Holiness, Folk Culture, and the African-American Experience

In a collection of essays entitled The Sanctified Church, Zora Neale Hurston described the traditions
of the African American holiness and Pentecostal churches as a “revitalizing
element” in black music and religion. As someone deeply invested in African
American folk culture, Hurston saw holiness and Pentecostal churches as
facilitating a way of preserving slave religion and thus recapturing the
vibrancy and vitality of the African-American experience.

Two clear examples illustrating Hurston’s point are Charles
Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason. Jones and Mason were both part of the
newly formed National Baptist Convention under Elias Camp Morris when they
embraced ideas about holiness in 1896. The sons of former slaves, Jones and
Mason saw in the experience-driven theology of holiness as it stemmed from John
Wesley a vehicle by which to transmit slave religion to a new generation. They
were involved in a broader struggle in southern black life between progressives
and conservatives over which direction to take black religion. Their answer was
to move forward by reclaiming the folk culture of African-American slaves and through
them to transmit an African heritage.

Jones sought to transmit this heritage by combining the
Methodist tradition of hymn writing with an emphasis on African identity and
forms of worship. Beginning with the publication of his Jesus Only book of hymns in 1899,
Jones would go on to compose hundreds of hymns before his death in 1949. He
also wrote a body of poetry that he published in An Appeal to the Sons of Africa. The experience of divine presence
in entire sanctification reminded Jones that “Africa’s sons, we plainly see /
That in us wise divinity / A holy purpose has. Let’s find / The wisdom of the
heavenly mind.” Jones also followed Booker T. Washington’s philosophy that
religion could uplift African Americans when combined with a program of
educating the common man.

For his part, Charles H. Mason saw in Pentecostalism a way
to maintain traditional African worship. He emphasized dancing in the church
because the slaves had the ring dance and holiness and Pentecostal adherents
were known to break forth in spontaneous movement. He also introduced healing
rituals, which he saw as combining African and Pentecostal practices. In
addition to anointing cloths, Mason had a collection of healing roots that he
saw as vehicles of faith although he denied that he was importing anything “magical.”

While the movement to which Mason and Jones gave birth split into two denominations over the issue of Mason’s Spirit baptism, the two remain united in their effort to uplift the folk culture of southern black religion. Jones’ followers became the Church of Christ Holiness while Mason formed the Church of God in Christ, two denominations that remain today.

The fusion of holiness and slave religion in the service of a folk culture that secured an African identity had a powerful effect
on the “saints.” One can see this impact particularly in the 1950s with the
emergence of Jazz artists like Charles Mingus who consciously mined their
holiness heritage as a resource for their music. Mingus recalled in his own
family the tension between going to the local African Methodist Episcopal
church with his father and then going to the holiness church with his mother. This tension stemmed from the broader struggle to define African-American religious life. Mingus sought to bring the ecstasy and struggle of holiness worship into Jazz
compositions such as “Haitian Fightin’ Song” and “Wednesday Night Prayer
Meeting.” These Jazz tunes are replete with the worship of the holiness and
Pentecostal churches. Indeed, they are so filled with the call-and-response dynamic of holiness worship that many Pentecostals and holiness folks would recognize Mingus’ shouts and call outs immediately. They provide a musical counterpart to the intense worship
and refusal to surrender to the forces of death.

In addition to the Jazz of the 1950s, many African-American
artists began to cross over from gospel to pop. Sam Cooke, whose father was a
minister in Charles Price Jones’ Church of Christ Holiness denomination, was
one such artist. Cooke’s final song “A Change is Gonna Come” became an anthem
of the black struggle for civil rights after his tragic death in 1964. One can
detect holiness themes in the song, especially in the final stanza: “Oh there
been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long / But now I think I’m able
to carry on / It’s been a long, a long time coming / But I know a change gonna
come, oh yes it will.” There is a persistence, a perseverance that echoes the
holiness optimism and refusal to surrender. This optimism came from the confidence that the saint had experienced God’s presence in the context of worship. 

What one sees in Charles Mingus’ Jazz compositions and Sam
Cooke’s movement from gospel to soul music is the power of folk culture. Each in his own way attests to the success
of Jones’ and Mason’s efforts to preserve slave religion within a holiness and
Pentecostal ethos. From this angle, one can also appreciate the challenges in Orthodox Christianity over ethnic enclaves of Orthodox Christians in the U.S. Greeks, Copts, Russians, etc., want to preserve the relationship between folk culture and religion as a way of transmitting their identity to a new generation.

The fusion of holiness and African-American spirituality
represented by Jones and Mason shows the limitations of Richard Niebuhr’s
Christ and Culture model. Both men were deeply invested in the facilitation and
propagation of folk culture as the means to sustain the black family in the
south and during the Great Migration to the northern cities. With its emphasis
on encounter with the divine and separation from the world, the message of
holiness provided a vehicle by which to preserve a way of life and empower a
people. Such an approach simultaneously affirmed and developed a folk culture
while eschewing an encroachment of a broader culture that attempted to
assimilate African Americans into an “American” way of life. It is no mistake
that during the civil-rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, musicians like Charles
Mingus and Sam Cooke would draw on these deep resources to fuel their own “black
consciousness,” a consciousness that connected their identity to a folk culture
forged at the intersection of region, religion, and family. It was this folk
culture that maintained an enchanted world and inspired them to tame it through
their own creativity.