Shifting Sands: Navigating Precarity through Religious Praxis in Nineteenth-Century North America

Abstract:

This paper examines the critical yet understudied role of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church within North America’s National Negro Convention Movement from 1830 to 1864, exploring how this Black religious institution functioned as a pivotal site for ontological resistance against the systematic violence of American antiblackness. By investigating the transnational religious networks, theological frameworks, and political strategies that emerged through this movement, I aim to contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about how religion has historically functioned as both a source of meaning-making and a practical resource for communities navigating precarious existence. Drawing on AAR’s presidential theme of “Freedom,” this analysis bridges historical, critical, and constructive methodologies to demonstrate how antebellum Black religious actors developed sophisticated strategies of survival and resistance that transcended regional and national boundaries throughout North America.

Central Arguments

My paper presents three interrelated arguments regarding the role of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the Convention Movement leading up to Emancipation:

First, I contend that the AME Church provided essential organizational infrastructure for the Convention Movement, offering not only physical meeting spaces but also established networks of community, communication, leadership structures, and mobilization strategies that enabled conventions to function as effective political instruments. I demonstrate how these religious resources facilitated connections between free Black communities across national boundaries, creating transnational networks of solidarity that transcended the geographical limitations often imposed by nationalist frameworks in the study of North American religions.

Second, I argue that AME leaders within the Convention Movement developed distinctive theological frameworks that directly contested the ontological violence of antiblackness. Through analyses of convention addresses delivered by AME clergy, I reveal how these religious actors transformed Christian theological resources into radical critiques of American democracy and its foundational contradictions. This theological work, I suggest, represents a significant and understudied contribution to North American religious thought that merits greater scholarly attention.

Third, I explore how the Convention Movement's religious dimensions illuminated the complex transnational dynamics of Black religious resistance in nineteenth-century North America. By examining how convention delegates navigated relationships with religious actors in Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico, I demonstrate how the movement transcended nationalist frameworks through strategic religious alliances and shared theological resources. This transnational perspective challenges scholarly tendencies to confine studies of American religious history within national boundaries, revealing instead the border-crossing nature of Black religious resistance.

Theoretical Framework

This analysis integrates multiple theoretical traditions to illuminate the complex relationship between religious praxis and political resistance in the Convention Movement. First, I employ Charles Long's conceptualization of religion as orientation in the ultimate sense, examining how AME leaders articulated theological frameworks that provided adherents with meaningful interpretations of their precarious existence under antiblackness. Second, I utilize Saidiya Hartman's concept of "the no longer and not yet"—the liminal space between legal emancipation and substantive freedom—to understand how Convention participants navigated their paradoxical status as technically free but substantively unfree subjects through religious resources. Finally, I draw on Calvin Warren's philosophical analysis of "ontological terror" in Ontological Terror and Terrence Johnson's examination of Black radical religious thought in We Testify with Our Lives to explore how AME leaders developed theological frameworks that contested the metaphysical foundations of white supremacy.

This theoretical approach allows me to move beyond reductive understandings of religion as either accommodationist or revolutionary, revealing instead how AME leaders strategically deployed religious resources to create temporary reprieve from antiblack violence while simultaneously working toward more radical transformations of the social order.