Christopher Cameron is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his BA in History from Keene State College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research and teaching interests include early American history, the history of slavery and abolition, and African American religious and intellectual history. Cameron is the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. He is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition and Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement. His research has been supported by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His current book project, entitled Liberal Religion and Race in America, explores the intersection of race and liberal religion dating back to the mid-18th century and the varied ways that liberal theology has informed African American religion and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Here we discuss African American Freethought.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have some interesting facets to work on American Secularism and African American religion experience and, in turn, atheism. Before this, though, there is, as always, an origin story. How did you grow up, e.g., family life and background, style of parenting, and community context?
Prof. Chris Cameron: I was born on an American army base in Heidelberg, Germany, where my mother Sylvie Cameron was stationed in the early 1980s. I am the oldest of five children and grew up primarily in New Hampshire. My Catholic and French Canadian family had migrated there in the early 1960s, and what little religious upbringing I had revolved around midnight mass on Christmas Eve or attending mass on Easter. I had a pretty turbulent childhood and moved around quite a bit between New Hampshire and the Bronx. I spent time in foster care and was even homeless for a while. I got into a life of crime pretty young and started dealing drugs at age 16, which would lead to my incarceration on multiple felony drug charges in 2001. Oddly enough, this was just the kick in the ass I needed to get my life together. I got my GED while I was in jail and started going to community college soon after my release in 2002. Within 8 years, I would have a BA, MA, and Ph.D. and my current job as a history professor.
Jacobsen: What sparked interest in African American religious and intellectual history?
Cameron: I began working in this area during my senior year of undergrad at Keene State College in New Hampshire. I read the autobiography of a formerly enslaved man in the 18th century, Olaudah Equiano, and was very fascinated by his use of religious rhetoric in making the case for the abolition of slavery. I wrote a short research paper just on him but would continue working on religion and Black abolitionist thought in graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill, with the dissertation I completed there in 2010 eventually becoming my first book–To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement. I then turned my scholarly interest in Black intellectual history into the founding of a new organization in 2014–the African American Intellectual History Society. This organization aims to promote scholarship and teaching in this field and to support it financially with fellowships for graduate students and faculty as well as annual conferences.
Jacobsen: African Americans, in my conversations and interviews when it comes up, who identify as freethinkers tend to remark on a complex history with the American church. The important role of the church in community organizing during the Civil Rights movement while, at the same time, the use and abuse of the Bible, the church, male authority figures, slave masters, and the God concept, to enslave, abuse, whip, chain, castrate, rape, humiliate, and intergenerationally torture a people. Some see black identity, African American identity, tied to the church and the God concept, so, when rejecting them, one becomes a community and social outcast. What’s your experience?
Cameron: My experience is actually very different from that of many Black freethinkers. I am mixed race and was raised by my white French Canadian family, primarily in New Hampshire. Religion was not particularly important in my family growing up. I actually embraced religion while incarcerated in 2001 and began to move away from it about 7 years later while I was in graduate school in North Carolina. Much of my peer group–fellow graduate students in the humanities–were already atheists so I felt welcomed and accepted. And when I started to be more public about my nonbelief, my family was fine with it. Even though most of them are believers, they rarely go to church and religion is just not a big part of their lives so it did not seem to matter to them that I did not believe. So I really lucked out in not being ostracized by my community for my lack of belief in God, but as you point out in the question, this situation is not the case for many other African Americans and they often have to choose between nonbelief and their families/communities. Many choose to stay silent about their religious identities for fear of ostracizing these groups.
Jacobsen: What seems like the greatest tragedy of the God concept and the Bible in advancement of European Christian colonial, institutional racism as a contingent fact for today?
Cameron: In my view it is the fact that the God concept and Christianity more broadly was used to enslave my ancestors and now the latter’s descendants are among the most ardent adherents of Christianity today. That is not to say that Black people should not be religious but I think it is particularly ironic that we seem to be even stronger believers in the religion used to justify our enslavement than the descendants of those enslavers.
Jacobsen: What was the influence of African Americans on the Universalist churches of the 18th century?
