Part II. Early Black Protestantism (18th–Mid-19th Century): Ecclesiology, Prophets, and Poets

By the late eighteenth century, Black theology in the Americas began to move from survival to structure—from whispered prayers in cabins to public sermons and printed words. The age of revolution—American, Haitian, and French—raised new questions about liberty and faith. Could Christianity, so often weaponized to defend slavery, also become the ground for freedom? For African Americans, the answer was yes—but only if theology was reclaimed, re-voiced, and re-lived in the face of bondage.

This era marks the rise of a distinct Black Protestant witness. While white theologians such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hodge explored divine sovereignty and grace from positions of privilege, Black preachers and writers asked far more immediate questions: Does God hear the slave? Does God demand resistance? Can the church itself be free? Their responses laid the foundation of a faith forged in protest.

Institutional Builders: Allen & Jones

In Philadelphia, an act of resistance reshaped American Christianity. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both formerly enslaved, worshiped at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where racial segregation forced Black congregants to kneel apart. Around 1792, after being pulled from their knees mid-prayer, they walked out—a protest against spiritual subjugation.

Five years earlier, in 1787, they had co-founded the Free African Society, a mutual-aid fellowship combining worship, education, and relief for the sick and poor. This organization became the seed of both the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (under Jones) and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (under Allen)—the first independent Black denomination in the United States (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors, 1833).

Allen’s sermons and pamphlets—especially his Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice (ca. 1794)—framed slavery not merely as a social evil but as a theological contradiction. For Allen and Jones, church building was liberation work. Ecclesiology—who gathers, how, and why—became theology in action. The Black church was not only sanctuary; it was a declaration: We will not pray in chains.

Prophets & Poets: Wheatley, Stewart, Lee

As these institutions took root, a new generation spoke with pen and pulpit.

Phillis Wheatley (1753 – 1784), enslaved in Boston and later freed, used poetry to expose the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders. Her 1773 collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, includes “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” where she rebuked racism within a language of providence:

“Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”

Wheatley’s verse was theology disguised as art—subtle yet subversive, balancing piety and protest within eighteenth-century constraints.

Maria W. Stewart (1803 – 1879), a free Black woman in Boston, became one of the first American women—certainly the first Black woman—to deliver public lectures on religion and social justice. Her 1832 address, “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?”, invoked Scripture to rouse courage and civic duty. Stewart proclaimed that silence was sin, and faith demanded public action. In her voice, we hear the first echoes of what scholars later call womanist theology—a theology born at the intersection of race, gender, and survival.

Jarena Lee (1783 – 1864), an AME itinerant preacher, chronicled her divine call in The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1836). Denied ordination because of her sex, she preached nonetheless, writing that “if the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman, seeing he died for her also?” Lee insisted that divine vocation overruled human hierarchy. In her testimony lies the seed of a gender-inclusive Black theology: the Spirit chooses its own messengers.

Together, these women claimed that the Spirit speaks through Black women as powerfully as through men—and that their voices belong at the heart of church and struggle alike.

Jeremiads & Resistance: Walker, Truth, Douglass, Garnet

The 1820s–1850s brought a generation of prophets whose words still burn.

In 1829, David Walker, a free Black Bostonian, published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Written in the style of an Old-Testament jeremiad, the Appeal declared that divine judgment awaited a nation proclaiming liberty while upholding slavery. The pamphlet was banned in the South and allegedly smuggled in clothing bales—evidence of both its danger and its reach.

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797 – 1883), born enslaved in New York, became an itinerant preacher and abolitionist. Her extemporaneous 1851 speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio—later remembered as “Ain’t I a Woman?”—confronted racism and sexism alike. Drawing on her own body, labor, and motherhood, she embodied a theology of incarnation: Black womanhood itself bore the image of God.

Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895) offered perhaps the century’s sharpest theological critique. In the appendix to his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he distinguished between the “Christianity of Christ” and the “Christianity of this land.” His 1852 oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, stands as a searing rebuke of American civil religion. For Douglass, authentic faith was inseparable from justice.

Henry Highland Garnet (1815 – 1882) went even further. In his Address to the Slaves of the United States (1843), delivered at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, he proclaimed that resistance to slavery was not only permissible but divinely mandated: “Brethren, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties.” Garnet’s theology fused Scripture with revolution—the Exodus not as metaphor but as marching orders.

Themes: From Survival to Prophecy

This generation made it impossible to separate theology from abolition. Four motifs stand out:

Ecclesiology as liberation: Allen and Jones showed that independent Black institutions could incarnate freedom.
Prophetic critique: Walker, Douglass, and Garnet harnessed Scripture to expose national sin.
Proto-womanist theology: Wheatley, Stewart, Lee, and Truth claimed divine authority for Black women’s experience.
Theology as resistance: Black faith was not speculative—it was embodied, abolitionist, and urgent.

Must-Reads

Two enduring texts capture this spirit:

David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829): the clearest biblical jeremiad against American slavery.
Frederick Douglass’s What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852): a theological and moral indictment of civil religion whose resonance endures.

Conclusion: Theology with Its Sleeves Rolled Up

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Black theology found its public voice. It preached in churches, thundered in pamphlets, sang in poetry, and marched in protest. While white pulpits often defended or ignored slavery, Black Christians proclaimed that the God of Exodus and the God of Christ stands with the oppressed and demands liberation.

This was theology with its sleeves rolled up—born in protest, refined by suffering, and unwavering in its insistence that faith without justice is false. If Part I revealed survival made sacred, Part II reveals protest made prophetic.

References & Further Reading

Allen, Richard. The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1833).
Allen, Richard. Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice (ca. 1794).
Stewart, Maria W. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835).
Lee, Jarena. The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1836).
Walker, David. An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829).
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).
Garnet, Henry Highland. Address to the Slaves of the United States (1843).
Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).
Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave (1850).