Conclusion

Abstract

Historically, African American Christians and many black religious scholars have tended to explain black people’s conversion to Christianity as positive and mostly beneficial. Black religious scholars often affirm enslaved Africans’ agency and their choice to convert. And while these scholars are quick to assert black converts’ suspicions concerning white interpretations and practices of Christianity, especially antebellum, they generally present black Christian conversion as a necessary, and ultimately virtuous, act. The tendency to approach black Christian formation as an exercise in apologetics, however, has often dismissed and subjugated the significance of what was lost in the conversion process. Such an approach also overlooks and disregards implicit negative assumptions about precolonial African religious knowledge.