The charge runs like this: enslaved Africans were handed a slaveholder’s religion, accepted it without thought, and the Black church grew out of that act of control. It is a claim about history, so it can be tested. The documentary record answers it plainly. Within a single lifetime, Black Christians in Philadelphia built a mutual aid society, raised money for their own house of worship against organized opposition, won legal separation, and formed a denomination they governed themselves. That record shows people choosing, organizing and arguing. It does not show passive absorption.
Lisa Fields stated the claim fairly when she raised it with the historian Dr. Nicholas Rowe, who teaches history and peace studies at Gordon College. She described it as a narrative “that suggests that slaves were not thinking, and they just took this faith of the slave master without critical thinking.” If that were true, the record should show Black congregations existing only where white authorities created and supervised them, and ending wherever those authorities said no. The question is whether the documents follow that trail.
The part of the charge that is true
Some slaveholders did use Christianity as a tool. Rowe says certain owners exposed enslaved people to the faith while taking Scripture out of context, because “they thought that by making them Christian they would be more amenable to the institutional structure of slavery and the social order.” Any honest answer has to begin by admitting that intent was real.
The same evidence complicates the story immediately. Rowe adds that “a lot of slave owners resisted that wholeheartedly, because inherently Christian message talks about freedom.” If Christianity worked simply as pacification, many of the people holding the tool would not have feared it. Their resistance is evidence about what they thought the faith contained.
Then there is what enslaved believers did with it. Alongside supervised services, which might have white observers present to keep watch, people gathered at night in the woods, away from the plantations, in shelters built from branches called brush harbors. There they prayed, sought God, and talked about meaning and freedom. A faith that people sneak away to practice on their own terms has already slipped out of its supposed owners’ hands.
Rowe offers a second correction, which rests on his authority and is worth checking against the wider literature: not every African brought to the Americas arrived without Christian faith. He points to believers from the Congo region who were mostly Catholic. If that holds, it removes the assumption that the faith only ever traveled one way, from captor to captive.
The Philadelphia test case
The clearest test is the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Rowe calls the AME, “for all intents and purposes,” the first denomination “that is institutionally and autonomously controlled by people of African descent.” The scope of that claim matters. Separate Black congregations existed earlier, among Baptists and others. The AME’s distinction is denominational self-government.
Its founder, Richard Allen, was born into slavery around Philadelphia in the middle of the 1700s. He came to faith at seventeen under traveling Methodist preachers, quickly proved gifted at preaching, and drew the attention of Francis Asbury, a founding leader of American Methodism. His enslaver was converted under his ministry, and Allen was eventually able to work and obtain his freedom.
Philadelphia drew freed people of African descent while Pennsylvania was moving to end slaveholding. Many of the newcomers were unchurched and poor. Allen preached wherever he could, including open fields, and brought converts to St. George’s, a mostly white Methodist church that had asked him to minister to its few Black members. It scheduled him at five in the morning, ahead of the regular service.
The sequence that follows matters for the charge. Before Allen and Absalom Jones formed a church, they formed the Free African Society. “It was a mutual aid society,” Rowe explains, created to meet the economic needs of Black Philadelphians, including helping one another find work. He reads it as a theological choice as much as a practical one: “He saw the Christian community as meeting the needs of the whole person.” Institutions like this one were planned and financed from inside the community, before any break with St. George’s.
Meanwhile conditions at St. George’s worsened. As Black attendance grew, Black members were told to give up their pews and stand along the walls. The church raised money from Black and white members alike for an expansion that included a balcony. Then came the incident recorded in Allen’s memoir. During prayer, with the congregation on its knees, church officials began physically pulling Black worshipers up and ordering them to move. Allen asked whether they could at least finish praying. They were told no. When the prayer ended, the Black congregants rose together and walked out. Allen wrote, in Rowe’s retelling, that the church was no longer troubled with them.
Allen and Jones had already asked St. George’s and the denominational leadership for permission to build their own house of worship and been refused. After the walkout, they raised the money anyway. The local Methodist elders sent representatives to stop the fundraising, threatened to read Allen out of meeting, which amounted to excommunication, and took him to court. Allen pressed back. The congregation moved a building onto the site of a former blacksmith shop and held its first service there. The AME logo still carries a cross and a blacksmith’s anvil in acknowledgment of that site.
Rowe estimates that four or five years passed between the walkout and the building. Eventually, through a lawsuit, the congregation won legal separation from the Methodist hierarchy. Other independent Black congregations, including an important one in New York, asked to join under a shared church polity. Allen was designated leader and wrote what Rowe calls the constitutional documents of the AME. That structure joined discipleship, teaching and training to care for material needs, with the mutual aid work tied to the church, and it continues in a denomination that still runs its own publishing house.
