At the forefront of dealing with the emptiness people feel inside their soul, cults of various shapes and sizes spring up to try and take advantage of the needy. Such a phenomenon was readily observed by Fischer as a reaction to the lack of black denominations. Admittedly, for a while it seemed that his definition of “cult” was more of an alternate word for “religion”, but once he describes the conduct of some of these groups and the emotional manipulation they take part in, it seems to be a more conventional definition. It was especially interesting to see how cult membership seemed to overlap with regular church membership, thus making it a bigger issue than it appeared on the average census.  Despite all of this, his take on cults doesn’t seem particularly negative, but rather a simple matter of fact observation that their appeals to equality and poverty allow them to out-compete regular churches in many departments.  It just goes to show that the expression of spirituality will manifest one way or another.

Reading about Rabbi Matthew and Black Judaism was very appealing to me. I found the information stated in the prologue interesting and helpful in my interpretation of this chapter. Rabbi Matthew’s views of Christianity shocked me however I understand where he is coming from. Black Judaism in Harlem peaked my interest because as a child I assumed that all African Americans were Christians. However after reading this chapter, I noticed that there is a lot of overlap between these two religions. After reading, I researched about the black jews and their history.

Growing up with a very religious family who went to church every Sunday I felt as if it was something I had to do. However, I’m starting to really appreciate my religion and understand it in my own way. With that being said after reading this chapter I realized within the first couple sentences how accurate everything that Rabbi Matthew was saying. It never dawned on me that nowhere in the Bible does it really ever indicate what race the people were. Rabbi Matthew decides to list all the men in the Bible starting with Adam and he points out that when God to decided to make man he did just that not once ever considering color. If the Bible was such a huge guide for our nation during slavery I sometimes wonder how we became so obsessed with color when it clearly makes no reference towards it in there. People often are misguided in life and it’s their preachers job to keep them on track. However, there are often times when preachers are misguided as well or they just chose to preach what they want and not follow God’s orders on how to lead their flock. In my opinion, this is why teaching and preaching are major components of religion. But just because you claim to be apart of a religion that doesn’t mean you are religious and just because you claim to be religious that doesn’t mean you know about your religion.

I’ve got to say, when I first began to read Miles Mark Fischer, I was a little confused as to why he called these other churches “cults”. To me, they seemed like normal churches, which made me question what his definition of a cult was. I was like, “Did the word cult not have a negative connotation then ? Or is this a reflection of the more mainstream religions aversion to Pentecostalism?” It wasn’t until I got to the Father Divine reading that I realized that his following at least, reminded me of the current definition of a cult. Although there were some parallels between what I would call a church today and the ‘cults’ of that era, which is a little disconcerting to say the least, there were way more differences that the first reading simply didn’t showcase. But the Father Divine reading creeped me out just a little.

Second, I would like to say that I’m kind of a little shook by the word niggeritions. It sounds like something my little brother would say, but was actually said by a grown man to describe the actions of other black people. I’d also like to give a fun fact. I noticed the name Nimrod in the Rabbi Mathews reading, and remembered that supposedly, it’s come to be equated with the word idiot today because Bugs Bunny, trying to be sarcastic, refereed to Elmer Fudd as “Nimrod,” who was described as a mighty hunter in the bible. Obviously people, not knowing the biblical character, missed the sarcasm and thought it was just another word for idiot. I’m not sure how true the story is, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Third, I’d like to say that I have actually never read about black jewish people until today. I heard about black muslims, but never black jews. I’m not sure I completely followed the argument as to why black people are true Israelites, but it’s an interesting line of thought that I might read over again.

Chapter 50 of the Sernett reading was very interesting to me. I wanted to have more information about Father Divine and how he came to have such a passionate following. He’s obviously a very moving speaker, but the same could be said about many pastors or priests who did not procure their own followings. The text mentioned that people began to believe that he was God incarnate when a judge who sentenced him for disturbing the peace died unexpectedly of a heart attack. However, this is not so outlandish that it would be likely to be seen as anything more than a coincidence. I would be interested to know if he had promoted himself as God before this incident, and what kind of religious doctrine he put forth for his followers to abide by.

