December 18, 1995
Web posted at: 11:30 a.m. EST
From Correspondent David George
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Approximately 34 million -- about 12 percent -- of the United States' 270 million citizens are black. Most classify themselves as African-Americans, and most are Christian.
Most African-Americans who crowd Christian churches across the country every Sunday are descended from people who came to the New World as slaves, bringing with them their African religious traditions. Over time, they turned to Christianity.
Dr. Robert Franklin, a professor, ordained minister and
Ford Foundation project officer, says Christianity's message
was a compelling one for people arriving on this continent in
chains.
"For a group of people who had suddenly lost their ability to define themselves, to move about freely, and who more importantly were stigmatized as less than human ... the message that they were somehow loved by God ... was exceedingly empowering psychologically," he said. (264K AIFF sound or 264K WAV sound)
Political empowerment came 300 years later, a century after the abolition of slavery. And Franklin credits "the church."
"The civil rights movement in the United States could not have occurred without the black church, without the message of freedom being proclaimed every week by talented, articulate preachers," he said.
But now, barely three decades after the movement began, the black church is in decline. Franklin says a generation ago, four out of every five inner city black men had some contact with church or Sunday school. Today, studies show three out of five have no church contact whatsoever.
Franklin says things changed when the economy changed,
eliminating many low-skill, high-paying jobs.
"The absence of those jobs meant that larger numbers of men, working class men, were unemployed," he said, "and many of them began to sort of drop out of the institutional infrastructure of the black community's life." (298K AIFF sound or 298K WAV sound)
For some African-Americans, the Nation of Islam is filling the void. The growth of the branch of Americanized Islam led by Louis Farrakhan continues a shift that began 30 years ago, when another generation turned from the pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr. to the more militant message of Malcolm X.
"I think that Malcolm's message caught on with a younger generation who were impatient with King's southern Christian activism," Franklin said. "And so it was precisely the appeal of a more aggressive response to injustice that made Islam attractive to younger people."
While Franklin and others are unsure if the Americanized Islam of Malcolm X and Farrakhan will continue its growth, there is no question that the tradition Islam brought to the United States by Muslim immigrants is growing rapidly.
By some estimates there are as many as 8 million Muslims in American today. Though there is wide disagreement about current numbers, some scholars predict Islam could surpass Judaism to become the nation's second largest religious group early in the next century.
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