Abolition and the Birth of the Independent Black Church

In 1787, Black worshipers at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia were pulled from their knees while praying in a section reserved for White congregants. The humiliation helped convince Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others that spiritual equality without institutional power was not enough.

That same year they formed the Free African Society, a mutual-aid organization that supported sick people, widows, orphans, burial needs, and Black community life. In 1816, Allen helped organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The new denomination was not a retreat from Christian unity. It was an act of ecclesial self-government in response to a unity controlled by white Christians.1

Eighteenth-century evangelical revivals produced movements of personal conversion, missionary expansion, education, prison reform, and antislavery activism. John Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery, published in 1774, condemned the slave trade and slavery as violations of justice and mercy. Quakers moved toward corporate opposition to slaveholding. British evangelicals helped mobilize against the Atlantic slave trade.2

Yet abolition was not a gift white Christians simply bestowed upon enslaved people. Black resistance, testimony, rebellion, escape, political organization, and theological interpretation were indispensable. Formerly enslaved writers exposed the brutality hidden behind Christian respectability. Black preachers declared that the God who delivered Israel did not sanction racial bondage.

Independent Black churches became centers of worship, education, abolition, political debate, mutual aid, economic cooperation, protection, and leadership development. They created public spaces in which Black people could speak as theological subjects rather than objects of white mission.4

The British Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most British territories through the 1833 act, with full freedom delayed by an exploitative apprenticeship system until 1838. Christian abolitionists contributed greatly, but the movement also depended upon formerly enslaved campaigners, Black resistance in the Caribbean, working-class mobilization, and political pressure. The state compensated enslavers rather than the people whose labor and lives had been stolen.3

In the United States, the conflict became a crisis of biblical........

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