ABOUT THIS BOOK

Reverend John Marrant (1755–91) was North America’s first Black ordained minister and one of America’s earliest Black authors and preachers. In The Gospel of John Marrant, Alphonso F. Saville IV examines how Protestantism and West African indigenous religious practices deeply informed his life and ministry. Saville follows Marrant from his time evangelizing the Cherokee in Georgia to meeting with Black Freemasons in Boston to engaging with diasporic communities along the eastern seaboard and in England. Using the Black folk magic tradition of conjure as a lens for understanding Marrant’s religious imagination, Saville outlines the importance of Africana religious and cultural themes, symbols, and cosmologies in the biblical interpretation and ritual culture in early Black North American Christian communities. Marrant’s life and work, Saville contends, reveal the diverse religious cultures that contributed to the formation of African American Christianity and its evolution into a prominent institution during the colonial and early history of the United States. In so doing, he demonstrates the need to recenter both religion and Africa in the study of African American cultural and intellectual history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alphonso F. Saville IV is Associate Research Scholar at the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University.

REVIEWS

“Offering new perspectives on eighteenth-century Black religious sensibilities in worlds of encounter and transformation, this exciting book reframes understandings of early Black Atlantic religion. Alphonso F. Saville IV uses John Marrant’s life to demonstrate a much more complex religious world of Black Christianity, leaving readers with new ways of understanding the results for Black people of religious encounter and the emergence of New World Africana religious ways of being. This approach is among the most exciting in the field.”

-- Judith Weisenfeld, author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

“Alphonso F. Saville IV’s The Gospel of John Marrant is a pathbreaking study of a leading figure of eighteenth-century African Atlantic literature. Saville’s Marrant is a literary adept at conjure, a form of healing with roots in Africa practiced under enslavement in America and, most strikingly in this book, central to Marrant’s transatlantic publications. For Marrant, the Bible provided less a theology than a formulary, with guidance for healing oneself and one’s community. This remarkable reorientation of Marrant studies toward conjure is sure to stimulate further work.”

-- John Saillant, author of Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Narrative

Journal

Sermon