Cameron: Universalism was just beginning in 18th century America and African Americans played important roles in those origins. A formerly enslaved man named Gloster Dalton was one of the founding members of the Independent Church of Christ, which was the first formally incorporated Universalist congregation in the United States. Dalton remained a member of this church until his death in the early 19th century and both his sons and grandsons would be prominent activists and leaders in Massachusetts. In addition to Dalton, a Black woman named Amy Scott was a founding member of the First Independent Church of Christ, a Universalist congregation in Philadelphia that was organized in 1790. Scott helped to form this congregation and participated in meetings that led to a general convention of Universalists in Philadelphia in May 1790, a meeting that helped shape both the theology and ritual practices of the emerging denomination. While both Dalton and Scott considered themselves Christians, they believed that religion must be in line with the findings of science and that God was a rational deity who would not damn humans to hell for eternity for finite sins. Their religious beliefs thus placed them squarely outside the bounds of orthodoxy at the time.
Jacobsen: How has American religious liberalism influenced, and been influenced by, African Americans and African American culture?
Cameron: In addition to their roles in founding the first Universalist churches in the 18th century, African Americans have played pivotal roles in American religious liberalism from the 18th century to the present. They were early believers in Transcendentalist philosophy during the 1830s and 1840s and influenced white Transcendentalists such as Theodore Parker to become more active in the abolitionist movement. Later in the 19th century, African Americans in Chicago such as John Bird Wilkins created the first Black Unitarian congregations and Joseph Jordan founded the first Black Universalist church, with both of these congregations starting in 1887. African Americans continued to found new Black liberal churches in the 20th century and then initiated the “Black Empowerment Controversy” within Unitarian Universalism in the 1960s, whereby they brought the call for Black Power into the church and demanded autonomy from whites. Under the leadership of Hayward Henry (now Mtangulizi Sanyika) they created the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus that served as a model for a contemporary organization, Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism.
Jacobsen: Were there any challenges in being the founding president of the African American Intellectual History Society?
Cameron: Absolutely. I first worked on starting this organization in early 2014 by organizing a group blog. I probably reached out to 50 different scholars in order to get 7 positive responses from people who would agree to write monthly posts starting in July 2014. Then from there came the challenge of converting the blog to an organization. We got non-profit status easily enough but it was a challenge to grow the membership. Things moved slowly until our first conference in Chapel Hill in March 2016, which had about 100 attendees. After that event we received a lot of buzz and membership began to quickly pick up. But there remained challenges of fundraising so we initiated an email marketing campaign that saw positive results. But this was certainly a challenge because most of us involved with this were academics who were not trained in essentially running an online business. My wife Dr. Shanice Jones Cameron was really pivotal because she did have this training and helped me every step of the way in getting the organization off the ground.
Jacobsen: Has the Black Lives Matter movement been influenced much by religious language and experience in its activism and work for equal dignity and rights?
Cameron: BLM has a wide variety of intellectual influences. Some of these are secular and the movement is much more accepting of secular activists than other civil rights organizations have been in the past. But many of the influences for BLM activists have been religious, including Islam, African Traditional Religions, and various forms of Christianity, including liberal Christianity. Some of the foremost activists in Black Lives Matter, including Leslie Mac, who founded the Ferguson Response Network, and Lena Gardner, one of the founders of the Minneapolis BLM chapter, are Unitarians who take their liberal religious perspective into their organizing work and take their political philosophy into their congregations. Indeed, Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism emerged out of a BLM convening in Cleveland, Ohio in the summer of 2015.
Jacobsen: As with much of American intellectual and activist history, much African American contribution, men and women, is hidden or downplayed. Who are the under-rated figures in African American freethought?
