User:Garyopenmind/sandbox

The Reverend Martin Luther King, once said, "it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning." From research done by sociologist Michael Emerson on multiracial congregations using a scale where no one racial group is no more than 80% of the congregations, the same still holds true today over fifty years later. Using that standard, these Christian Churches who share tha same faith and beliefs, Emerson has found that only 8% of all christian congregations in the U.S. are racially mixed to a significant degree: 2-3% of mainline Protestant congregations, 8% of other Protestant congregations, and 20% of Catholic parishes.==References== ref>http://www.phil.vt.edu/JKlagge/ConductorChurch.htm

In the Christian Bible Jesus states in Mark 12:30-31 of the New Testament, 30: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these.” second is this:. Jesus also crossed cultural boundaries in his ministry, and the Apostle Paul opened Christianity to all ethnicities by allowing Gentiles as well as Jews to be part of the growing Christian churches. In the early part of the christian Americas this version of Christianity was missing for the African free citizen and its slave counter part.==References== ref>http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12%3A30-31&version=NIV

The history of the African American and at the same time U.S. history have been shaped profoundly by the fact that they entered the Americas by force for the most part, which meant they were denied or lacked far fewer of the cultural or institutional support available to voluntary immigrants. When Africans reached America as slaves "the gods of Africa died", and especially as a result of the Great Awakening produced American Evangelicalism, for rational choice Christianity became the dominate religion among Africans in in the United States, both slave and free. Using rational choice the Africans adapted to Christianity as their own religion, infusing ecstatic experience and the persistence of folk beliefs to imprint a distinctive character onto their own form of Christianity.

Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord Colossians 3:22. By enslaving Africans white American slave owners believed or tried to justify that they were simply enforcing God's will by bringing their slaves Christianity. During slavery some whites owners allowed in certain southern states Virginia, Georgia, and Kentucky for black Baptist free and slave to lead their own services and to worship and congregate, for bible study and church. One of these churches and third oldest black church in America founded in Kentucky 1790, by a slave Peter Durrett helped lead to the congregationalism. This was all done before the 1800.This religious freedom would all come to a end after slave revolts in the early 19th century, including one led by a Baptist slave name Nat Turner in 1831. This uprising led to the killing of over 50 white citizens. Virginia passed a law requiring black congregations to meet only in the presence of a white minister. Other states similarly restricted exclusively black churches, or the assembly of blacks in a large groups unsupervised by whites. This pushed the black church underground and caused them to become the " Invisible Church". ==References== ref>(http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/intro.html)

Many of the first African American churches established before were founded by free blacks. One of these churches founded in the north was in Philadelphia, PA by Allen and Abbsalom Jones through the free African Society established the African Church of Philadelphia. With the help of Benjamin Rush and Robert Ralston, a white businessmen, FAS leaders drew up a plan to organize the African Church on July 25, 1791. Soon thereafter, Allen. Jones, and others began soliciting funds, again with the help of Rush. Their appeals met with resistance from white church leaders, many of whom had been supportive of the black community, but disapproved of a separate back church. However, the FAS raised enough money to buy two adjacent lots on Fifth Street, just one block from the State House. In the fall of 1792, several black leaders attending services at St. George's Methodist Church and had recently helped to expand the church. The black churchgoers were told to sit upstairs in the new gallery. When they mistakenly sat in an area not designated for blacks, they were forcibly removed from the seats they had helped build. According to Allen, "... we all went out of the church in one body, and they were no longer plagued by us"==References==

From this treatment by their white Christian brothers and many other stories like it, caused African American Christians to feel not fully Christian nor American. This is what the African American W.E. Du Boise came to call a double consciousness.

^ a b "Gillfield Baptist Church, Petersburg, Virginia", Virginia Commonwealth University Library, 2008, accessed 22 Dec 2008 ^a b H. E. Nutter, A Brief History of the First Baptist Church (Black) Lexington, Kentucky, 1940, accessed 22 Aug 2010 ^ a b c Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F. (May 2001). "The Church in the Southern Black Community". Retrieved 2007-05-21. ^ a b  William L. Andrews E. Maynard Adams Professor of English Series Editor An Introduction to the Slave Narrative ^ a b Kevin J. Christiano, William H. Swatos Jr., and Peter Kivisto, Sociology of Religion Second Addition ^ a b BibleGateway