The Great Migration was the mass movement of Black people from the Southern United States to the North from 1910 to 1970s, to escape racial violence, oppression, and economic crises. During this period, many Black religious groups developed in the North, especially in Chicago. The Black Coptic Church was one of these Black religious groups, as Leonard Cornell McKinnis II explains in his 2023 book The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion. To dispel any misunderstandings that may arise from the title of the book, the Black Coptic Church has no affiliation with the Coptic Church in Egypt (or anywhere else in the world). It was founded in Chicago by Prophet Cicero Patterson (1895-1962), who, McKinnis explains, migrated from Atlanta to Chicago in 1948 (35-36). McKinnis’ intricate ethnographic study details the raison d’être of the church, and clarifies why the church has “Coptic” in its name.
According to McKinnis, the Black Coptic Church is the result of an upheaval, what he describes as an “earthquake”—the brutal removal of enslaved Africans from Africa to the United States (1-2). This removal was an earthquake in that it shook the foundations of the lives of Africans, depriving them of their identity and sense of self. In the United States, Africans came to be called “Negroes” and were treated with contempt—as beasts of burden. In the wake of this injustice, enslaved Africans sought to regain their sense of self, to recreate their identity. To do this, they returned to the foundations, to Africa, to retrieve a narrative that would restore their sense of dignity (10-17).
The Black Coptic Church emerged out of this narrative of retrieval. This narrative attempts to draw from the imaginative repertoire of Black life, especially as informed by the Bible and Christianity, to create a sense of liberation or freedom from bondage and racism. Thus, even though the Black Coptic Church is rooted in the Christian tradition, it centers Blackness in its enactment of this narrative. The “Coptic” in its name denotes its connection to an ancient Christian church in Africa, the Coptic Church in Egypt, which is believed to have been founded in the 1st century. According to the author, this ideological connection demonstrates that the Christian tradition is not the making of white Americans, but rather has a long history in Africa. However, Ethiopia is also central to the thinking of the church. Ethiopia is a land that speaks of Black freedom and indeed Black royalty. Thus, church members are taught to see themselves as royalty rather than debased servants. The goal, McKinnis explains, is to create a counter-narrative that imagines Blackness in a new, hopeful light. The goal is to create new Black people—people who are free from the shackles of slavery’s afterlife in the United States.
The performance of a new imagination that creates different identities is rooted in rituals such as naming, the wearing of Black and royal regalia, the commemoration of the Passover, and a theology of liberation rooted in the vision of God as Black. The rituals of name change relate to the moment when members of the church are given new, spiritual names that bespeak their new birth (95). Consistent with their claim to royalty, some members are given titles such as Empress or Queen, and they wear royal regalia to mark their status. The celebration of “400 Years Passover” is a high point in the life of the church, a moment when the congregants, placing themselves in the place of ancient Israel, remember how God led them from slavery to freedom in the United States (115-121). And this deliverance from slavery to freedom is the work of the Black God in whose life the Black Coptic Church is rooted.
The Black Coptic Church is a theoretically and methodologically rich text that portrays the Black Coptic Church as a site for the enactment of Black freedom. Such enactment of freedom speaks, first, against an American plantocracy that diminishes Black lives, and, second, against a fatalistic Afropessimist view that sees no hope of redemption from the predicament into which Black lives have been plunged in the wake of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. The Black Coptic Church provides theology and rituals of redemption that rename, remake, and revive Black identity, and it also provides an ontology that roots their identity beyond the moments of slavery and racism. Called Blackontology, McKinnis argues that this ontology roots Black lives in a Black God who is at the same time beyond race, because this God is the beginning of creation itself (159-184).
However, McKinnis recognizes that the freedom that the Black Coptic Church preaches is checkered. First, the church is hierarchical, and in this hierarchy women are not on par with men. This raises the question of gender, leading him to critique the church’s Black theology through the lens of womanist theology. However, there is a more foundational question that William Jones raised fifty years ago in his book Is God A White Racist? (Anchor Press, 1973): whether the God of Black theology, including the Black God of the Black Coptic Church, could rescue Black people from their predicament in the wake of slavery. In other words, how free are members of the Black Coptic Church in the United States? To answer this question, McKinnis would need to study the ordinary lives of members of the Black Coptic Church outside the context of the church, for liberation cannot be gauged through the teachings and rituals of religious organizations alone but is also reflected in the daily life experiences of the people.
Students and scholars interested in the study of American religion, especially Black religions in the United States, would benefit greatly from reading this work.
David T. Ngong is professor of religion and theology at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
David Ngong
Date Of Review:
November 29, 2024
