“Gathering the Spirit” at First Baptist Church: Spirituality as a Protective Factor in the Lives of African American Children

Spiritual socialization can be central to children's healthy development. In the following narrative fragment, Mrs. H, a 73-year-old African American woman, spontaneously recounted to me her experiences as a seven-year-old child walking to a segregated school: "The whites would be walking one way, and we'd be walking the other. They'd yell at us, 'You dirty, black niggers! We hate you! We hate you!' I'd go to Mama and ask her, 'Why do they hate us?' She'd always take me to the Bible. She taught me that God loves us all. God is the judge. She taught me not to take hate inside of myself." Mrs. H went on to explain that when we hate, we destroy that part of God that he left inside each of us when he created us. Thus, from the perspective taught to her by her mother, Mrs. H was not the victim of this story, rather, her taunters were. My research on the spiritual socialization of African American children is informed by the concept of resilience. Investigators of resilience attempt to understand individuals like Mrs. H, who have developed well despite profound, ongoing stressors (for example, Fraser, 1997). Unfortunately, very little systematic research has explored the strengths of African American children, their families and communities, including the ways in which African American adults like Mrs. H socialize resilience. Rather, research focuses on social problems such as educational underachievement, poverty, teenage pregnancy, drug use, and crime. Thus, the first goal of this article is to describe effective socialization contexts and practices that support children's healthy development in an African American community. Identifying sources of resilience has become a basic component of assessment and intervention in social work practice with children (Maluccio, 1995). Ethnographic methods represent one important strategy for developing such knowledge in ethnically diverse communities (Devore & Schlesinger, 1996). Although ethnographic methods are receiving growing acceptance and appreciation within social work (for example, McRoy, 1995), there remain relatively few examples of their application to the generation of knowledge in social work practice. Thus, the second goal of this article is to provide a model of the use of ethnographic strategies to generate knowledge of an African American community. Although understanding ethnographic methods is important, it is not sufficient to effective social work practice. Social workers must go one step further than the ethnographer to apply their knowledge of diverse cultures to their own practices (Thornton & Garrett, 1995). Thus, the third goal of this article is to demonstrate how knowledge generated from ethnographic strategies was used to generate ethnic-sensitive social work interventions in an African American community. Children's Spiritual Socialization in African American Sunday Schools The church has been discussed as a potential community-level source of protective factors (Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990). Throughout its history the African American church has played a significant role in the provision of social support and services (see, for example, Franklin, 1980). Unfortunately, almost no research has investigated the role of the church in the socialization of competence (Ogbu, 1985) or resilience in African American children. Available empirical evidence suggests a relationship between socialization experiences emanating from the African American church and a number of positive developmental outcomes. For example, Brown and Gary (1991) found that self-reports of church involvement were positively related to educational attainment among African American adults. In an interview study of African American urban male adolescents, Zimmerman and Maton (1992) found that youths who left high school before graduation and were not employed, but who attended church, had relatively low levels of alcohol and drug abuse. In a questionnaire administered to African American adults (Seaborn-Thompson & Ensminger, 1989), 74 percent responded "very often" or "often" to the statement, "The religious beliefs I learned when I was young still help me. …