Cameron: There are many I can point to but I will just name 3 in different eras of American history. Fannie Barrier Williams was one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women and a prominent speaker, activist, and intellectual during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She moved to Missouri from New York in the early 1880s to become a teacher and the racism she experienced there turned her away from Christianity. In the 1880s, she would join a Unitarian church in Chicago led by a deist and freethinker named Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Her reasons for joining this church were rooted in its activist identity rather than an adherence to particular theologies. In the 1930s and 1940s, Louise Thomson Patterson was another important freethinker and leader. She was repulsed by Christianity after experiencing racism from white Christians in Washington state in the 1910s. She went on to become a leading activist in New York’s Communist Party and was a key figure in the Black Freedom Struggle for much of the 20th century. And finally, during the 1960s, Octavia Butler moved away from her Baptist roots and became an atheist. She would bring her secular perspectives into her novels and went on to become the most well-known Black sci-fi writer of the 20th century. I intentionally named 3 Black women because they have often been marginalized in histories of freethought, even more so than African Americans more broadly.
Jacobsen: How are atheists viewed in African American communities, in general? Are there areas in which there is a wider acceptance of these individuals outside of the work of a handful of significant organizations and individuals pulling a lot of weight for a neglected freethought group?
Cameron: Generally speaking, atheism is often seen as a “white” thing in Black communities. Probably most Black people believe in the central role of the church in the Black Freedom Struggle and believe that atheists are opposed to a key institution in Black culture. They also think secularism more broadly is something rooted in a western philosophical paradigm, a paradigm that has often tried to exclude Black people from the category of the human. In terms of where Black atheists are more accepted, it is generally in urban, cosmopolitan areas or areas with a large educated population, such as college towns like Chapel Hill, NC where I went to graduate school.
Jacobsen: What do African American freethinkers need in terms of support based on current contexts and historical examples? Interviews and exposure can help; finances can assist too. However, there must be more.
Cameron: As you note, interviews and exposure are great and I would not downplay the importance of financing Black secular organizations and causes. Also, larger secular organizations using their financial resources but also their reach through publications and large email lists can really be key in supporting Black freethinkers. Here I’m thinking of organizations like Freedom from Religion Foundation using their email lists to host a fundraiser for a group like Black Nonbelievers. It would not necessarily be FFRF giving BN money but helping them raise it, or even publicizing events that Black secular orgs put on.
Jacobsen: Race and sex intersect in American equality activist history. The work to give equality to white women was seen as priority over black women because this was viewed as an impediment if pursued at the same time. Why?
Cameron: I think a large part of this viewpoint boils down to racism and jealousy. White women activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton were incredibly angered after the Civil War when they saw Black men getting the right to vote before them, and that resulted in racist tirades from women like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony against Black people, which inhibited making common cause with Black women. When prominent Black women leaders heard and read these racist remarks, it turned them off from working with white women and they founded their own organizations such as the NACW that Fannie Barrier Williams helped to found.
Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, how are factors like this played once more when it comes to economic justice, social fairness, and legal equality, too?
Cameron: When activists separate themselves from one another and work in their own siloes, it makes it harder to achieve goals that should probably be common ones. Take the socialist movement. That really began to gain steam during the early 20th century, but major labor unions such as the AFL-CIO or IWW either prohibited Blacks from joining or marginalized them when they did. So too did the Socialist Party. This had very negative effects on the fight for economic justice at the time because a large portion of the working class, namely African Americans, were not involved in the organized movement for workers’ rights. Instead, they formed their own major unions such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by socialist and agnostic A. Phillip Randolph. So the existence of racism, whether among white women activists or those in the white working class, certainly stymied what could have been very broad movements for economic and social justice. And that is exactly how the white ruling classes, at least in the United States, have wanted it. As LBJ said in the 1960s, give the lowest white man someone to look down on and he’ll let you pick his pockets.
Jacobsen: The life paths for black boys, African American boys, is much more precarious than for white boys, European American boys, statistically speaking. To those freethought boys and young men reading this, what is your advice for them, from either background?
Cameron: You are part of a long tradition of Black freethinkers that includes some of the most prominent thinkers, activists, and leaders in African American history, including Frederick Douglass, Fannie Barrier Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Thompson Patterson, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, to name just a few. Many of these individuals struggled with some of the same feelings that you might be wrestling with, including feeling out of place and ostracized for their beliefs. They nevertheless pressed on and achieved things that have profoundly shaped our modern world, and you can too.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Prof. Cameron.
Cameron: Thank you as well for this opportunity and I hope your readers enjoy this.
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Photo credit: Christopher Cameron.