Schools and relief after the war
The evidence for the later decades is thinner, and it should be weighed as such. Rowe argues that by the end of the Civil War the AME had the longest pedigree of the Black denominations, and that when newly freed people needed help, the church was ready because “they had the structures in place to try to do that.” He describes local AME bishops and churches setting up relief organizations and schools, consistent with the Free African Society’s founding purpose.
On the specifics, Rowe hedges himself. He says Wilberforce University in Ohio is, he believes, AME-related and comes out of that work. He also says plainly that the AME was far from the only body doing this. So the transcript supports a general pattern, an older Black-governed denomination taking on education and relief during Reconstruction, but not detailed claims about which schools it founded or when. Those details need independent confirmation before anyone leans on them. What the pattern does suggest is continuity: the habit of pairing worship with mutual aid, visible in Philadelphia, carried into the period when it was most needed.
How far the evidence goes
Much of the founding story rests on one source: Allen’s memoir, which Rowe calls the best account available and dates to near the end of Allen’s life, in the 1830s. It is a primary source, but it is a participant’s account written decades later. Where no independent records confirm a detail, that detail remains Allen’s testimony.
Rowe himself marks several limits. Historians dispute whether the walkout was spontaneous or planned after weeks of mistreatment. The account does not make clear what the full plan for the new balcony was. And Rowe acknowledges he has not done much work on Absalom Jones, who was connected to the Anglican church. Those admissions make his account more trustworthy, because they separate what the sources show from what a storyteller might fill in.
The core facts are harder to dispute: an independent denomination existed, it was led by people of African descent, and white church authorities tried to stop it. Opposition alone does not prove independence; authorities sometimes resist things for reasons of their own. But here the opposition sits beside the fundraising, the legal fight and the written constitution, and together they describe people acting on their own judgment over the objections of those who supposedly controlled them.
The strongest objection: Allen stayed Methodist
Allen did not invent a new religion. He kept Methodist doctrine and practice, and two of his most important financial supporters were white, among them Benjamin Rush, whom Rowe identifies as a Philadelphia signer of the Declaration of Independence. Doesn’t that make the faith borrowed after all?
Receiving a tradition is different from being passively shaped by it, and the record shows Allen weighing traditions and choosing. He stayed with Methodism partly because he came to faith there and partly because he judged its ministry better for reaching ordinary people. He thought the Anglicans too intellectual for most common people, and he valued Methodism’s appeal to both head and heart. His own congregation disagreed for a time and went with the Anglicans, who were treating them better, before changing course. Members of the community reached different conclusions and argued them out, which is what the charge says did not happen.
The funding points the same way. Rowe describes Rush’s religious views as having moved toward universalism, the belief that everyone will finally reach heaven. The people who most helped Allen held theology he did not share, while the local hierarchy that claimed orthodoxy worked against him. Lisa Fields drew the conclusion: “So he didn’t let the financial contribution change his theological conviction.” His doctrine differed from both his allies and his opponents, which is hard to explain if he held it to please the powerful.
Methodism’s own history adds an irony. John Wesley opposed slavery, and early American Methodism barred slaveholders from full membership before compromising, partly over economic pressure and partly to keep access to enslaved people. Asbury disliked the compromise and preached at the dedication of Allen’s church despite how the local leadership behaved. Of the obstructing church leaders, Rowe’s diagnosis is that “the Praxis was completely separated,” because “their theology did not challenge the presupposition of the inferiority of race.” On the record presented here, Black believers in Philadelphia took the faith’s claims about human worth more seriously than some of the white leaders who taught it.
What follows for the original claim
Rowe’s assessment is that the AME “confounded the presuppositions of this racial order. It really did.” It undercut claims about Black inferiority, inability to organize and intellectual capacity. He adds: “An autonomous black institution is threatening to the social order because it undermines the narrative of the social order.” That reading fits the resistance Allen met, though it is Rowe’s interpretation of why the resistance came.
Underneath the history is a theological claim about why any of this happened: “the Holy Spirit directly deals with persons.” Black believers did not need white mediation to meet God. Rowe ties this to the teaching that all people are made in God’s image, which rests on Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” His argument is that Black Christians read that teaching as applying to themselves, and it put them at odds with the social order their oppressors defended.
Rowe also points to a single line near the end of Allen’s memoir, in which Allen looks forward to meeting in heaven those blessed by his ministry, both Black and white. Rowe takes it to mean white people were willing to serve under Black leadership, and he puts the larger point this way: “It was not a matter of black folk keeping white folk out. It was black folk being rejected by white folk.” One line in one memoir is a suggestive basis for that reading, not proof, and Rowe himself says he is going out on a limb.
None of this shows that slaveholders never used Scripture to control people, and none of it proves Christianity true. It answers a narrower and more specific claim. If the Black church began as passive acceptance of a religion handed down by the powerful, its founding generation should have left a record of compliance. The founding generation in Philadelphia left a mutual aid society, a contested building, a lawsuit, a constitution and a denomination that outlived the people who tried to stop it. Anyone repeating the borrowed-religion story has to account for that record, not around it.