The problems of our times, such as lack of unity, a dysfunctional education system, chronic underdevelopment, and poverty are rooted in the use of religion as part of Britain’s civilising process after the 1865 Paul Bogle-led uprising in St Thomas.

The colonisers declared that black people were heathens, had no God in the Christian sense, and, therefore, must be made “civilised” with the humanising qualities of Christianity. This religion was used to justify the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of Africans and later became a most divisive tool in service to the social control of ex-slaves.

From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, groups of missionaries and evangelists, especially from America, mushroomed. As part of the effort to civilise the ex-slaves, who they perceived to be barbarians and savages, the Church was given the responsibility to educate the children of the ex-slaves.

The central feature of the Church-led curriculum, which is presently alive and well to a large extent, are religious studies by memory; practical training; basic numeracy and literacy; but nothing about mathematics, the sciences, and history. Generations have been robbed of an emancipative experience in education, but more important is how this practice makes critical, creative, and innovative thinking victims of rote learning.

This tradition did not go unnoticed and elicited tremendous and profound responses from Marcus Garvey and Leonard P Howell in that outstanding decade of the 1930s. The former introduced “black liberation theology” and the latter introduced a new messiah, a new god, and a new religion. Interestingly, both men called for a new philosophy of education for Jamaica. The time has come to deepen the struggle for cultural decolonisation in Jamaica.

From Western Design to Puritanism in America

Over the years, when I think of religion and Jamaica, I look deeper into the past as I search for knowledge to understand why Jamaica is said to have the most churches per square mile in the world. I think about the puritan Oliver Cromwell of Great Britain and his Western Design. The Puritans emerged in the early 1500s. Their objective was to spiritually cleanse the Anglican Church from the influences of Catholicism. Cromwell, a committed Puritan Protestant, developed his foreign policy guided by his bitter opposition to Roman Catholic Spain.

In 1655, Jamaica, then a Spanish colony, was seized by naval commanders William Penn and Robert Venerables as part of the Western Design. In 1620 a small group of separatist Puritans, the Pilgrims, seeking to practise their faith freely, landed on Plymouth Rock (Massachusetts). They contributed to the development of early American states and politics, but the movement declined in the mid-18th century. After the 1776 American Revolution, Church and State were separated as the Protestant movement underwent an “amoeba-like” transformation — rapid division into new branches — as America grew in size.

Protestantism exploded into The Great Awakening (1730 to 1770). Later Evangelicalism grew with the expansion of America, grounded in the concept of Manifest Destiny. The late 18th to the early 19th century witnessed the growth of a number of Protestant denominations.

The Evangelicals have some distinguishing features when compared to the traditional Protestant movement. They emphasise that the Bible contains the words of God, religion from the heart, and openness to emotional expression in worship (a quality black people found attractive). Later, the Pentecostals emerged with the quality of speaking in tongues. As the world moved from Western Design to the Monroe Doctrine, the missionaries and evangelicals from America became a critical component of the British civilising process in Jamaica.

Some of the leading new denominations and Evangelical movements that emerged in America from the 1860s to the 1920s entered Jamaica in critical times of spiritual and political upheavals. In 1863 William Miller and his associates established the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Charles Taze Russel and company led a breakaway from the Seventh-day and formed the Jehovah Witness movement in 1872. The Pilgrim Holiness Church originated in New York in 1897. Other emerging church leaders questioned their traditional religious relations and came up with new thinking that led to the rise of the Pentecostal church in 1901 and Elder R Spurling’s Church of God of Prophecy (COGOP) in Tennessee in 1922. There were more churches of this type, such as the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Pentecostal Church of God, and the Mormons (1830), among others. What was happening in Jamaica that saw the rise of the Evangelicals and increased missionaries in post-1865 Jamaica?

Religion for social control

The 1865 uprising was described as “black barbarism”, likened to the Haitian Revolution. After the event the colonialists advanced the view that the Negro is innately cruel and brutal, especially when under superstition, and that “he has no God in the Christian sense” and “never had grasped the idea of personal deity”. The colonial authorities were not just concerned about the 1865 uprising but also worried, nervous, and distressed about the role of the creole spiritual movements that were active politically before that event, especially in the periods of the late 19th century.

After 1865 the British developed a more drastic approach to the civilising process of the ex-slaves of Jamaica. Christian churches were needed to displace the creole religious formations in Jamaica. An increasing migration of missionaries came into Jamaica from the United States of America, from the Seventh-day Adventists to a cavalcade of Evangelical churches. In most cases, some of these movements were accommodated by Jamaican immigrants abroad. Some of these churches began in Kingston, but it was the rural areas that became the main focus of the expansion of Evangelical movements in Jamaica. It was this process that led to the proliferation of churches across the length and breadth of country.

Cultural Decolonisation

If decolonisation has to do with the reversal of colonisation, the process must go far beyond political decolonisation. There must be economic and cultural decolonisation and most importantly the decolonisation of the mind. It must be noted, however, that cultural decolonisation preceded the struggles for political decolonisation, in terms of the role of Garvey and Howell during the critical years of the 1930s. While Garvey advanced a “black liberation theology”, black Christ, black Virgin Mary, and called his religious component the African Orthodox Church, Howell, to the contrary, went to the heart of the problem by declaring a new messiah and god, a new philosophy, and a new religion.

Garvey taught the black masses that they should not expect God to do for them what they can do for themselves. Hence, his programmes for self-reliance and economic self-development. Interestingly, both Garvey and Howell preached black consciousness and black unity and called for a new philosophy of education for Jamaica from as far back as the 1930s.

Education in the post-1865 era was about habit and discipline and not about critical thinking, science, mathematics, and the liberal arts. Education during that period was for social control and the transformation of the ex-slaves into productive and more responsible citizens.

Religion is powerful as it is deeply embedded in the soul of man. It is personal and the kind of topic generations have been trained not to question. If you dare to question religion, you are branded as atheist, devilish, and a person to be avoided and condemned. I know history will absolve me in this mission as I seek to deepen the process of decolonisation of culture, education, religion, and the mind. The time has come.

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