Abstract
The church has been the central institution of the Afro-American community. Black people are incorrigibly religious. Religion is the opiate
of the black masses. The black church is but a pale reflection of white Christianity. The black preacher is a protean hustler preying on the
credulity of his congregation. The list of cliches is too long to recite in its entirety; so let me just conclude with a couple of quotations from Elmer T. Clark, an authoritative scholar of American religion: "Evangelistic work among the Negroes [in the antebellum years] was beset with many discouragements owing to the illiteracy, the superstition, and the general backwardness of the slaves. Fresh from the most degraded barbarism, these people were with difficulty made to understand the fundamentals of Christianity. Wildly emotional, their
religious services were prone to become mere orgies of unrestrained frenzy. The Negroes did not always connect religion with morality; but they were—and are today—“incurably religious.”1