Christianity is an African Religion: How African Spirituality Gave Birth to the Light of the World. Deconstructing White Christian Religious Racism co - Paperback

by Donald Henry Matthews Ph. D. (Author)

This book affirms that Christianity was based on Black Egyptian African Spirituality. This fact has been obscured, hidden and ignored by the impact of White Christian Religious Racism. Prior to the development of modern racism, with the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Rapetalistic Ideology of Racial, Sexual and Economic Oppression, it was widely accepted that African Spirituality was the basis for the major theological and ethical perspectives found in the Western religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Due to Institutional Racism these facts have been withheld or misrepresented by our educational institutions. This miseducation serves to support racist ideas of Black Inferiority and White Supremacy that are used to oppress Americans of African descent. Black Egyptian Africans were the original recipients and developers of the revelations of theological and ethical concepts that defined the Western Religious Traditions. Concepts such as: Monotheism, Moral Codes, Eternal Life, Resurrection, A Dying and Rising Savior, Power of the Divine Feminine, and Scripture are just a few of the fundamental truths that these ancient Black African priests and scribes gave to the world which were then used to develop Western Religions. The book is based on an article written by Dr. Donald H. Matthews in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), the official professional journal of the American Academy of Religion. This book It is written in a style that makes it accessible to the general public. The afore mentioned article is reprinted for the benefit of the scholarly community and for those who wish to delve further into the subject.

Author Biography

Dr. Donald H. Matthews, Ph. D. is a noted scholar of African American Religion and Culture. He received the Doctoral Degree from The Divinity School of The University of Chicago in Religion and the Human Sciences where he studied Religion, Theology, Ethics, Psychology and Anthropology. His first book, Honoring the Ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black religion and Literature, was published by Oxford University Press, (1998; 2012). He has written several other books and articles and has taught at several major institutions and theological seminaries, including Washington University of St. Louis, University of California at Santa Cruz, Temple University, and at The University of Missouri at Kansas City where he was the Director of the Black Studies Program. He is an ordained minister and has completed a Certified Residency in Pastoral Education at the Bay Area Center for Pastoral Care (ACPE). He received the Masters Degree in Communicative Disorders from Northwestern University; and the Master of Divinity Degree from the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA.