Black Christianity in Britain

Abstract The essay examines Black Christianity in Britain, that is, that distinctive version of Christian belief and practice that has developed among the black people from Africa and the Caribbean who have settled in Britain, especially since the 1950s. It seeks to demonstrate that these beliefs and practices have taken shape as a result of the need for black Christians to respond to their experience as an ‘ethnic minority’. Thus Black Christianity is seen as a specifically religious response, in Christian idiom, of a racially discriminated and marginalized community. It serves as a movement of passive but liberating resistance and struggle enabling the victims of racism to defend and empower themselves. Two characteristics are singled out: first, that of seeking to meet the specific needs of the poor and the marginalized in a global and comprehensive way; and second, that of being an outgoing missionary outreach rather than an inward‐looking and exclusive fellowship. Implicitly, the essay is asking to what extent these characteristics are typical of the religious practice of ethnic minorities when they have to respond to conditions like those that black people have had to experience in Britain.