In 1737, Jonathan Edwards published A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, one of the earliest written evangelical accounts describing the Great Awakening. In it, he mentions the presence of “several Negroes” taking part in the revivals. Yet, in his account, they are voiceless, passive recipients. Evangelical historiography has largely followed in Edwards’ footsteps. However, this has given a skewed perception of what early evangelicalism was like and the vivified diversity present in it from its early days.
Popular histories have often focused on white male revival leaders to tell the story of early American evangelicalism, with marginal glances toward blacks. Mark Noll’s The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, for example, is a wonderful but typical example. It should be noted that the rise of evangelicalism was also the age of John Marrant, George Liele, Phillis Wheatley, and many other black leaders and participants who helped shepherd and spread the nascent movement.
Early America was a world of heterogeneity. It was a melting pot of people from Western Europe, West and West Central Africa, and various indigenous nations. Though a multitude of people, racial divisions were a stark reality. The evangelical revivals entered this complex tapestry and bled through the color lines, bringing together Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans in exuberant worship.
A window into this interlocking mosaic can be seen through the life of John Marrant, who first appeared on the evangelical scene as a disciple of the prominent evangelist, George Whitefield.
Marrant was born into a free black family in New York in 1755. After the death of his father when he was around four years old, his mother moved the family from Florida to Georgia in search of work before ultimately settling in Charleston (then called “Charles-Town”), South Carolina. Despite his early transience, his mother made sure he was educated and, in his early teens, apprenticed to ensure his financial future. Marrant found early success as a trained musician, excelling in horns and violins. The combination of success and youth led him down a road of deviance and rambunctious associations.
One night in 1770, he and a friend noticed a crowded meeting happening in a nearby church. His friend dared him to disturb the meeting by blowing his French horn while the preacher was speaking. As Marrant entered, the preacher, who happened to be George Whitefield, disturbed him by locking eyes, pointing his finger straight at him, and announcing his text for the night, Amos 4:12: “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” Marrant fainted on the spot.
He recounted the incident in his 1785 book, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black. Of that eventful night he recalled, “The Lord accompanied the word with such power, that I was struck to the ground, and lay both speechless and senseless near half an hour.” His narrative would go on to depict Whitefield, with tender pastoral love, grasping his hand to lead him in prayer. Detailing the moment of his conversion, he relayed, “The Lord was pleased to set my soul at perfect liberty, and being filled with joy, I began to praise the Lord immediately.” Whitefield would visit Marrant many more times while in Charleston, and the two would go on to strengthen their friendship as builders of a small Calvinistic branch of Methodism.
Like many evangelical converts of his day, Marrant’s faith had an immediate effect on his life. He engrossed himself in the scriptures and began to share his faith. His passion led him to become a missionary to the Georgia Cherokee Nation as a teenager. Becoming fluent in their language, he spent two years among them before returning to his family and ministering to many slaves in Charleston.
At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Marrant enlisted and sided with the British as a Loyalist. Subsequently, he was transported to England, where he continued his ministry among white evangelical enthusiasts. By 1785, he was ordained and sent to Nova Scotia to pastor a congregation of Loyalist blacks who had settled there after the war. His fire for revival continued as he entered Canadian shores. In 1790, he published A Journal of Rev. John Marrant, in which he recounted his initial months in Nova Scotia preaching to large crowds of blacks, whites, and indigenous groups alike.
While Marrant’s life was extraordinary in many ways, it was also emblematic of early black evangelicalism.
From the First Great Awakening, blacks touched by the Spirit in the revivals shared their faith evangelistically, becoming leaders and pastors, helping to spread the evangelical tradition. Some enslaved blacks, like Jupiter Hammon, ministered primarily to their own people. Others who started as slaves, such as Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, were eventually emancipated by evangelical masters and shared the gospel beyond the confines of racial and national barriers.
