King’s Hosts Dr. David Daniels for Black History Month Lecture
1644 map of Africa | Photo courtesy of the Princeton University Library
King’s hosted an event for Black History Month on Thursday, Feb. 10. Guest speaker Dr. David Daniels, Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, covered various topics of Black culture while Dr. Tubbs, Associate Professor of Politics at King’s, moderated the event.
Daniels discussed Black Europe and Christian Africa. His goal was to critique some of the more common views of African Christian communities in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“I am pushing the envelope. I had a professor once that said, ‘I’m taking you out on a limb, and the limb could break,’” Daniels said.
He had five goals within the hour that he spoke to the room of students and faculty, including those joining on Zoom.
“Locate the origins of African American Christianity and African Christian communities of Africa and Europe,” Daniels said. “Identify the first generations of Africans who brought Christianity to the 13 colonies, beginning in 1619. Explore Christian communities in African Europe in which these African Christians lived. Spotlight early modern discourses which engage African Christians prior to the rise of modern racism,” and lastly, to “reconstruct the African and Afro-European origins of Black American Christianity and then propose some implications.”
He began by identifying the questions about Africans' capabilities regarding morality, spirituality and mentality, which arose because of modern racism and not before 1700.
“The whole question about are Africans human, do they have mental capacities, spiritual capacities, moral capacities, those questions really are not raised by educated people in Europe until around that time in any serious way,” Daniels said. “If that’s the case if there were no questions about then what is the experience of these Africans who are Christian prior to 1660 or at least prior to 1700?”
Daniels reiterated Christian Africa and how the questions of modern racism have left facts of Christians in Ethiopia neglected because the modern lens is shaped by this prejudice, as is evident by African presence in the universities, as teachers and as clergymen.
“This image of them then, again, modern racism–are they human, do they have the moral capacity, do they have spiritual capacities, can they actually be Christian,” Daniels said. “It’s not an issue because we already have a history of Ethiopians being Christian longer than Russians, Swedes, Germans, and therefore in their understanding of that, it’s not even an issue. That’s a modern racism issue, so let’s reconstruct the story.”
Daniels continued, “The story of African American Christianity begins in black African Europe...That African American Christianity emerged out of a context where elite African Christians engaged, leading Europeans like Erasmus, Luther and others and participated within a book reading culture. That African Christians were a topic in early modern discourses such as theology, philosophy, literature, music and biology.”
He addressed, in closing, the commonly brought-up responses to this new picture of Black Christians preceding the 1700s.
“‘So did Africans from West Africa need slavery to be introduced to Christianity?’ In this case, the answer would be no,” Daniels said. “They could have learned from Cape Verde. They could have learned from Kathu. They could have learned if they traded at all with anybody from Warri, Benin, or Alada, which is part of Nigeria.”
Finally, he spoke a helpful reminder, relevant to any liberal arts student, including the King’s community, given this new view of the origins of Black Christianity.
“If you’re taking a course related to the Enlightenment, I think you need to do some reading in the century before. Otherwise, you might reproduce racism,” Daniels said.