Religions of Harlem

I had an astonishing experience wandering around West Harlem Saturday afternoon, looking for interesting topics and trying to find expressions of “alternative religion”.  What began as an innocent and accidental encounter with a church I’d never seen before, quickly ended up as an experience of deep self-consciousness that completely transformed my perspective of so-called “Black culture” and “Black religion.”

I was walking past this church on my way to a Caribbean festival  just across the street, when a friendly, older-looking woman with charcoal-gray hair and glossy, twinkling eyes caught my attention.  “What are you lookin’ for, sweetie?  Can I help you find somethin’?  You look lost,” she said.  I told her I was trying to find a festival at some other church nearby, but was just exploring different religious cultures in the area.  “Well, we’re having a gospel concert later on this afternoon– you should stop by.  I’ll be singin’ a song,” she told me, flashing a smile.  I told her I would like that, and that I would most definitely stop by.

An hour or so later, I returned to the front stoop of the tiny New Hope Church.  But this time, there was a different woman standing outside.  “Is the gospel concert still going on?” I asked her.

“Not the kind of gospel you’re looking for,” she replied, somewhat angrily. “We don’t do that kind of gospel here, or any kind of gospel.”

“I’m sorry– I didn’t mean to be rude, I was just informed by another woman that there was a gospel concert going on this afternoon.  I’m sorry if I was under the wrong impression.  I didn’t mean to offend you,” I responded.  This woman was clearly agitated.

“You all come here, lookin’ at us like we’re supposed to be playin’ black gospel music, just because that’s what you think is right.  You see this (she points to her face), and you think this (she starts snapping her fingers and clapping).”

I held my ground, surprisingly it seemed considering the awkwardness which I felt, and discussed with this woman about my interest in researching alternative forms of worship in Harlem.  “I’m just here to understand exactly what it is that you do, what makes your church so different from all the other churches around here,” I suggested.

Her attitude suddenly, remarkably shifted.  Her face suddenly became bright and warm, and she started talking about the difference between Seventh Day Adventism and Pentacostalist traditions.  “Those folks think they’ve got the power of God, shouting and jumping and clapping their hands, but really– you come to one of our services, you’d be bored.  You all expect us to act a certain way, a certain “black” way, and we do, on some days.  But what we also got is the Sabbath, the holy day where we spend sunset to sunset praising God, seeing God, and it’s not about the performance.  All you wanna see is a performance.  That’s not what we do here.  When we sing, we sing about God, about the Holy Bible, about the power of Christ.  It’s different, you see.”

She continued explaining to me, and as I stood a few steps away from her on the stoop, this woman and I exchanged some incredibly important lessons about perceptions of Black culture in Harlem.  There is one version, she seemed to indicate, which is primarily about the show– that’s what White people perceive and label as “Black” religion.   But there’s another side, which is truly and equally about reaching communion with God, and on a Saturday at that.  Saturday, she told me, was the “original Sabbath”, according to the Bible and the 10 Commandments (a view that distinguishes Seventh Day Adventists from most other Christian traditions).

Over the next hour or so, she introduced me to the Pastor, and nearly everyone in the Church.  The Pastor, Gamal Alexander, was also an incredible person to meet.  He talked to me about the main difference between Adventist sermons and Pentacostal ones: “My sermons are more cerebral, they’re mostly information-based.  It’s not about the passion, these people have passion.  What they need is information.”  He talked about health reforms aimed at promoting vegetarianism and veganism (one of the tenets of the Church) in Harlem’s black communities, for the purpose of improving overall health.

He also discussed what I thought was an intriguing distinction between Seventh Day Adventists and other religions of Harlem.  Rather than endorse the belief in an immortal soul that ascends to Heaven after death, Adventists believe that when you die, “your breath goes back to God, like in Genesis when he formed man from dust, and breathed life into him.  When you die, your soul dies too, it’s an unconscious death,” Gamal explained.

There are many forms of religious practice in Harlem, each with a distinct style of understanding and worshiping the divine.  And as I learned from my interactions with the individuals at New Hope Church of Seventh Day Adventist, it is paramount not to condense all forms of “Black worship” into umbrella terms that endorse misinformed and inaccurate stereotypes towards what are in fact completely unique religious groups.

My encounter on New Hope’s stoop revealed to me the complexity of how our imposed perceptions become labeled onto people, and how this in turn, results in a communication rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, a dialogue destined for failure.  But it is in the moments where you could, hypothetically, run the other way to escape an uncomfortable situation facing one of these “others” that there is the potential to completely reverse these false pictures of what Harlem “should” be.

Tags: New Hope, Saturday-worship, Seventh Day Adventist, stoop