Religion

In 1837 he received his ordination as a Lutheran minister, becoming the second African American to do so (the first being Jehu Jones, Jr., also a Charlestonian). Unable to find a Lutheran appointment, Payne eventually moved to Philadelphia, where contact with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church led him to join its ministry in 1842.

In South Carolina in the early twenty-first century, there were several other flourishing denominations that represented Pentecostalism, many with roots in the earlier Holiness movement.

From about 1898 to 1926 Perry ran the Elhanan orphanage and school for poor children in Marion, North Carolina.

In the mid-1880s the Methodist bishop of South Carolina invited Pike to preach at the Washington Street Methodist Episcopal Church, South in Columbia.

A fine example of colonial American architecture, Pompion Hill Chapel is one of only a handful of surviving eighteenth-century ecclesiastical buildings in the lowcountry.

The very existence of praise houses in South Carolina indicates that masters failed in their attempt to make the plantation a completely closed system.

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) organized in 1973 when 215 churches withdrew from the Southern Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church, U.S. [PCUS]), charging that Southern Presbyterians “denied the deity of Jesus Christ and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture.”

Presbyterianism after the Revolution—while losing its numerical leadership to Methodist and Baptist churches—grew rapidly and entered a period of significant social and intellectual strength.

Primitive Baptists comprised one early nineteenth-century form of the “antimission” movement protesting the development of Baptist organizations in the South.

Prince Frederick’s Parish stretched like an elongated triangle from the Santee River northward “to the utmost bounds of the Province,” encompassing all or part of modern Dillon, Marion, Florence, Horry, Georgetown, and Williamsburg Counties.

PTL stood for both “Praise the Lord” and “People That Love.”

The Society of Friends (more commonly known as the Quakers) experienced a fragmented history in South Carolina. This was due…

With the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1867, Randolph joined in Reconstruction politics as an active Republican. He rose rapidly through the leadership ranks. He represented Orangeburg County in the 1868 constitutional convention.

The Reformed Episcopal Church in South Carolina is part of the Diocese of the Southeast, which also has churches in Tennessee and Florida. In the early twenty-first century there were approximately thirty-one parishes and missions in South Carolina with about 2,500 members, and they were about evenly divided between whites and blacks.

The denomination is Methodist in theology, doctrine, and practice, with love feasts and class meetings. One hundred years after its establishment, the church had eighteen congregations, twenty-six clergy, and 3,800 members.

“Regulars” favored the limited use of confessions of faith, orderly worship, formal hymns, educated pastors, and women who kept silent in worship. In all of these things they differentiated themselves from the Separate Baptists, who in the colonial South emanated from Sandy Creek, North Carolina, and who in South Carolina tended to be backcountry and rural.

As enslaved people adopted Christianity in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, the foregoing rituals became a profound aspect of the Africanized Christianity they practiced. No longer accompanied by drums (which were prohibited), the singing, hand clapping, and counterclockwise movements remained part of ecstatic worship services, where the “Holy Spirit” frequently entered the celebrants.

Emancipated after the Civil War, Jim took the name of James R. Rosemond, and he gathered a group of black Methodists to establish a separate congregation in Greenville.

For Scots, one of the attractions of Carolina was religious liberty. The proprietors guaranteed it, and Scottish Covenanters stood ready to emigrate for it.

Located near the South Carolina–Georgia state line, Silver Bluff Baptist Church is one of the oldest independent African American Christian congregations in the United States.