Person

Albert J. Raboteau

Albert J. Raboteau (4 September 1943 to 18 September 2021) was an American historian of religion who taught at Princeton University from 1982 to 2013 and held the Henry W. Putnam chair in religion. His first book, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1978; updated 2004), is the standard history of how enslaved Africans in the United States received, reshaped and made their own the Christian faith. It takes its subtitle from E. Franklin Frazier and charts a course between Frazier, who held that slavery stripped away the African heritage, and Melville J. Herskovits, who held that much of it survived.

Life and career

Raboteau was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and died in Princeton, New Jersey. Wikipedia records a B.A. from Loyola University of Los Angeles (1964), an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Yale University (1974). His Yale dissertation became Slave Religion. At Princeton he chaired the Department of Religion (1987 to 1992), was appointed Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion in 1992, served as dean of the Graduate School (1992 to 1993), and became professor emeritus in 2013.

He was raised Roman Catholic and later converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, taking the name Panteleimon, and served as lay coordinator of an Orthodox mission in Rocky Hill, New Jersey. His other books include A Fire in the Bones (1995), Canaan Land (1999) and American Prophets (2016).

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Slave Religion (1978)

Wikipedia notes that the book appeared "just as the black studies movement was gaining steam" and was part of a wave of scholarship that brought slave narratives into mainstream history. Paul Harvey, writing a tribute to the book on the Religion in American History blog in 2008, summarizes its argument in three movements.

1. The death of the gods. "In the initial section of his book, Raboteau depicts the 'death of the gods,' meaning the inevitable demise of African religions in any systemic form." On this point Raboteau grants Frazier much of his case for the United States.
2. Survivals nonetheless. "There were 'retentions' and 'survivals,' fragments of surviving African religious customs (as Melville Herskovits had documented in his older classic Myth of the Negro Past)." On this point Raboteau grants Herskovits his.
3. A religion of their own. The enslaved "also created their own covert religious culture, one with its own distinctive theology and rituals. In services held in slave cabins, in the woods at night, and in 'hush arbors,' enslaved African Americans developed a religious culture that brought together elements of their African past and their American evangelical training." In Harvey's summary: "While African religions died, from their remnants African-American Christianity took its characteristic cultural forms."

That is the middle position. The old religions did not survive as whole systems, but they did not vanish without trace either, and what grew in their place was neither the master's religion nor the old religion, but a Christianity the enslaved built for themselves.

The "invisible institution" in practice

Raboteau's research is the main source for the risk attached to secret worship. Wikipedia's article on invisible churches, drawing on him, describes enslaved believers who might attend public congregations and also "participate in worship gatherings at night in secret locations, risking severe punishment to do so." It also records that some mixed congregations had far more enslaved members than masters in attendance. See Hush Harbors.

Apologetic relevance

Against "they were stripped of their religion and given the master's." Raboteau's book is the answer in scholarly form. It concedes the loss of the African religious systems, documents the African fragments that remained, and shows that the Christianity of the enslaved was practiced in secret, against the masters' wishes, and in forms the masters did not control. A faith people risk punishment to keep in the woods at night is their own. See Christianity Spread Only by the Sword Objection Defeater and Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater.

On the slaveholders' Christianity. Raboteau's account fits the distinction Frederick Douglass drew in 1845 between "the Christianity of this land" and "the Christianity of Christ." The enslaved were not passive recipients of the first; they were practitioners of the second. See Black Christian Agency.

A scholar of faith. Raboteau wrote as a historian, not an apologist, but he was himself a practicing Christian, and his later books include American Prophets (2016). His history of slave religion is not apologetics, which is why it carries weight in an argument.

See also

• E. Franklin Frazier, who coined "invisible institution" and argued the African heritage was lost
• Melville J. Herskovits, who argued for African survivals
• C. Eric Lincoln, sociologist of the Black church that grew from the invisible institution
• Hush Harbors, the secret worship Raboteau documented
• Slave Bible, what the official religion tried to keep from the enslaved
• Black Christian Agency, the broader pattern his book established
• Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher formed in the setting Raboteau describes
• Black People Shouldnt Be Christian, where Slave Religion is cited as the foundational study