Person

E. Franklin Frazier

Q: Who first called slave religion the "invisible institution"?

The phrase is credited to E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Church in America, published after his death in 1962. It names the religion enslaved people practiced out of sight of the official churches. Albert J. Raboteau later used it as the subtitle of his 1978 history Slave Religion.

E. Franklin Frazier (24 September 1894 to 17 May 1962) was an American sociologist, head of the Department of Sociology at Howard University from 1934, and in 1948 the first Black president of the American Sociological Society. He studied with Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago. Apologetically he matters for one book and one thesis. The book is The Negro Church in America, published after his death and long used as the classic short overview of Black Christianity, which gave scholarship the phrase "invisible institution" for the secret worship of the enslaved. The thesis is that slavery in the United States destroyed the African cultural heritage of the people it held. That thesis is the scholarly form of the popular claim that enslaved Africans were "stripped of their religion" and handed the master's faith, and it is worth knowing exactly why it does not help that claim.

Life and career

The American Sociological Association's biography records a bachelor's degree with honors from Howard University (1916), a master's degree from Clark University (1920), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1931). He joined Howard in 1934 as professor and head of the sociology department and was professor emeritus there when he died in 1962. The Hartford Institute's encyclopedia entry by Hans A. Baer describes him as a "major student of race relations, the black family, and the black middle class," and adds that he "was not a specialist on religion," which makes the long influence of his church book the more striking.

His major works, as the ASA lists them, include The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), The Free Negro Family (1932), The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Black Bourgeoisie (1955 in French, 1957 in English). The Negro Family in the United States grew out of his dissertation and, in Wikipedia's summary, "analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s." Black Bourgeoisie was a sharp critique of the Black middle class and drew heavy criticism from it.

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The Negro Church in America

Frazier wrote the book before he died in 1962, and it was published posthumously by Schocken Books in New York. Bibliographic records differ on the first year: Wikipedia and the Hartford entry give 1963, while the Open Library record and John Bracey's bibliography of Frazier give a Schocken edition of 1964 (xii, 92 pages). The book is short. Its argument, as Baer summarizes it, is that the Black church "historically functioned as an institution of accommodation and refuge in a racist society but was being called upon to respond to processes of secularization and modernization." The visible section headings include "The Religion of the Slaves," "The Loss of Social Cohesion" and "The Christian Religion Provides a New Basis of Social Cohesion," which states the thesis in outline: slavery broke the old social bonds, and Christianity supplied new ones.

In 1974 Schocken issued a combined volume, The Negro Church in America together with C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Church Since Frazier (vi, 216 pages; New York: Schocken). The library record notes that Lincoln's essay "originated as the James Gray lectures given at Duke University in 1970." Penguin Random House still keeps that combined edition in print and describes it as "Frazier's study of the black church and an essay by Lincoln arguing that the civil rights movement saw the splintering of the traditional black church and the creation of new roles for religion."

The "invisible institution"

The phrase that outlived the book is "invisible institution," Frazier's name for the religion of the enslaved as it was practiced out of sight of the official churches. Wikipedia's article on invisible churches states that the phrase "was first used by E Franklin Frazier in The Negro Church in America to describe the spirituality on slave plantations that was primarily out of view of the mainstream American religious consciousness." Albert J. Raboteau took the phrase as the subtitle of the standard history of slave religion in 1978, and it is now the common scholarly name for what the codex treats under Hush Harbors.

The Frazier-Herskovits debate

Frazier's best-known scholarly quarrel was with the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, whose The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) argued that African Americans kept a great deal of their African heritage. James E. Blackwell's The Black Community (1985), reproduced by the New Jersey State Library, summarizes the two sides:

Frazier "claims that Herskovits and his followers overstate the case for African survivals and a black culture."
"He maintains that the black American's African past was gradually 'sloughed off' as a consequence of his experiences in America."
Herskovits, by contrast, held that "in spite of the harshness of slavery and its deliberate efforts to dispossess blacks of their cultural past, a black culture has survived in America."

Blackwell adds a correction that is often missed: "The disagreement between Frazier and Herskovits is not so much over kind as degree." The question was never whether anything African survived, but how much, and whether enough to shape later Black life. A paper by John Bracey on Frazier's thought likewise records his long running battle with Herskovits over the extent and influence of African survivals in Black American culture.

The debate also had a political edge. The Wikipedia article on Herskovits's book notes the worry at the time that segregationists might use it to argue that Black Americans could not assimilate.

Apologetic relevance

The objection. "Africans were stripped of their own religions by slavery and given Christianity by their masters, so Black Christianity is the slaveholder's religion." Frazier is the respectable scholarly name behind the first half of that sentence.

Why Frazier does not help it. Take his thesis at full strength and follow it through.

If the old religions were stripped away, the faith that replaced them was chosen and built by the enslaved. Frazier's own heading says the Christian religion "provides a new basis of social cohesion." The cohesion was among the enslaved, not between slave and master. Frazier's own name for that religion, the "invisible institution," means a religion practiced out of the master's sight.
It was practiced against the master's wishes. The record of secret worship is the record of people risking punishment to worship in their own way. Wikipedia's summary of the scholarship, drawing on Raboteau, describes enslaved believers who would "participate in worship gatherings at night in secret locations, risking severe punishment to do so." A religion people risk the lash to practice in secret is not a religion imposed on them by the people with the lash. See Hush Harbors.
The law confirms it. Colonial slaveholders had to legislate that baptism did not free a slave, which shows that the faith's implications worried them; see the Virginia acts of 1667 and 1705 in Christianity Spread Only by the Sword Objection Defeater.
If Frazier is wrong and Herskovits is right, then African traditions were not erased, and the "stripped" objection loses its premise in the other direction.

Either way the objection fails: on Frazier's reading the faith was the enslaved people's own construction, and on Herskovits's reading the old traditions were never fully lost. Raboteau's middle position, that African religions died as whole systems while their fragments shaped a Christianity the enslaved made their own, puts both halves together.

An honest limit. Frazier was not writing apologetics, and some of his judgments of the Black church were severe. Bracey notes that in The Negro Church in America he renewed his criticisms of "the more backward religious leaders." He is useful here as a hostile-enough witness, not as an ally.

Common questions this page answers

Q: Who was E. Franklin Frazier?

An American sociologist (1894 to 1962) who headed the sociology department at Howard University from 1934 and in 1948 became the first Black president of the American Sociological Society. He wrote on the Black family, the Black middle class and, in a short posthumous book, the Black church.

Q: Who first called slave religion the "invisible institution"?

The phrase is credited to E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Church in America, published after his death in 1962. It names the religion enslaved people practiced out of sight of the official churches. Albert J. Raboteau later used it as the subtitle of his 1978 history Slave Religion.

Q: Did Frazier think slavery erased African culture?

Largely, yes. In the summary of sociologist James E. Blackwell, Frazier held that the Black American's African past was gradually "sloughed off" under American slavery, and he thought Melville Herskovits overstated the African survivals. Blackwell also notes the two men disagreed more about degree than kind.

Q: Does Frazier's thesis prove enslaved Africans were forced into Christianity?

No. If Frazier is right that the old religions were lost, then the Christianity that took their place was built by the enslaved themselves, and his own term for it, the invisible institution, describes worship held in secret against the masters' wishes, often at risk of punishment. If Frazier is wrong, African traditions survived and were never simply stripped away.

Q: What is the 1974 edition of The Negro Church in America?

A combined Schocken volume that binds Frazier's book with C. Eric Lincoln's essay The Black Church Since Frazier, which began as Lincoln's James Gray lectures at Duke University in 1970. It is the edition most readers now use.