Abstract
In a classic essay on Black religion W. E. B. DuBois wrote: “Three things characterized this religion of the slave—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.” Although this classic description captures the dynamic of the Africans’ earliest appropriation of evangelical Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic, contemporary historical studies reveal a more complex and comprehensive pattern of religious development. From a perspective that includes not only what DuBois called “an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites . . . roughly designated as Voodooism,” but also the institutionalization of incipient slave worship in Black American churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three dominant themes or motifs stand out as foundational from the Jamestown handing to the present. They are survival, elevation, and liberation.