"Following Mays's lead, African American religion came to be seen as a static entity that either promoted or inhibited social change....
Its African character—of which improvisation and spontaneity, call and response, polyrhythms, and intense feeling are main features—was ignored in the attempt to delineate particular progressive or socially accommodative themes. In other words, the method of interpretation did not fit the method of the people under study. This acultural view of Mays can also be seen in the work of Joseph Washington. Washington fails to recognize what I term the cultural dialectical character of the spirituals as the carrier of African meanings...
...these passages demonstrate the ethnocentric dialectical denial of the African cultural past that followed in the wake of Mays's work. Washington argues that African American religion may have retained the form but not the meaning of African religion. This dualistic position not only creates a political dualism but also contributes to a cultural dualism because the African religious foundations of African American religion are obscured. This opposition of form and function continues to plague Black theologians.
This dualistic perspective separates form from function, structure from meaning, and style from content. It is dialectical in understanding African American religion as the result of interaction between the oppressed and the oppressor, but there is little acknowledgment that form also signifies function, that cultural structures continue to carry meaning, and that style often contains content.
- Black theologians generally have accepted the premises and problems of this dualistic dialectical methodology and ask either-or questions that require clear, unambiguous responses. A dialectical position, however, calls for a both-and position that acknowledges the presence of both African and American meanings.
- African American religion has been concerned with orthodoxy and maintenance, as is any expression of religion, and it also has been concerned with issues of social transformation. African American religion shares African and evangelical Christian American characteristics because it was created out of a social situation that contained both elements. The advantage of the cultural-structural methodology is that it reveals both the political and the cultural structures of African American religion. It does not deny either the political or the religious nature of the religion of African Americans because it is faithful to describing it in its fullness.
By adopting a dualistic, either-or perspective, Black theologians have not been able to appreciate the depth of the dialectical nature of African American religion. The adoption of an ethnocentric theological position has contributed to this methodological failure because it does not acknowledge the presence of African cultural characteristics."
Matthews, D. H. (1998b). Honoring the ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature. Oxford University Press.
-Yogabrofessor
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