Miles Mark Fischer take on cults was initially surprising to me, because of the connotation that this term usually carries. And Fischer is certainly aware of this term, but uses it throughout the text in an attempt to reclaim and re-contextualize the word. He is critical and concerned of the formal attitude of the traditional church, which he thinks sometimes are too steeped in the idea of tradition and organization that it does not do enough to really speak to the people and address social issues. The cults are not held by these chains of bureaucracy and consequently seem to be able to do much more and are more willing to challenge the statue quo. Fischer reminds his reader that at some point every religious organization was a cult, and that people should focus more on the core ideals of an organization rather than whether they are considered official by an authority.

The cults and the sects had to fill in for fighting for the black people to have their own religion after Garveynism ended and black denominations have yet to still be reached out to America. I really liked how the cults and the sects have filled the void of taking over of what the back people believed in. The black people wanted to have their own religion of Christianity and to me, the cults and the sects also started filling black people into the negro churches. The negro churches started to grow because of numerous black people filling up the negro churches. I also like how the cults and the sects had not just black people but also people of mixed races helping them out. I founded cool that even women contributed and had leadership roles in helping black people have their own religion of Christianity. Even though some leaders leading their cult or sect died, people in the cults and sects still keep pushing to fight for what the black people believed in.

Compared to the chapters assigned previously throughout the year, chapter 49 of Sernett’s  “African American Religious History” was definitely one of my favorites. African American religion is often described as just Christian values mixed in with the roots of their native land, but Rabbi Matthew gives the reader a much different insight. I really enjoyed how Rabbi Matthew used biblical and historical context to show the connection between Judaism and early Africans. When asked what an ideal Jewish person would look like, I would imagine a non-black person(like many others would). Matthew gave me a more diverse outlook when he describes the descendants  of crucial Hebrew prophets such as Noah, Moses, and Solomon, who were in fact African. Before reading this chapter, I thought that Judaism and African people had very little connection, when in actuality they were key components in the Hebrew faith.

I wanted to look up some videos about the history of the Ethiopian Hebrew identity, but nothing immediately came to light except a video with a link in the description to the “Lion of Judah Society” website. I didn’t even realize what Rastafarianism was up until that point, so it was really interesting to see the connection between it and the Ethiopian Hebrew identity talked about in the first Weisenfeld chapter this week. In general, I think it’s interesting how many fringe-to-large African American movements decided to align themselves with either Judaism or Islam, and the myriad odd ways in which they chose to do so. I had never heard of Moorish anything at least within recent history until this week, and when I found out that there is still a fairly sizable congregation belonging to the Moorish Science Temple of America, I was kinda shocked. It’s definitely cool, but it’s also a little bit annoying how many people try to use very similar words to describe themselves, and the ways in which they can get tangled up.
Here’s the video that led me down that weird rabbit trail, though:

In Miles Mark Fischer’s piece about “Organized Religion and the Cults,” he looks at the rise of cults in African American Culture. I found this part of the reading extremely interesting because the idea of the cult being something of the rise I found interesting. Cults have been around for years in America which I recently learned about in one of my history classes when we read The Kingdom of Matthias .  He said that there were many small cult-like groups popping up around the United States with individual prophets claiming to be healing groups (Sernett, 467). That lead me to question why African Americans started forming religious cults at that point or if it was occurring before, why did it become such an issue then? Cults seemed to be an alternative to the traditional “White” or “Black” churches they had to choose from. It was almost like they went because it was the third option for them when they really had no other options. Fischer looks at cults like they were a bad thing but to me, it seemed like people only went to cults because it allowed them to explore their spirituality instead of just following the traditional things they were forced follow for years.