Ethiopianism as a Trans-Atlantic Christian Religious Movement

In my paper I propose to talk about Ethiopianism as the first recognizable religious movement among Protestant Christians of African descent.  For purposes of the paper, Ethiopianism may be defined as a shared agenda among black Anglophone Protestant Christians in North America, the Caribbean, Britain, and Africa, that the civilizing of black peoples would be best effected by them, as opposed to Europeans.  For purposes of the paper, a religious movement may be defined as a collective effort over time, by a given population of adherents of a creed, to realize some spiritual or pious ideal. 

The proposed paper will make the case that by the eighteenth-century European Protestantism had evolved (among others) a liberal form that reconciled Christian spirituality with both the intellectual rationalism of the European Enlightenment and the capitalist ethos that powered Europe’s transoceanic expansion and the incipient Industrial Revolution. One group of European missionaries preached this form of Christianity among peoples of African descent, though with so many racial caveats that the real spread of liberal Christianity among black folks was probably facilitated by black converts who became evangelists.  Ethiopianism originated among free black Christians who identified with the ideas and ideals of liberal Christianity but who were also conscious of the ways in which racism among white Christians limited the spread of the ideas and ideals of liberal Christianity among peoples of color.  For these Christians, releasing Christianity from the fetters of white racism became an evangelical goal, with the understanding that there was an onus upon them to pursue this goal among peoples of African descent. 

It can be argued that a tenet of liberal Protestant Christianity is that God recognizes self-help/social amelioration as among the greatest expressions of faith.  Ethiopianists certainly looked upon social amelioration, i.e., “racial uplift,” as an obligation placed upon them from above.  Following this line of thinking, the greatest illustrations of how white racism functioned as an obstacle to African racial uplift was first the Atlantic slave trade, second the European colonization of Africa.  From the beginnings, in the writings of Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, Ethiopianists identified the abolition of the slave trade as a task enjoined upon them as Christians.  Wheatley and Sancho wrote and published in North Atlantic cities.  They also wrote in conjunction with and as amplifications of the European Christian abolition movement.  A generation after Wheatley and Sancho, Ethiopianists such as Ottabah Cuguano and Olaudah Equiano in Britain and Prince Hall and Richard Allen in North America provided Ethiopianism with both an intellectual and an institutional framework for black participating in the white Abolition movement.  The discourse about African agency in the abolition of slavery became in turn the basis for Ethiopianist strategies for freeing Africa from European domination. This Ethiopianist discourse continued till the time of Marcus Garvey, when it was politically repressed by white governments, the process of repression ironically pushing to the fore more explicitly political secularized versions of Ethiopianism which from that point onward were known as Pan Africanism. 

The concern of the paper is with how Ethiopianism grew over space and time from its 18th century origins.  The task that needs to be completed before Ethiopianism can be recognized as a religious movement that encompasses and explains actions and developments on three continents over three centuries is the identification of the common spiritual animus motivating these actions and developments.  The paper will argue that it is the Augustinian sensibilities about Divine Providence at the core of all Protestant creedal thinking that prompted black Protestants across the Atlantic to view Ethiopianism as the basis of the Christians' of African descent unique covenant with God.  The paper will close with an examination from this perspective of the movements directed by Martin Delany, Henry McNeil Turner and Marcus Garvey in the New World, the movement directed by Harold Moody in Great Britain, and the movements directed by Orishatukeh Faduma and John Dube in Africa.