Black evangelicals participated in the transnational network of evangelicalism, particularly through connections in England, where their incipient conversion narratives were published. These works, such as Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself or Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, served the same purpose as Edwards’ early account of the Great Awakening. They were presented as witnesses to God’s extraordinary activity in the American revivals, with their narratives showcasing the power of God without respect to race.
As the Second Great Awakening emerged, moving southward and westward, accompanied by abolitionist fervor, black evangelicals, slave and free, increased dramatically with the growth of Methodist and Baptist churches. Marrant would have shared a milieu with southern black evangelical pastors, church planters, and missionaries such as George Liele and David George, who also ministered cross-culturally and internationally.
In a racially stratified environment, early evangelicalism was especially attractive to enslaved blacks, as it offered the hope that Christianity would overcome racial divides and the peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Howbeit, in the years following the Revolutionary War, white southern evangelicals would largely sever the tie between evangelicalism and abolitionism in their region.
Writing about this period, scholar of African American religious history Albert Raboteau noted in his book Slave Religion, that “Increasingly, slavery was not only accepted as an economic fact of life, but defended as a positive good, sanctioned by Scripture and capable of producing a Christian social order based on the observance of mutual duty, slave to master and master to slave.”
Methodists and Baptists, the denominations that held the largest number of blacks who had entered Christianity through the revivals, split into proslavery and antislavery groups primarily along the lines of the North and South. As white evangelicals were dividing over slavery, black evangelicals were increasingly uniting against it.
In northern states moving toward abolition after the Revolutionary War, black evangelical slaves openly petitioned for their freedom based on their Christian convictions. Evangelical biblicism had opened the way for enslaved blacks in the North to have limited access to education so they could, in some circumstances, read the Bible for themselves. Using the little education they had, they advocated for themselves in appeals like the “Petition of 1779 by Slaves of Fairfield County for the Abolition of Slavery in Connecticut,” where they argued slavery was against the “whole tenor of the Christian religion.”
In the South, the decades leading up to the Civil War saw numerous slave narratives produced by runaways who were a part of evangelical denominations and had such masters. Among the most famous, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, along with many others, witnessed to the rejection of proslavery Christianity held by the enslaved.
Ties that were once closely knit through evangelical egalitarianism were strained by the persistence of slavery and the desire of black evangelicals to theologically challenge doctrines that upheld ideas of white supremacy.
Marrant’s life displayed this divisive tension and foreshadowed the coming results.
He had initially formed close ties with Whitefield, who began his ministry as a denouncer of slavery. Time in Georgia, a need to finance his orphanage, and coming to see slavery as an instrument for Christianization led Whitefield to become a defender of the peculiar institution. Whitefield’s orbit followed suit. In Marrant’s small collective of Calvinistic Methodists, he was surrounded by slaveholding evangelicals who did not want him to focus on arguments between abolitionists and proponents of slavery.
The editor of his first publication, the narrative portraying his conversion, early missionary journey, and ministry, removed all criticisms he made about proslavery Christianity and any references to the racialized violence he witnessed from whites in Charleston. Refusing to be silenced, Marrant republished his narrative under his direct supervision, incorporating his antislavery theology. His once widely cross-cultural ministry increasingly became situated among like-minded black evangelicals.
Like Marrant, black evangelicals in the North and South, in their own denominations, in separate churches in shared denominations, and in hush harbors formed communities where they could freely express their convictions. Their collective organizing became the basis for the story of the rise of the black church in America.
Because blacks and whites largely separated into their own corners, their shared history in evangelicalism also parted ways historiographically. The history of the early black church found a home in Africana studies, focusing more on the growth of Christianity among blacks and less on the kind of Christianity they practiced. In contrast, the history of early evangelicalism predominantly followed the life of its white leaders and subscribers.
Despite our inheritance of segregated narratives, the history of early evangelicalism is an integrated story – one in which black evangelicals and their theology always existed.
Jessica N. Janvier, PhD 
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