Historically Black Protestant Tradition

The historically Black Protestant tradition has a starting point scholars agree on: a walkout. In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both formerly enslaved men worshipping at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, were pulled from their knees during prayer for kneeling in a section reserved for white congregants. They left, and with other Black members of St. George's formed the Free African Society the same year, a mutual aid and worship society that became the seed of the independent Black church movement in America. Allen went on to found Mother Bethel in 1794, and in 1816 he and fifteen delegates from Black Methodist congregations in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Allen consecrated its first bishop, the first denomination in the United States founded and governed by African Americans.

The tradition's other historic denominations organized on their own separate timelines across the following century. James Varick led the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to formal organization in New York in 1821. Three existing Black Baptist conventions merged into the National Baptist Convention at Atlanta's Friendship Baptist Church in 1895, splitting in 1915 into the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated, and the National Baptist Convention of America. Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ in Mississippi in 1897. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's landmark study centers on these same seven denominations, plus the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, as the tradition's historic institutional core.

The historically Black Protestant tradition is the one of Pew Research Center's three Protestant classification families that groups denominations by shared history rather than by shared theology or church government. Its member bodies span the Methodist connectional system of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the congregational autonomy of the National Baptist conventions, and the more centralized structure of the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal holiness body rather than a Methodist or Baptist one. What holds them together in the classification is not doctrine. It is that each was founded by and for Black Christians who were excluded from, or segregated within, white controlled denominations, and that a member of any of them is counted in this tradition by Pew's survey regardless of which specific theology that member holds.

This differs from church family, the atlas's own doctrinal grouping of a denomination by theological lineage rather than by shared history; a denomination's classification family and its church family answer different questions and can differ from each other. Five of the seven denominations C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya name as the tradition's historic core are full entities in this atlas: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Baptist Convention of America, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Two are not yet entities here: the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated, the tradition's single largest body, and the Church of God in Christ, its largest Pentecostal denomination. Both gaps are named rather than left silent.