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The Same Ocean, Read as Exodus

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The Same Ocean, Read as Exodus

The Atlantic was crossed in the other direction by people who understood the voyage itself in scriptural terms, and who wrote about it at length.

English Puritans sailing to New England in the 1630s described themselves as crossing a sea out of bondage into a wilderness on the way to a promised land, and the Exodus frame shaped the colonies they founded, their covenanted congregations, their reading of hardship as chastisement, and their sense of being watched. The same imagery was later taken up in a very different mouth: enslaved Christians in North America and the Caribbean read Exodus as being about themselves and not about their owners, and the spirituals that came out of that reading are among the clearest evidence anywhere of a text being reclaimed against the people who supplied it.

The ocean also carried revival. The transatlantic preaching circuits of the eighteenth century, with George Whitefield crossing repeatedly, made the Great Awakening a phenomenon on both sides at once, connected by printed sermons and newspaper reports moving on the same ships. In the nineteenth century the traffic was mission: British and American societies sending personnel and money out along Atlantic routes to West Africa and beyond.

The result is an ocean that carried Christianity west, Africans west, and then, in the twentieth century, African-founded and African American churches back east and north, so the direction of religious influence has reversed at least twice.

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