Their Own Received Them Not. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006, p 2
[13] James H. Cone, "Black Theology and Black Liberation," in Black Theology: The South African Voice, ed. Basil Moore (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1973), 92, 96.
[14] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997; orig. ed. 1975) 16–17.
[15] Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1915. Page
[16] Carl S. Dudley and Nancy T. Ammerman, Congregations in Transition, A Guide for Analyzing, Assessing, and Adapting in Changing Communities, Jossey-Bass, 2002. P 40
[17] Ibid
[18] Carl S. Dudley and Nancy T. Ammerman, Congregations in Transition, A Guide for Analyzing, Assessing, and Adapting in Changing Communities, Jossey-Bass, 2002. P 40
[19] Fenella Cannell, The Anthropology of Christianity. In The Anthropology of Christianity. Fenella Cannell, ed. PDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 43.
[20] Ibid
[21] Ibid
[22] Paine, Crispin. 2006. “Whose Sacred Place? Response to Jane Samson.” Material Religion 2
(1):111.
[23] Lane, B. C. 2001. Landscapes of the sacred: Geography and narrative in American spirituality. Expanded ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[24] Rhys H. Williams, “Introduction to a Forum on Religion and Place.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44 (September) 3: 239-242.
[25] Daniel B Lee, Maria of the Oak: Society and the Problem of Divine Intervention, Sociology of Religion 70:3, 2009, 213-231.
[26] Bowman, Marion. 2003. “Vernacular Religion and Nature: The ‘Bible of the Folk’
Tradition in Newfoundland.” Folklore 114:286.
[27] Daniel B Lee, Maria of the Oak: Society and the Problem of Divine Intervention, Sociology of Religion 70:3, 2009, 213-231.
[28] Rhys H. Williams, “Introduction to a Forum on Religion and Place.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44 (September) 3: 239-242.
[29] Ibid
[30] Ibid
[31] M. J. Neitz, Reflections on Religion and Place: Rural Churches and American Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2005,44: 243–247.
[32] Ibid
[33] Ibid
[34] Ibid
[35] Interview.
[36] M. J. Neitz, Reflections on Religion and Place: Rural Churches and American Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2005,44: 243–247.
[37] Interview
[38] M. J. Neitz, Reflections on Religion and Place: Rural Churches and American Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2005,44: 246.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):371. September 2011.
[41] Yvonne V. Jones, 980 Kinship Affiliation through Time: Black Homecomings and Family Reunions in a North Carolina County. Ethnohistory 27(1): 49–66.
[42] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):371. September 2011
[43] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):371. September 2011.
[44] Faye Harrison, ‘Give Me That Old-Time Religion’’: The Genealogy and Cultural Politics of an Afro-Christian Celebration in Halifax County, North Carolina. In Religion in the Contemporary South: Diversity, Community, and Identity. O.Kendall White and Daryl White, eds. Pp. 35. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
[45] Interview
[46] Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. "Religious Identities and Religious Institutions." Pp. 213 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon.
[47] Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. "Religious Identities and Religious Institutions." Pp. 214 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon.
[48] Interview
[49] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):374. September 2011.
[50] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):371. September 2011.
[51] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):382. September 2011.
[52] Sascha L. Goluboff, Making African American Homeplaces in Rural Virginia," Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 39(3):384. September 2011.
[53] Margaret R. Somers, 1994. "The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach." Theory and Society 23:621.
[54] Margaret R. Somers, 1994. "The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach." Theory and Society 23:617.
[55] Ibid
[56] Ibid
[57] Ibid
[58] Ibid
[59] Ibid
[60] Ibid
[61] Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. "Religious Identities and Religious Institutions." Pp. 213 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon.
[62] Somers, Margaret R. 1994. "The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach." Theory and Society 23:606.
[63] Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. "Religious Identities and Religious Institutions." Pp. 214 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon.
[64] Ibid
[65] Somers, Margaret R. 1994. "The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach." Theory and Society 23:606
[66] Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. "Religious Identities and Religious Institutions." Pp. 214 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon.
[67] Nancy Ammerman, “Religious Identities in Contemporary American Life,” Sociology of Religion, 67(4) (2006): 359-64.
[68] Ammerman, “Religious Identities in Contemporary American Life.”