African American Religious Experience
The story of the emergence and overwhelming manifestation of African American Religion is rooted in the memoirs of the enslaved. Religion aided in innumerable pivotal roles in the progression and acceptance of American people and the African American church. Christianity, astoundingly, became the focal point of African American culture, despite the awareness that their oppressors had previously used the same doctrines of Christianity against them to justify 300+ years of slavery, genocide, and rape. The elucidation of why Christianity was so successful is beyond what any one book could bother to grasps. Albert Raboteau’s Canaan Land valiantly takes the charge to convey the often neglected narrative of the African American religious experience and it’s awe-inspiring capacity to instill meaning, hope, and dignity within a people(x). African enslavement in the United States is easily the dumbest, vilest, and most inhumane concept ever constructed. The actuality that slavery occurred without a kink for so long is still incredibly inconceivable. How could one person declare that another person is less than human, and therefore create an entire institution of treating them as less than to prove that point? Where does one get that type of audacity and witlessness? One may never know the mental ideology behind the birth of US slavery but the chronological history starts in the year 1619 on a boat voyage that landed twenty captured Africans in Jamestown, VA. Slavery existed before that first boat across the Atlantic Ocean came ashore to America, but this slave trade was the first and only to use skin color as a basis of slave status so effectively. 10 to 12 million African mothers, fathers, sons and daughters survived the middle passage, a journey between their homeland across the Atlantic and onto American shores. Before they were here, Africans thought of themselves to be more than merely just Africans, but as Ibo, Akan or Wolof(7). Yes, these people had their own