Religion

Advocating “the Gospel of Freedom,” African Methodist ministers have played important roles as secular leaders.

The Zion Church expanded in decades during and after the Civil War, with the inclusion of many southern blacks, mainly freed people.

The archministry’s mission is to remove negative stereotypes of African and African American culture by providing a living laboratory of African traditions and by disseminating historical and cultural information.

The productive presidency of David Henry Sims, an Oberlin graduate and a future AME Church bishop, developed Allen University into a full fledged seat of learning.

Anderson College began offering upper-level undergraduate classes in 1991 and in 1993 again awarded bachelor’s degrees. In 2006, the school officially changed its name to Anderson University. In 2013, Anderson's College of Visual and Performing Arts was renamed the South Carolina Schools of the Arts.

Among Asian religious traditions, those introduced by Indian immigrants—including Hindu, Jain, and Sikh groups—have probably had greater impact on South Carolina’s religious landscape.

In 1782 the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States was organized in Philadelphia. The Associate Reformed Synod of the South, later called the General Synod, was organized in 1803 and became known as the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Bachman consistently presented a sound scientific case for all races of humans as members of the same species. Drawing on his keen knowledge of the nature of species, he presented his argument in numerous articles and in The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Races, Examined on the Principles of Science, published in 1850. Yet Bachman condoned slavery, and he was an unyielding defender of states’ rights.

Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings were brought to South Carolina by the son of a slave, Louis G. Gregory (1874–1951), a native of Charleston and a 1902 graduate of Howard University Law School. Becoming a confirmed believer in the Baha’i faith in 1909, he made his first teaching trip to Charleston and seven other southern cities the following year. Gregory grew to international prominence in the Baha’i faith; thus the eponym of the Louis G. Gregory Baha’i Institute and radio station WLGI in Hemingway.

In 1876 representatives from some of these independent African American Baptist congregations met in Sumter and organized the Colored Baptist Educational, Missionary, and Sunday School Convention to provide leadership. The name was later changed to the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention, and the body is known popularly as the “Baptist E & M.”

Baptists are by far the largest religious group in South Carolina, and in many ways they are the most diverse. They are black and white, Asian and Hispanic, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and liberal and conservative in their politics, their social views, and their theology. As different as Baptist groups or even churches within a group may be from each other, almost all Baptists share a commitment to believers’ baptism by immersion, the Bible as the primary source of faith, and a congregational church polity.

Bernardin was a popular bishop, renowned for administrative skill and respected for his work to benefit children, the elderly, the poor, and the sick.

In 1824 forty-eight members of Beth Elohim, led by Isaac Harby and Abraham Moise, whose requests for changes in worship services had been rejected by the adjunta (board of trustees), formed the Reform Society of Israelites. This was the first attempt to reform Judaism in the United States; it functioned for nine years. The synagogue, now the oldest surviving Reform synagogue in the world, became a National Historic Landmark in 1980.

The grandson of former chief Samuel Taylor Blue, Gilbert Blue was elected chief of the Catawba Tribe of South Carolina in 1973. Under Chief Blue’s leadership, the Catawba successfully pursued their lawsuit against the state of South Carolina for land claims under the Nations Ford Treaty of 1840 and their quest for the reinstatement of status as a federally recognized Indian tribe.

Chief Samuel Blue was the driving force behind the political revival of the Catawba tribe. It was during his second administration that the Catawba finally became a federally recognized tribe and recovered parts of their original reservation.

Headed by four generations of Jones family evangelists, the university emerged from the separatist fundamentalist movement and has from its inception been committed to “combating all atheistic, agnostic, pagan and so-called scientific adulterations of the gospel.” Wary of any secular standards of education, the university eschews accreditation by external agencies, although it is state-certified to offer degrees from the bachelor’s level through the Ph.D.

The gallery's collections contain around four hundred representative works of Flemish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and Spanish painting from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Among them are outstanding examples from the brushes of Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, Botticelli, Preti, Reni, Le Brun, Gerard David, Cranach, Murillo, Ribera, Rubens, and Van Dyck.

Boyce gave a speech before the state convention of South Carolina Baptists in 1856, arguing for the necessity of a separate Baptist seminary. In response, the convention proposed to put forth $100,000 toward the endowment of a seminary located in Greenville if the same sum was raised by others. At the Southern Baptists’ Educational Convention held in Louisville in May 1857, the proposal from the South Carolina Baptists was accepted, and Boyce went about the task of securing the money. The institution opened in 1859 as the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Boyce served as its first president.

In 1888 the school moved to DeGraffenried Place, a ten-acre site in Chester. The institute gained its first black leader, J. D. Martin, in 1928. Brainerd Junior College opened in 1934 to train teachers. Both institutions closed in 1939, citing increased public school opportunities for blacks and financial strains. The actress Phylicia Rashad, daughter of an alumna, purchased the former campus in 1997 and began restoration work on the only surviving building, Kumler Hall.

The American Baptist Publication Society hired Brawley to perform missionary service among black South Carolinians. Although there were numerous black Baptist congregations statewide, Brawley found no existing state convention. Accordingly, in 1876 he organized the Colored Baptist Educational, Missionary, and Sunday School Convention. He went on to organize numerous local Sunday school programs throughout the state. A key ally in these endeavors was the Reverend Jacob Legare, pastor of the Morris Street Baptist Church in Charleston. Meanwhile, Brawley raised funds for Benedict College in Columbia, where he also served on the faculty.